SOLEN - This is a true story about a rattlesnake wrangler who crashed his plane without leaving the ground, a cowboy who got struck by lightning while trying to lasso love and that most cavalier of risk-takers, the farmer-rancher.

Mostly, it's about the farmers.

But first let's illustrate a point.

The rugged country down here is made for rugged people who can tilt their hats into the wind and weather a storm. The terrain in northern Sioux County is craggy like an old man's face, and out of the county's forehead rises a nasty-looking mole called Rattlesnake Butte.

On a stormy summer night in 1934, one of those tough cowboys was on his way to the other side of the jagged butte to visit his girlfriend. The wind picked up, the rain poured down and, right at the base of the hill, lightning struck him dead on his horse. Joe Magilke was buried there, a simple stone marker still showing the spot.

On a much nicer day about 40 years later, a man from Selfridge landed his small airplane on top of the butte. That was a ridiculous and difficult stunt all by itself, but landing the plane on a bumpy postage stamp turned out to be the easy part.

The pilot hopped out of his plane with a canvas sack, determined to fill it with a passel of the butte's namesake reptiles. After fishing rattlesnakes from under rocks and out of dens, he cinched his squirming bag, tossed it in the plane and pulled down on the prop to start the engine. It fired and took off without him, though he was able to grab part of the wing. The little plane spun in circles, around and around, until it got too close to the edge of the cliff and he got too tired. It careened down the hillside.

The pilot scrambled to the bottom of the hill.

To get his snakes.

He pulled his sack from the wreckage, slung it over his shoulder and began the long walk back toward town. A farmer's wife spotted him and picked him up, and the grateful pilot tossed his bag in the trunk. When they got back to Selfridge and she popped the trunk, he noticed his bag had come open. She sold the car.

Strange things happen around Rattlesnake Butte.

Two weeks ago, a funnel cloud whipped through the pastoral yard on the Hatzenbuehler Ranch, which sits in a small valley about a stone's throw from the butte, if a tornado is doing the throwing. It was the only ranch in the county that the storm hit.

(Click here to view video of the damage to the Hatzenbuehler Ranch.)

Winds of 95 mph ripped two steel bins from their foundations and tossed them 150 yards into a tree row. The storm tore part of the roof off the main barn, while 17-year-old Lee Hatzenbuehler sought refuge inside the large metal building.

He was OK.

The funnel cloud, spotted by motorists six miles away on Highway 1806, spared the Hatzenbuehlers' house. It didn't touch their 1,100 cattle. It rocked three buildings off their foundations and damaged several storage bins, however. Wayne Hatzenbuehler, the head of the ranch and the family, knew insurance wouldn't cover his losses.

And now, finally, the point: When you gamble with nature, you can expect to lose your share of bets.

Which brings us to the risky business of farming and ranching on the high prairie. Sometimes - maybe even most times - it might be safer to play with a bag full of rattlesnakes.

Drought to deluge

A week ago, Joel Durheim was in tall cotton.

More literally, the Dickey County farmer was in tall corn and lush soybeans.

"It was probably the best I've ever seen," said Durheim, who's been farming south of Ellendale since 1986. "Conditions were probably the worst I've seen them in a long time last year, and the best I've ever seen this year."

The drought that stretched across most of North Dakota and the upper Plains in 2006 had a far reach geographically and also financially, reaching deep into producers' pocketbooks. Farmers managed some of their lowest yields on record, and ranchers were forced to sell down their herds early. Mandan's Kist Livestock sales ring set a record last July when more than 1,800 animals were checked in to be sold at a weekly auction. The average number for this time of year is about 500.

The sun baked the earth. The Bismarck area finished the year more than 5 inches of rain behind normal.

This spring, the skies opened.

Rain has fallen early and often. Bismarck is 3 inches ahead of normal this year.

"This year has been absolutely wonderful," said Jon Hanson, lab director at the Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory in Mandan. "It rained when we needed it, then stopped when we needed it to stop. Then it rained again when we needed it."

But rain also came down too heavily in some areas, flooding fields and washing out crops. On July 3, Gov. John Hoeven requested a disaster declaration from President Bush for 11 North Dakota counties that were swamped by heavy June rains. The declaration, worth about $1.2 million to the counties, was issued Tuesday.

The money is for repairs to public infrastructure, however, and earmarks nothing for producers.

Still, the declaration does make special low-interest loans available to farmers and ranchers in Barnes, Bowman, Dickey, Grant, LaMoure, Logan, McHenry, Ranson, Richland, Sargent and Stutsman counties. The grants would be administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But it does nothing for Durheim, who lost about a third of his bumper corn and soybean crop to a hellacious wind storm last week. Durheim said he had 320 acres totaled by the storm - which featured hail and winds of more than 70 mph - and another 1,000 acres sustained hail damage. His machine shed was flattened.

Storms across southeastern North Dakota on the same night knocked over power lines. Tornadoes were spotted near Tower City and Embden, the National Weather Service said.

"Everything was looking so good, and then this happens," Durheim said. "Thank God no one was hurt. We were lucky in that respect."

One hundred and thirty miles away, as the crow flies, Wayne Hatzenbuehler uttered the same phrase. Things could have been uglier, if the barn roof would have collapsed on his son, or the storm had hit the house.

"It couldn't have lasted more than 20 minutes or half an hour," Hatzenbuehler said. "The moisture has been good out here; all the grass looks good. We have a bumper crop of hay. But now we have all this to deal with. It's always something."

Hoeven hoped to link last week's storms in the southeastern part of the state - including the one on the Durheim farm - to the disaster declaration. That probably won't do much for Durheim, and will do nothing for Hatzenbuehler or Garrett Gilbertson, a McLean County farmer who lost half his crop in the July 9 tornado that struck White Shield.

Beyond insurance, which the men said would not make them whole, there could be help in the way of the disaster aid package Congress passed in May.

The aid package, tacked on to a war spending bill the president signed May 25, will put as much as $170 million back into North Dakota farms and ranches. Hatzenbuehler's neighbor, Woody Barth, was one of hundreds of farmers to travel to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the assistance. It was more than two years in the making.

"This is great news. It's been a long, hard fight," Barth said in May.

The disaster aid is available to farmers who lost more than 35 percent of their crop. Farmers will have to choose to receive aid for one year - from the flooding of 2005, the drought of 2006 or the storms of 2007. They'll then receive money to cover a portion of their loss.

The Bank of North Dakota also has disaster-relief loan programs available for affected farmers and businesses in any North Dakota county. Bank president Eric Hardmeyer said the program hasn't been heavily used this year.

"It's probably a little early," Hardmeyer said. "There's some hesitation to do anything with our program until (producers) see what the feds will do for them. Federal money is cheaper: Generally what we have to offer is low-interest loans; the federal government gives grants."

Hardmeyer said the state-owned bank booked about $20 million in disaster loans based on losses during the 2005 growing season, and about $11 million from losses last year. The loan program was scheduled to expire at the end of June, but the bank extended it through September to help producers.

Who knows what the look of the land will be around here in September? No one. It's a gamble, like catching rattlesnakes or riding into a thunderstorm. The safety net is full of holes.

North Dakota's farmers and ranchers provide food for the world, but there's no guarantee that while they're setting the table they're not also setting themselves up for a fall.

(Reach reporter Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tony.spilde@bismarcktribune.com.)