They Laughed When She Put Geese With the Cows — 12 Years Later, Everyone Wanted In

They Laughed When She Put Geese With the Cows — 12 Years Later, Everyone Wanted In

In May of 1976, at the Murray McMurray Hatchery on the southern edge of Webster City, Iowa, a 38-year-old rancher named Mave Yoder paid $560 in cash for 80 Toulouse goslings and 5 Embden ganders.


The goslings were 1 week old. They sold for $6.25 apiece. The ganders sold for $18. Mave carried them out of the hatchery in 12 cardboard boxes lined with cedar shavings and loaded them carefully into the back of a borrowed 1968 Ford F-250 pickup.

She had driven 178 miles north and west across the Sand Hills to get them, and she drove the geese back to her ranch in Cherry County, Nebraska, in a single 8-hour run. She stopped twice for fuel and once for a quart of motor oil at a Kico station outside Norfolk. By the time the goslings arrived at the Yoder Ranch, it was 11 at night, and the sky over the prairie had gone black and cold.


Mave unloaded the boxes into the brooder shed behind the main barn.

Her father, Roland Cleary, had built that shed in 1958. It was 16 feet long and 10 feet wide, with a corrugated tin roof, a single hand-hewn cedar door, and an interior divided into 3 bays by hand-tooled wooden rails. The first bay was the heat bay, where 300-watt infrared lamps hung from the rafters on adjustable chains against the hard Sand Hills nights of late May. The second bay was the feed and water bay, with galvanized steel waterers and a long wooden trough Roland had cut by hand from a single ash plank in the winter of 1957. The third was the imprint bay.

That last bay mattered most.


Every morning at 5 and every evening at 7 for 6 consecutive weeks, Mave sat on a low stool in that imprint bay and let the goslings learn her. She fed them by hand from a tin scoop. She spoke to them in a low, even voice. She walked among them slowly, never startling them, never forcing them, letting them follow her in a tight waddling line whenever she moved between bays.

The protocol did not come from a university, a government bulletin, or a cattlemen’s publication. It came from her mother Adele Cleary’s leather memorandum book, written in pencil in a section labeled “May Imprint” and dated June 4, 1932.

The Toulouse goslings imprinted to Mave by the second week.


The Embden ganders were slower.

They imprinted by the fourth.

By the third Sunday of August, the goslings had grown into half-sized geese with their pin feathers in and their bond fixed to the woman who had fed them since their first week. Mave opened the brooder gate and walked them out across the dirt yard to the open Sand Hills pasture south of the ranch road.

By the end of August, 85 geese were ranging on her pasture among 46 head of Hereford cow-calf pairs. They ate thistle and bindweed and dandelion. They snapped up the small grasshoppers that lifted from the bunchgrass at dawn. They moved in loose, uneven formations at first, sometimes wandering too close to the lake margin, sometimes clustering around Mave’s legs when she crossed the meadow.

The cattle watched them with suspicion.

The men in Valentine laughed for 2 and a half hours when they heard.

In 1976, the agricultural orthodoxy of the American Sand Hills had reached the cleanest expression of its 100-year arc. A Sand Hills ranch ran cattle. Some ranches ran sheep. A few stubborn old-timers still kept a small string of horses for working herds. But nobody ran poultry, not on purpose, not as part of a serious cow-calf operation.

Poultry belonged on the small farms in the eastern third of Nebraska, where the soil was deep enough for corn and the railroads ran close enough to ship eggs to Omaha. Poultry did not belong in the Sand Hills, where a chicken laid perhaps 130 eggs a year against a Lancaster County average of 240, and where every coyote, badger, skunk, and great horned owl within 20 miles treated a flock as a standing invitation.

In the professional judgment of the Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association, poultry was a hobby for retired schoolteachers in Valentine.

It was not a thing a serious ranch operator put on grass.

The association president in 1976 was Vernon Bramwell, a man who had served 8 consecutive 1-year terms by election and had grown accustomed to hearing agreement before he finished speaking. He said his position openly at the spring meeting in March. He repeated it at the fall meeting in November.

“Cattle ranches run cattle,” he said, “and small farms run birds. The ranch that mixes them runs neither.”

It was not controversial. It was consensus.

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension Service agreed. The Sand Hills Resource Conservation and Development Council agreed. Every ranch supply firm selling fence wire, salt blocks, and squeeze chutes from Norfolk to Chadron agreed. Geese in particular were considered worse than useless on a working cow-calf operation.

They were too small to justify the predation tax.

Too loud to keep cattle calm at calving.

Too hungry for forage that should have gone to mother cows.

Geese were for mowing lawns on 5-acre places outside Lincoln. They were not livestock for a serious Sand Hills ranch.

Mave Yoder had been raised on a different consensus.

Her mother, Adele Cleary, had kept 54 working geese on the Cleary family ranch outside Long Pine, Nebraska, from 1932 until 1958, when arthritis finally took her hands and she gave the flock to a neighbor. Adele had run the geese quietly, the way her own mother had run them on a small ranch outside Atkinson in the 1910s and 1920s.

She had not kept them as decoration.

She had run them as part of a system.

The geese ate broadleaf weeds the cattle would not touch. They kept pastures from going to thistle and Russian knapweed. They alarmed against coyotes, skunks, and great horned owls at night. They plucked tick larvae and biting flies from the faces of calves in the long, sweet summer evenings. They laid eggs the family ate and sold. Twice a year, they were plucked for down.

Adele’s geese paid for themselves 3 ways every year.

During the drought year of 1934, when the Cleary ranch had been losing money on cattle, Adele’s geese generated side income from down sales to a pillow manufacturer in Sioux City. Mave had heard that story so many times as a child that she could recite it before she understood what drought did to grass, cattle, and pride.

Adele taught her daughter every part of the system between Mave’s 7th birthday and her 17th.

Then, in 1958, the flock was gone.

The system, however, was not.

It sat in a leather memorandum book Adele kept on the kitchen shelf for the last 26 years of her life. In pencil, with hand-drawn diagrams, she recorded pasture rotations, gosling imprint schedules, predator-defense protocols, down-plucking cycles, breeding notes, and small observations most men would have dismissed because they came from a woman standing quietly at the edge of a pasture.

When Adele died of a stroke in 1968, the book passed to Mave.

Mave read it once in 1968, once in 1969, and then a final time in the kitchen of the ranch she had inherited from her late father in 1973, in the November of the year she buried her husband, Owen Yoder, who had died at 36 in a roping accident at a fall branding outside Cody.

By then, Mave had buried her mother, her father, and her husband in 8 years.

She was 35 when Owen died.

She was 36 and 3 months old in the spring of 1974 when she decided she would bring the geese back.

She was 38 in May of 1976 when she finally drove the F-250 to Webster City and bought them.

The Yoder Ranch sat at the south end of Cherry County, 30 miles south of Valentine, on 640 acres of native Sand Hills pasture. The land ran from a north section of choppy sand prairie hills down to a broad subirrigated meadow at the south end, where 2 natural Sand Hills lakes formed a wet boundary between the Yoder operation and the Dosset ranch on the next section.

The lakes were small, about 18 acres of open water between them, with a quarter mile of cattail margin around each. They had been there since the geological retreat of the Pleistocene, and they were what made the Yoder Ranch viable for geese.

Geese needed water.

The Yoder Ranch had it.

Mave spent the winter of 1975 to 1976 reading her mother’s memorandum book in detail. She studied the imprint schedule. She studied the breeding cycle. She studied the rotation system. She studied predator defense. Then she wrote, in pencil on 3 sheets of lined notebook paper, an order for 80 Toulouse goslings and 5 Embden ganders from the Murray McMurray Hatchery.

She mailed the order in February.

The hatchery answered 3 weeks later.

Pickup was scheduled for the third Tuesday of May.

She told no one in Cherry County what she was doing.

By the morning of the third Sunday of August 1976, when Vernon Bramwell drove past the Yoder South Meadow on his way home from a Cattlemen’s Association field day at the Niobrara Valley Preserve and saw 85 half-grown geese ranging among Mave’s Hereford herd at the lake’s edge, the geese had been on the ranch for 3 months and 4 days.

The brooder shed had done its job.

The imprint had taken.

The geese followed Mave in a single waddling line whenever she walked the pasture in the evening. By the second week of August, they had begun to drift into rough flank formation around the Hereford calves at dusk, exactly the way Adele Cleary had described in her notebook.

The 1976 calving year had not yet begun.

The 1977 calving year would begin in March.

By then, the geese would be 10 months old and fully working.

By the second Tuesday of September 1976, every rancher in Cherry County had heard about the Yoder widow’s geese.

The Valentine Cafe sat on the corner of Main Street and Highway 83 in Valentine, Nebraska. On Tuesday and Friday mornings between 5 and 7, the long Formica counter filled with men in brown felt cowboy hats drinking coffee from chipped enamel mugs and arguing over feeder cattle prices, the prospects for the fall sale at the Valentine livestock auction yard, and whether pending United States Department of Agriculture changes would help or hurt Sand Hills operators.

By the third week of September, Mave’s geese had become the dominant topic.

Vernon Bramwell told the story 4 mornings in a row. He told it again at the September Cattlemen’s Association meeting. He told it once more at Methodist church coffee hour on the third Sunday of September. By the end of the month, he had told some version of it to every rancher within 70 miles of Valentine.


The story changed with each telling.

By the time it reached Ezra Dosset, whose 4,000 acres adjoined the Yoder operation to the south, the story was that Mave Yoder had bought 1,000 geese and was claiming, on the authority of her late mother’s handwritten notes, that they would protect cattle from coyotes.

Ezra Dosset had been a personal friend of Roland Cleary for 43 years. He had attended Roland’s funeral in 1972. He had attended Owen Yoder’s funeral in 1973. In all those years, he had never heard Roland say a single useful thing about poultry. Roland, as Ezra knew him, had been a Hereford cattleman through and through.

The story Vernon Bramwell was telling did not match the man Ezra had known.

It also did not match 43 years of working friendship.

By the time Ezra finished his second cup of coffee on September 28, 1976, he had decided he would drive over to the Yoder Ranch that afternoon and see for himself.

The mockery in Valentine was not openly cruel. It was worse in some ways. It wore the clothing of concern.

At a cattlemen’s coffee, Mave overheard Jeb Picket, the man who had taught her father how to break a roping horse in 1948, tell another rancher that the Yoder widow had let grief get the better of her judgment. At the Valentine livestock auction yard, the manager pulled Mave aside after she finished marking her sale lots and asked, in a low respectful voice, whether she had thought through what the geese might do to her insurance premiums. At the Methodist church potluck on the third Sunday of September, the minister’s wife drew Mave aside in the basement fellowship hall and asked whether the geese were something Owen would have approved of.

Mave looked at her across the corner of a folding table that held a covered casserole and a glass pan of cinnamon rolls.

“Owen would have asked me what my mother thought,” she said.

The minister’s wife had no answer.

Mave carried her green bean casserole back to the kitchen and washed her own dish.

Ezra Dosset was 60 that autumn. He was tall, lean, and weatherworn, his face deep brown from 40 years of Sand Hills sun. White and gray stubble flecked his cheeks and jaw. His eyes were blue and deep-set, narrowed from a lifetime of looking into bright prairie light. He wore a tall-crowned tan stockman’s hat with a sweat-stained band, a faded sheepskin-lined denim ranch coat over a green plaid pearl-snap shirt, dark Wrangler jeans softened by years of washing, and scuffed brown boots.

His mouth often carried the paternal, worried set of a man who had spent his life believing he was responsible for other people’s decisions.

He had wanted the Yoder section before Owen died.

He wanted it more after.

In the 3 years between Owen’s death and the arrival of the geese, he had never openly raised the subject with Mave. Instead, he approached it sideways. He stopped by on Sunday afternoons. He brought casseroles his wife, Hannah, had made. He asked, in the tone of a neighbor being practical, whether Mave had considered leasing the South Meadow for a couple of seasons. He offered to ride her north fence line on his son’s Saturday mornings. He offered to send Reed over to fix windmills. More than once, he told Mave that any decision she wanted to make about the operation would have his full support, and that he and Hannah were always available to talk through whatever she was thinking.

Mave thanked him.

She did not lease the South Meadow.

She did not ask Reed to fix the windmills.

She rode her own fence line.

The geese changed the conversation.

Ezra first heard about them from his hired man, Saul Epper, who had driven past on a Sunday morning and seen the geese walking out of the brooder shed in single file. Saul told Ezra at the gas station the next morning. Ezra did not believe him. He drove past the Yoder South Meadow himself on Tuesday afternoon and counted, by the rough estimate of a man who had run cattle for 40 years, somewhere between 60 and 100 large gray and white geese ranging in loose formation among Mave’s Hereford cow-calf pairs.

That evening, he went home to Hannah, sat at the kitchen table with his hat off and his elbows on the oilcloth, and said, “Hannah, my best friend’s daughter has lost her mind.”

Hannah Dosset set down the coffee pot.

“Ezra,” she said, “you do not call her your best friend’s daughter in front of me ever again. She is Owen’s widow, and she is your goddaughter, and she is 38 years old, and she has buried a husband and a father and a mother all in 8 years. You will go over there tomorrow, and you will ask her what she has done, and you will listen to the answer.”

Ezra went the next morning.

Mave was standing at the south end of the brooder shed with a coil of fencing wire in her left hand and a pair of fencing pliers in her right when she heard Ezra’s truck pull up to the gate. She did not turn around immediately. She finished the section of wire she was working on, set the pliers on the top rail of the brooder fence, wiped her hands on her canvas work pants, and crossed the dirt yard.

“Ezra,” she said.

“Mave.”

“You want coffee?”

“No.”

She had expected the visit, though not on that particular Wednesday.

She crossed her arms and waited.

“Saul told me yesterday,” Ezra said. “I drove out to the end of the section myself. I counted somewhere upwards of 80 geese ranging with your cattle. I came home and asked Hannah to set me straight. Hannah told me to come ask you.”

He looked toward the South Meadow.

“Mave, what in God’s name have you done?”

“I bought 80 Toulouse goslings and 5 Embden ganders from McMurray in May. I imprinted them in the brooder shed. I walked them out to the South Meadow in August. They’re running with the herd. They’re eating thistle, bindweed, and dandelion. They’re alarming against coyotes. They’re doing exactly what my mother’s geese did on the Cleary place from 1932 until 1958.”

“Mave,” Ezra said slowly, “you have 85 geese on a working cow-calf operation.”

“Yes.”

“By the time the calves come in March, every coyote in the Niobrara is going to know there’s a goose flock in your South Meadow. You’re baiting predators into your calving pens. You’re going to lose calves. The Hereford cows are going to spook every time a gander hisses. Your weight gains are going to drop. You’re going to wean a 50-pound lighter calf in October. Mave, you’ve invited the wolves to dinner and rung the bell.”

“The wolves were already coming, Ezra,” she said. “I just gave them a reason to walk past my pasture and go to yours.”

“Mave.”

“The geese alarm against coyotes. They fight coyotes. They’re bigger than people think, and they fight in formation. A Toulouse goose at full breeding weight goes 20 pounds. A Sand Hills coyote goes 30. The goose has wings the coyote can’t see in the dark, and a beak that can break the bridge of a coyote’s nose. The first coyote that comes through the South Meadow is going to learn. The second coyote won’t come through.”

Ezra stared at her.

“By March,” Mave said, “no coyote in 5 sections is going to come within a quarter mile of my calves.”

“Mave.”

“Drive home, Ezra. Watch what happens in March. If I’m wrong, I’ll sell the flock at the spring auction in Bassett, eat the loss, and buy you dinner at the Cherry County Fair. If I’m right, you buy me dinner. Either way, you and Hannah lose nothing by waiting.”

Ezra took off his hat, put it back on, then took it off again. He looked across the dirt yard at the brooder shed, then back at Mave.

“I cannot stop you,” he said. “I cannot help you. I’m going home.”

He drove home.

Then he watched.

Part 2

The 1977 calving season began on the third Tuesday of March.

By the end of April, Mave had lost zero calves to predators.

Ezra Dosset had lost 3 calves to coyote depredation on the south boundary of his ranch, the line that ran along the Yoder lakes, and 4 more calves on his north section.

The 3 south-boundary calves were taken on 3 consecutive nights in the second week of April. Each morning, Ezra’s son Reed followed the tracks at first light. The tracks ran from the Dosset south fence line into the Sand Hills willow thicket on the northern Yoder property line and stopped there.

They did not cross into Mave’s pasture.

On the morning of the third Tuesday in April 1977, Reed stood at the willow thicket and looked across at Mave’s cow-calf pairs grazing peacefully in the South Meadow. Eight Toulouse geese stood in loose flank formation around the nearest calving cow.

That evening, Reed told his father the coyotes had stopped at the willows because the geese had taught them to.

Ezra did not believe him.

Not then.

But by the end of May, the geese had been ranging with the herd for 14 months. The cattle had stopped flinching at the ganders’ hiss by the third week of August 1976. By the second week of September, they had begun walking in loose proximity to the gaggle as if the geese were a kind of mobile shelter. By calving in March 1977, the cows delivered their calves with geese standing flank guard at a 20-foot radius from the labor mound.

The coyotes were not coming through.

They were going around.

From 1977 through 1985, the Yoder Ranch entered what Mave later thought of as the deep work years.


The geese were simply there.

The cattle calved without predator loss.

The thistle infestation that had been creeping into the South Meadow since the 1969 drought rotation cleared by the 1979 grazing season. The Russian knapweed that had been threatening the north section since 1972 cleared by 1981. Cattle weight gains improved by an average of 23 pounds at weaning between 1976 and 1981, partly because the geese ate dandelion blooms before they could shade out bunchgrass and partly because they ate biting flies and tick larvae from calves’ faces in the long Sand Hills evenings.

By the end of the 1981 calving year, the Yoder operation was the best-performing cow-calf operation in Cherry County by every metric that mattered.

Pounds of weaned calf per cow.

Pounds of weaned calf per acre.

Pasture composition.

Weed pressure.

Predator loss.

The men at the Valentine Cafe knew the numbers because the Valentine livestock auction yard published them every fall in its newsletter, which Vernon Bramwell himself edited.

The men did not stop making jokes.

They simply stopped making them in front of Mave Yoder.

By 1981, the mockery had moved sideways. It focused less on performance and more on the oddity of the system. The men at the counter said Mave had gotten lucky. They said one good run of calves proved nothing. They said the real test would come during the next serious drought year.

Mave heard pieces of it here and there.

She did not answer.

She had cattle to run, geese to manage, eggs to collect, down to clean, records to keep, and her mother’s book to consult.

By the end of 1985, the working flock had grown from 85 geese to 240. Mave bred for size, territorial aggression, and the imprint cycle Adele had documented. In spring 1982, she began selling breeding stock. She sold goslings to a small farm in Holt County, to a cattle operation in Brown County, and to a hobby buyer in Lincoln.

By spring 1983, she began plucking her geese twice a year for down.

The down went to a small bedding manufacturer in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, under an arrangement Mave negotiated herself at $32 a pound. The company had been started in 1947 by a Norwegian immigrant named Olaf Tollefson, who had returned home from a Sand Hills cattle drive in 1939 and told his wife that the only soft thing on the northern plains was a goose, and that someday the rest of the country would figure it out.

Olaf died in 1972.

His grandson ran the operation by 1983. When Mave wrote him, he answered with a hand-typed contract for 500 pounds of cleaned grade-A down per year at $32 a pound and a promise to buy whatever else she could produce.

He visited the Yoder Ranch every October to inspect the down. He stayed for 1 cup of coffee. He never asked about the cattle. He always paid cash on delivery.

By 1985, the down income alone was $14,720.

Egg income brought in $800 a year.

Goose meat from culls brought in $1,200.

Breeding stock income reached $6,000.

The geese were producing $23,000 a year on top of cattle revenue in 1985, on a Sand Hills operation that netted $48,000 from cattle alone. The geese had become the second-best income generator on the ranch.

Then a letter arrived in the winter of 1984.

It came from Dr. Cornelia Thornberry, an associate professor of range science at South Dakota State University in Brookings. Her research focused on multispecies grazing systems in the northern Great Plains. She had read about the Yoder operation from a feed and grain industry newsletter, which had picked up a 1983 article from the Valentine livestock auction yard newsletter after the cooperative marketing committee insisted that Mave’s pounds-per-cow data was too good to leave unpublished.

Dr. Thornberry wrote to Mave on December 14, 1984, on university letterhead. She asked whether Mave would consent to a multiyear research collaboration. She wanted to visit the ranch annually with a small graduate-student team to measure pasture composition, soil organic carbon, livestock health markers, and calf-loss data.

She promised in writing that no individual ranch would be named in any peer-reviewed publication without the operator’s express written permission. She also promised Mave could withdraw at any time.

Mave answered 3 weeks later.

She said yes.

She also said, “Don’t use my name.”

Dr. Thornberry arrived at the Yoder Ranch on the morning of May 16, 1985, in a 1981 brown American Motors Concord with 2 graduate assistants from the South Dakota State University Range Science Department in the back seat and a yellow hard hat on the front passenger floorboard.

She introduced herself at the gate and asked to walk the South Meadow before they did anything else.

Mave walked her out.

The May light lay long and golden across the bunchgrass. The geese were ranging in 3 established subflocks among the Hereford cow-calf pairs at the edge of the South Lake. Dr. Thornberry stood on the rise overlooking the water for 45 minutes without speaking.

She watched the gander-led north subflock cross the lake margin to drive a coyote off a fence line in the middle distance. She watched the dam-led south subflock pluck biting flies from the faces of 3 calves resting in the shade of a Sand Hills willow stand. She watched the third subflock graze the thistle margins of bare sand patches where the bunchgrass had thinned.

At the end of the 45 minutes, she turned to Mave.

“Mrs. Yoder,” she said, “I have spent 11 years studying northern plains grazing systems. I have ridden research plots from the Texas Panhandle to the Saskatchewan border. I have never seen anything like this. I am here for 1 day. May I have 5?”

She had 5.

Dr. Thornberry kept her promise. She visited the Yoder Ranch every May from 1985 through 1990. She rode the South Meadow on horseback with Mave every spring for one 12-hour day. She measured pasture composition at 64 sample points using a Daubenmire frame. She recorded calf health metrics with a portable bovine diagnostic kit. She took soil cores at 12 sample points.

In 1987, she published a paper in the Journal of Range Management titled “Multispecies Grazing with Resident Anseriformes: A Case Study from the Sand Hills.”

The paper identified the Yoder Ranch only as Cooperator A.

Its conclusion found that Cooperator A showed a 38% reduction in calf loss to predators, a 41% reduction in pasture broadleaf weed cover, a 23-pound increase in weaning weight, and a 26% increase in soil organic carbon at the 0-to-12-inch depth, all measured against a 5-year rolling baseline of comparable Sand Hills cow-calf operations in the same 8-county region.

The paper became the most-cited article in the Journal of Range Management in 1988.

None of the Sand Hills ranchers knew Cooperator A was Mave Yoder.

Then the summer of 1988 came.

The rain stopped on June 17.

By the first week of July, temperatures in Cherry County reached 103. By July 15, they reached 105 and held there day after day for 19 consecutive days.

Native bunchgrass that had been holding through dry June at fair condition began to crash by the third week of July. Pastures overgrazed in the late 1970s and early 1980s went first. Thistle, bindweed, and Russian knapweed, suppressed in better years by healthy bunchgrass competition, exploded into the bare patches opened by drought.

By the first week of August, every Sand Hills pasture in Cherry County except the Yoder operation showed visible thistle and knapweed infestation.

On Vernon Bramwell’s east section pasture, the infestation was bad enough that he was projected to lose 40% of his summer forage to the weed shift.

The Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association called an emergency meeting at the Valentine VFW Hall for the evening of August 23.

Sixty-one ranchers attended.

The meeting opened with a presentation by the Cherry County Extension range specialist on emergency haying options. It moved to federal disaster declaration paperwork. Then came the question nobody could avoid.

Coyotes.

Coyote populations in Cherry County had been climbing through spring and early summer. The drought had compressed their prey base. Jackrabbits, ground squirrels, and prairie dogs were dying off in the dry pastures. By mid-July, coyotes had begun pushing into Sand Hills calving operations in numbers no one had seen since the 1956 drought.

By the end of August 1988, the countywide calf loss to predation rate was running at 11.4%.

Ezra Dosset had lost 38 calves on his south section by the morning of August 23.

Vernon Bramwell had lost 22 on his east pasture.

Jeb Picket had lost 19 on the section he ran with his son.

The losses were not evenly distributed. They concentrated on operations with the worst pasture going into the drought. Pastures overgrazed in the late 1970s were the pastures where thistle had taken the broadest hold by the third week of July. The thistle attracted white-tailed deer and jackrabbits because broadleaf weeds were among the only green forage left in the county. The deer and jackrabbits attracted coyotes. The coyotes, finding the wild prey insufficient, moved on calves.

The chain of failure took 6 weeks to play out, from June 17, the day the rain stopped, to August 2, the morning Carlton Tollefson walked out to his calving pen at 5 and found the carcass of his 3-week-old purebred Hereford bull calf with its hindquarters missing.

Carlton lost 11 more calves in the 4 weeks that followed. By August 23, he was selling off the rest of his cow-calf pairs at a 30% discount at the Bassett cattle auction to cover his September feed bill.


Coyotes were taking calves at midday.

They were taking calves at salt licks.

They were taking calves through fence lines.

They were taking calves in pairs.

The Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association had no answer at the August 23 meeting beyond federal predator-control assistance and emergency depredation cost-share filings.

The meeting was scheduled to end at 8.

By 7:30, the men in the back rows began asking Vernon Bramwell, in increasingly direct terms, about the Yoder operation.

Vernon had not yet gone to check on the South Meadow himself. He had heard the rumors. He had heard them from Ezra Dosset, from Saul Epper, and from Knox Ackley at the Valentine Co-op gas pump. But he had not gone.

Standing at the front of the VFW hall, Vernon said the Yoder operation was the responsibility of Mrs. Yoder and that he would not be making any official Cattlemen’s Association comment on an operation conducted without cattlemen’s consultation.

That was when Knox Ackley stood up in the third row.

Knox had worked for Mave Yoder since 1973. He had been there when the geese came off the truck in 1976. He had watched the system grow from an old notebook into a working pasture.

“Vernon,” Knox said, “I have spent 12 years standing in that South Meadow during the worst of every season. I have watched the geese walk out of the brooder shed in single file. I have watched them flank the calves at calving. I have watched a Toulouse gander chase a coyote off a fence line at 3 in the morning in the rain. I’m going to tell every man in this room something I should have said in 1976.”

The hall went quiet.

“The geese are not freak luck. The geese are not a hobby. The geese are exactly what Adele Cleary wrote in a leather memorandum book in 1932, and exactly what Roland Cleary’s wife ran on her ranch for 26 years, and exactly what every Sand Hills rancher’s grandmother knew before we forgot. The geese are why Mave Yoder is sitting at zero calf loss and the rest of us are sitting at 11.4. The geese are our blind spot. We laughed at them for 12 years. We are going to apologize for that laughing for the rest of our lives.”

Knox sat down.

Vernon Bramwell did not respond.

The meeting ended 10 minutes early.

Reed Dosset drove to the Yoder Ranch the next morning.

He arrived at the gate at 7 and sat in the cab of his 1984 Ford F-150, watching Mave walk from the brooder shed to the lakeside of the South Meadow with a 5-gallon feed bucket in one hand and a coiled lariat over her shoulder.

She saw him at the gate and walked over. She set the feed bucket in the dirt and stood at the driver’s-side window.

“Reed.”

“Aunt Mave.”

“You want coffee?”

“No,” he said. “I came to ask a question. My father didn’t send me. He doesn’t know I’m here.”

Mave waited.

“He’s been losing 2 calves a week for 7 weeks. I’ve been driving past your South Meadow on the way home from the auction yard every Saturday for 12 years, and I’ve been watching the geese walk along the fence line in the evening like they own the place.”

He swallowed.

“I came today because I think they do own the place. I came to ask if you would sell us goslings.”

Reed was 35 then, 6 feet 2 inches, with his father’s tall stocky build and Hannah’s green eyes. He wore a faded brown felt cowboy hat and a denim jacket over a blue plaid pearl-snap shirt. In the 8 years since he had taken over day-to-day operations on the Dosset ranch, he had never asked Mave Yoder for a single thing.

Now he asked.

Mave set the feed bucket down.

“I’ll sell you goslings,” she said. “The price is $35 a gosling. The minimum order is 30 goslings. The order includes 3 Embden ganders. It also includes 1 consultation visit from me at your operation in spring 1989 to set up the brooder, train your hired men on imprint protocol, and walk the pasture with you to identify holding water and predator approach corridors. The fee covers that visit. No follow-up consultation is included. If you want follow-up, the rate is $80 an hour.”

Reed did not hesitate.

“Aunt Mave,” he said, “I’m in.”

Part 3

Word travels in Cherry County.

By the morning of September 2, 1988, Mave had received 14 telephone calls.

By the end of September, she had received 23.

The callers were Sand Hills ranchers. Most had laughed at her in the Valentine Cafe in 1976. All had heard by the end of August that Reed Dosset had ordered 30 Toulouse goslings and 3 Embden ganders from the Yoder operation for delivery in May 1989. All wanted to know whether Mave could do for their operations what she had done for hers.

Mave had not anticipated this.

On the morning of August 24, when Reed Dosset stood at her gate, she thought she would sell goslings to the Dosset ranch in 1989 and perhaps to 1 or 2 other neighbors in 1990.

The 23 telephone calls changed the math.

On the evening of October 7, 1988, Mave sat at her kitchen table with Adele’s leather memorandum book and a pencil. She wrote down what she could do alone, what she could do with Knox Ackley, what she could do with 1 part-time hatchery hand, and what she could do if she expanded the brooder shed.

By the end of the evening, she had the numbers.

She could supply goslings to between 9 and 12 Sand Hills ranches in spring 1989 at $35 per gosling, with planning design, brooder construction, and 1 consultation visit per ranch. Total revenue, if all 9 to 12 operations bought, would land between $36,000 and $60,000.

She would work 70 hours a week from January through May.

She would hire Knox Ackley’s son, Owen Ackley, full time at $12 an hour.

She would expand the brooder.

And she would teach the next generation of Sand Hills ranchers how to work geese with cattle.

By the second week of January 1989, 8 Sand Hills ranches had signed contracts.

By the end of February, the number was 11.

The first delivery from Murray McMurray Hatchery arrived at the Yoder Ranch on the morning of April 3, 1989, in 2 semi trucks. Over the next 2 days, 3,700 Toulouse goslings and 140 Embden ganders were unloaded into the expanded brooder shed.

Mave supervised every imprint protocol herself.

By the morning of May 15, 1989, the goslings had been distributed to 11 Sand Hills ranches. Mave visited each one to walk the pasture and identify predator approach corridors. She walked early in the morning before the heat, marking holding water with white-painted survey stakes and predator approaches with red-painted stakes.

She wrote in pencil, in a hardback notebook she had bought at the Valentine Co-op for $2.20, the imprint protocol for each ranch and the goose-to-cattle stocking rate appropriate to each pasture’s topography.

The smallest ranch took 18 goslings on 180 acres.

The largest took 60 goslings on 2,200 acres.

Each ranch received the same consultation document: 12 typed pages produced on Mave’s father’s 1964 Olympia SM9 manual typewriter. It included the imprint schedule, the predator approach map, the winter feeding plan, the goose-to-cattle stocking ratio table by pasture acreage, and the Adele Cleary down-plucking cycle adapted to the northern plains climate.

At the end, she included a 1-page handwritten note in cursive.

Do not change the imprint schedule. Do not skip the morning walk. Do not take a gander in trade for a calf. Do not name the geese. The geese will name themselves to you.

The 1989 calving season opened with the largest multispecies grazing conversion ever conducted in a single Sand Hills county at one time.

Vernon Bramwell, who had not yet apologized to Mave in person, drove to her ranch on the third Saturday of May 1989. He sat at her kitchen table and did not take off his cowboy hat until she poured him a cup of coffee.

“Mave,” he said, “I have 2 questions.”

She waited.

“The first is whether you would consider, beginning in fall 1989, presenting a series of educational lectures on multispecies grazing systems at the Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association quarterly meetings with a small honorarium for your time.”

“And the second?”


He looked into the coffee.

“The second is whether you would accept the apology of a man who has been wrong for 12 years about the most important thing he ever held an opinion on.”

Mave said yes to both.

The first lecture was held on October 14, 1989.

Forty-two ranchers attended.

The second was held on January 20, 1990.

Sixty-one ranchers attended.

The third was scheduled for April.

Ezra Dosset came to the Yoder Ranch on a cold Saturday afternoon in October 1989, 1 year after his son Reed had stood at Mave’s gate.

The 33 goslings on the Dosset ranch had grown into 33 working geese. They had ranged with the Dosset herd through the 1989 calving season. Dosset predator loss in 1989 was 3 calves against 28 in 1988.

Ezra stood at the open wooden gate of the Yoder South Meadow and looked at the geese, now 12 generations into Mave’s selective breeding, walking in loose flank around a small group of Hereford yearlings at the lake’s edge. He took off his tall-crowned tan stockman’s hat and set it against his chest.

Mave walked out from the lakeside.

She wore the same gray wool work jacket she had worn the morning he stood at her gate in September 1976. Her braid was a little more silver. Her hands were a little more weathered. She stopped at the gate.

“Ezra.”

“Mave,” he said. “I owe my son’s herd to you. I owe my own herd to you. I owe my friendship with your father a debt I should have paid in 1976.”

She did not interrupt.

“I’m asking forgiveness,” he said. “I’m asking it as a man who watched his goddaughter for 12 years and decided the easier thing was to assume she was wrong. I would like to come stand at this gate 1 Saturday afternoon a season and learn what I should have learned in 1976.”

Mave unlatched the gate and held it open.

“Ezra,” she said, “you’re forgiven. You were forgiven on the night Hannah sent you over here in September of 1976. You didn’t need to come today.”

“I did need to come today.”

“Then come walk the meadow.”

He came in.

They walked the meadow for an hour.

They watched the geese from a low rise overlooking the South Lake. Mave handed him the leather memorandum book. He read 3 pages, carefully and silently, then gave it back.

He drove home at dusk.

The next Saturday, he came again.

The Saturday after that, he came again.

By the end of October 1989, Ezra had come back 4 Saturdays in a row. By the end of November, he had come back 6.

He did not pay for the visits.

Mave did not ask him to.

The Saturday visits became, in the Dosset and Yoder families, a thing understood and not discussed. They continued until Ezra Dosset’s death in 2003. In his obituary in the Cherry County Sentinel, the bench on the rise overlooking the South Lake was named for him.

The Cherry County Sentinel ran a feature on November 22, 1988, under the headline “The Geese That Saved the Sand Hills.”

The article took 8 column inches on the front page and continued for 14 more inside.

Knox Ackley was quoted.

“I worked beside Mave for 12 years,” he said. “I knew the geese were right by 1981. I should have spoken up then. I’m sorry I waited until the VFW meeting in August.”

Vernon Bramwell was quoted too.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong from the morning Mave Yoder put the goslings in the brooder in 1976 until the morning the Cattlemen’s Association met in August 1988. I was wrong for 12 years. The Cherry County Cattlemen’s Association is going to spend the next 20 years correcting what I said. We’re going to do it well.”

Reed Dosset was quoted.

“I owe my herd to my father’s goddaughter,” he said. “I’ll spend the rest of my life learning from her.”

Jeb Picket, then 71 years old, was quoted as well. He had taught Roland Cleary how to break a roping horse in 1948.

“I knew Adele Cleary,” he said. “I taught her husband to rope before he taught me how to read a Sand Hills lake. I will say this once. The daughter is what the mother was. And what the mother was was the smartest stock person on the eastern Sand Hills. Her daughter is going to be the smartest on the western. I’m sorry I didn’t say so in 1976.”

Dr. Cornelia Thornberry at South Dakota State University was quoted.

“We have known about the Yoder operation since the autumn of 1984,” she said. “Mrs. Yoder asked us to keep her name out of the literature. We did. We are no longer going to. The Yoder operation is the foundation of multispecies grazing research in the northern Great Plains. It is, as far as we have been able to measure, the cleanest multispecies grazing operation in the United States. It has been quietly funded for 12 years by a single Sand Hills widow and a leather memorandum book her mother kept on the kitchen shelf since 1932.”

The article noted in its final paragraph that the Yoder operation had recorded zero calf loss to predators in the 1988 drought against a Cherry County average of 11.4%. It noted that 11 Cherry County ranches had ordered Yoder goslings for spring 1989, and that Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City had received an order for 3,700 Toulouse goslings to be delivered to the Yoder operation in April 1989.

The article did not mention everything.

It did not mention that the breeding records at the Yoder Ranch were maintained in the same leather memorandum book in which Adele Cleary had recorded the original 1932 imprint schedule.

It did not mention that the brass clasp on the book had been buckled and rebuckled several thousand times since Adele bought it from a hardware store in O’Neill, Nebraska, in 1929.

It did not mention that the geese that saved Cherry County had been ordered with money Mave earned in the summer of 1975 selling weaned heifers at the Bassett cattle auction.

Five hundred and sixty dollars.

Eighty Toulouse goslings.

Five Embden ganders.

A rancher’s daughter.

A leather book.

A system everybody laughed at until the worst calving year Cherry County could remember proved that the old knowledge had not been foolish.

It had only been forgotten.

Mave ranched the Yoder section for 24 more years. She ran the gosling and consultation business from 1989 until 2010. By the end of her career, more than 11,000 working geese had been placed on Sand Hills ranches in Cherry, Brown, Rock, Holt, and Boyd counties under her direct supervision, across more than 200 working operations.

The original 1976 flock on the Yoder South Meadow eventually became 460 geese in 12 generations of Mave’s breeding.

They still walked in loose flank formation around the Yoder Hereford herd at dusk.

Mave did not explain why she chose the geese.

She did not need to.

The answer had never been hidden. It had been sitting in a leather memorandum book on the kitchen shelf of a small ranch outside Long Pine since 1929, waiting for a daughter who would carry it into a county her mother had never named and a year her mother had not lived to see.

For 12 years, the men at the counter laughed.

Then the drought came.

Then the coyotes came.

Then the pastures failed.

And when every other rancher was counting losses, Mave Yoder stood in the South Meadow while her geese circled the calves and proved that sometimes the future arrives wearing the shape of something everyone else calls obsolete.