The Daily News

ALMONT, N.D. (AP) — In his golden years, Chad Skretteberg plans to tell his grandchildren about the night he carried 32 heavy calves on his shoulders, one by one, through ice-cold, waist-high floodwaters to safety.

It’s a tale that amazes even him.

“I don’t know how I had the stamina,” said Skretteberg, who at 40 is a wiry 5-foot-10 and 185 pounds. “If I tried to attempt that just any day of the week, I would probably just quit, it’s so much work. But in those circumstances, your adrenaline kicks in.”

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On this day, the skies are sunny, the air pleasantly crisp and the Heart River flows peacefully by the south central North Dakota farmstead, where pregnant cows mill about in a pen full of freshly fallen snow with frozen mud peeking through.

But the scene was not so peaceful late Sunday night and early Monday morning, when floodwaters from the swollen Heart began rising at his dad’s farmstead, where Skretteberg’s calving barn sits on a hill. In no time, it seemed, the water was a foot deep right outside the barn.

Loren Skretteberg, Chad’s father, first tried to back an all-terrain vehicle with a cargo bed up to the barn to carry the calves, but the pooling water killed the engine.

“At that point, I started carrying them,” Chad Skretteberg said. “They would never have walked through that foot of water that was out there.”

The water kept rising, and as Skretteberg chased skittish calves, the straw-choked murk rose about 1 1/2 feet over the barn’s floor. Electricity still flowed to the building, so Skretteberg could see. But he worried about getting electrocuted.

“I was trudging through the water with calf-high rubber boots — those were plumb full of water,” he said. “Then, when I would step off that threshold I’d drop another foot, and I was in water over my knees. At one point, it was up to the pockets of my coveralls.”

Skretteberg hoisted each calf on his shoulders and trudged 100 feet around the side of the barn to higher ground, where his father took over and herded the animals into a makeshift pen the two had hurriedly set up. The animals ranged from 80 to 120 pounds each, he said.

“I don’t know how in the hell he did it,” Loren Skretteberg said.

“At that point in time I was wishing I had smaller calves,” Chad Skretteberg said with a laugh. “I was absolutely exhausted. The last few, once I’d get outside in that deeper water, I would hoist them up on my shoulder and would lean one arm against the wall of the barn.”

Ranchers make their living selling calves, and this spring’s severe storms and record flooding in the midst of North Dakota’s calving season drowned or fatally sickened many calves, cutting into ranchers’ incomes.

In the end Skretteberg saved them all, and has lost only two calves this spring. One drowned in standing water before the flooding and another died after falling ill.

“I am counting myself extremely lucky,” he said. “You hate to lose any, but in the circumstances ... I know guys who have lost many, many animals, and some who don’t even know how many they’ve lost because they can’t get to certain areas.”

The Skrettebergs once again can get anywhere they want on the farmstead. The high water receded within a day back into the channel a stone’s throw from the calving barn. On this day, as Chad surveys the water sparkling with sunshine, he muses about how quickly the Heart became a dark threat.

“In the summer it’s knee-deep most of the time,” he said. “It’s a slow, old river. When you ride on an innertube, you drag your (backside) on the rocks.”

And when a once-in-a-lifetime flood occurs?

“You get resourceful,” Skretteberg said with a smile.

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