Bill knelt and touched the swollen foot, feeling around the joint. “Not quite to the tendon sheath,” he said, “but the toes’s all swollen apart.” He held the syringe up to the sky and filled it from a short white jug. “Poor fella,” he said, “abandoned like bones at a barbecue.”
“Is that LA200?”
“Nope, plain ole oxytetracycline. Don’t treat these and it infects a whole pasture. Red Wolf wouldn’t like that.” He swept the flies from the indentation along the spine and gave the bull his injection in the hip. “We’re gonna have to do this several times,” he said. “Funny deal, dry year like this. Supposed to bring sulfa boluses, and didn’t. Forgot to, I guess.”
Evelyn watched him peel back an eyelid and feel under the jaw of the increasingly relaxed bull. She’d watched him closely since her childhood. Now Bill Champion was old, but straight and lean and, when the narrow slits of his eyelids so revealed, the owner of the bluest ice blue eyes. He always had his hands all over his animals, and when something caught him by surprise like this foot rot, he seemed to doubt his own care. Likewise, he watched Evelyn continuously. Today he told her to shorten her reins, sit straight in her saddle, get her heels down in the stirrups and look to where she wanted to go before directing her horse there. “Sometimes they can tell just from your eyes.”
Now they gathered more cattle for shipment. Bill liked to leave as soon as you could “tell a cow from a bush,” so it was still dark when they trotted out of the corrals. They were desperately trying to beat the first real winter storm, after which shipping and pregnancy testing would become infinitely more laborious and wretched. One day, Bill alarmed Evelyn by leaving his good bay gelding behind in favor of a green colt—“He needs the experience”—which blew up five minutes into the work, dropping his head between his forelegs, then squalling and bucking through wind-bent junipers. Bill managed to ride him to a standstill, and the drive went on. Evelyn rode her reliable bald-faced bay, Crackerjack, and kept her canvas coat un-buttoned from the exertion. Her horse surveyed his land through a forelock that fell over his eyes. “That colt made you ride pretty good,” said Evelyn, who seemed even taller wearing spurs and chink chaps, her hair pinned up under a Miami Heat ball cap.
Bill had a sour look on his face, and a band of old sweat ran halfway to the crown of his hat. “I was all over him like a cheap suit.” This urgent race with the weather helped Evelyn forget that this was the most depressing day of her year, the separation of the calves from the cows and the shipment of the calves to faraway feedlots.
Evelyn rode along behind the herd, absently untangling Crackerjack’s mane with her free hand, reins slung loose from the other, and looked mournfully at the gamboling calves. Several times, an old cow who’d been through this before wheeled around to challenge her horse before losing conviction and joining the herd headed downhill to a certain future.
Wednesday morning it started snowing before sunup; they sorted off the calves amidst the deafening bawl of the cows. When they had divided the steer calves from the heifers into two pens, a rank cow with a single twisted horn grown close to her skull knocked a panel over and they had to sort them again. The big double-decker tractor trailers came down the long lane and circled, one backing up to the chute and the other standing by. Bill had positioned the chute so the early sun wouldn’t be in the cattle’s eyes when they loaded them. The brand inspector — a small man with iron gray hair, a green State of Montana jacket and worn-out cowboy boots — arrived around eight with a bag of doughnuts and a thermos of coffee, and they commenced the business of weighing the calves, taking them onto the wobbly old scale in drafts of tens and twelves. Evelyn stood with the cattle buyer, resplendent in bright Nocona boots and 40X Resistol with the latest crease, as they slid the weights around, taking turns but each watching the other’s hands until the brand inspector came inside and wrote in his book. Bill strode about with a white fiberglass pole, moving the calves here and there as needed as each scale load of confused calves was emptied into adjoining pens and the entire calf crop had been weighed. There was a cloud of steam above the shack, and a stormy sky building overhead in ledges of gray. Evelyn looked at one black calf, curled up on the ground trying to sleep, as if pretending none of this was happening. The buyer woke him with the toe of his boot, and he jumped up and scrambled into the trailer.
By the time all two hundred had gone up the aluminum ramps into various chambers against the roar of the cows and the steady rumble of diesels, Evelyn was covered with manure and had a heavy heart. The truckers stripped off their coveralls and climbed into their cabs in clean clothes. The dark wall that had been ascending in the western sky had overtaken them and it began to snow. Bill paid the brand inspector for his services and, holding the weight tickets between his fingers, raised his leathery face to Evelyn, studied her for a moment and said, “We had a good year.”
The bawling of the cattle made conversation impossible. Evelyn tipped her head toward the noise, her excuse for cutting it short. Bill bumped her on the shoulder with an open hand, then turned to make his round of gates and latches, to nail up stray planks on the alleyway that led to the squeeze chute where tomorrow it would be determined which cows had started a new calf for next year. The old dry cows with numerous calves behind them over the long years would be slaughtered. Evelyn was going dancing tonight; tonight she would dance this all away.
She drove off in her little car, its floor a jumble of vaccine bottles, paper coffee cups, baler twine and hair elastics. She drove down the mountain foothills and then, still north of the modest skyline of the city, she turned east toward the stockyards. She followed a semi loaded with round bales until she’d passed the corrals, then parked in front of the café, an encouraging place where cattlemen and hippies could be found sitting at the Formica counter listening to Otis Redding under a sign for Black Cat Stove Polish. Various bits of advice were posted, including No promises about eggs “over” or “scrambled.” And If you have a fork, you don’t need a spoon to stir your coffee. And one really caught her attention: Kill or remove ants on counter. Here was a spot for Red Wolf, she thought, then added, Now I’m doing it. A young man tried unsuccessfully to catch her glance, but without returning it she realized the time for such things was not so far away.
She saw how hard it was snowing and tried to imagine that the calves were better off in the trucks. She ate her breakfast in silence, then drove downtown in weather so lowering the streetlights seemed decapitated. This was when you could discover if your preparations for winter were adequate, and if you were ready for the restrictions of movement and light that were about to be upon you. The snow was blowing up against the front of a travel agency, obscuring the words “holiday” and “foreign currency” on its sign.
With an almost military sense of purpose she made her way through several shortcuts, from which occasional pedestrians appeared or disappeared, coats and scarves drawn across their faces. Her friends Violet and Claire, ambitious beauties, had a small shop on Main Street, Just the Two of Us, that, despite its high prices, Evelyn loved for its rarified sense of exotic couture right next door to an old saddle shop whose owner was their landlord. Evelyn doted on the interior of this silly boutique with its endless chalk white walls and racks of clothes in an arrangement impossible to understand. The owners looked out over their treasures in conspicuous separation from the big old-fashioned cash register to which they hoped to repair often enough to avoid eviction by the saddle maker, who, at the first of the month, came sniffing around for his check. Claire — lips pursed and breathing through her nose in concentration — held a dress abstractly to Evelyn’s shoulders. “Thank goodness,” Violet said in her surprisingly deep voice, “you don’t have a big bosom. Big bosoms make good clothes look stupid. Big bosoms are basically rural.”