Eleven Heifers on the West Eighty

She turned the burner down and looked at me.

“Jim, you’ve spent twenty-two years smoothing out other people’s roads,” she said. “Go fence your own ground.”

Saturday morning I drove up to Strong City to the sale barn.

Mr. Tolliver has run that barn since his father turned it over to him. He is past seventy, and he has never in his life said three words where two would do.

I found him in the alley behind the ring with a sorting stick, looking over a pen of cows.

“Jim,” he said.

“Mr. Tolliver. I need some cattle.”

“What kind?”

“The kind eighty acres of grass south of town will carry without hurting it.”

“That’s seven acres to the pair, if you’re careful,” he said. “Eleven head. Twelve in a wet year, and I would not count on a wet year.”

“Then eleven.”

“I’ve got a ranch down by Matfield Green cutting back,” he said. “They’ve got a set of red Angus heifers. All one brand, all raised right there on the same kind of grass. Bred to a calving-ease bull, checked by the vet, due to start calving the tenth of September. There’s eleven of them. I’d thought I’d have to split the set.”

“What are they asking?”

“Twenty-six fifty a head.”

Eleven of them came to twenty-nine thousand one hundred fifty dollars.

“Heifers,” I said. “First calf.”

“First calf,” he agreed. “They’ll want watching in September. But you’ll have young cows that know that country, and you’ll have them ten years.” He paused. “Your dad bought his first set of cows in that ring, off my dad, the same year he bought the grass. He paid too much for them too.”

I wrote him the check on the hood of my pickup.

He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket, and then he asked me the only personal question he asked me that whole spring.

“Does Russ know?”

“I told him in March. Plain.”

“Did he hear you?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe he did.”

Mr. Tolliver nodded slowly.

“They can stay where they are until the first of May,” he said. “I’ll have them in my pens the night before. You’ll want that fence up before then.”

The fence was the other twenty-six hundred dollars, and three weekends of my life.

Russ and the neighbors burned the pasture the first week of April, the way that country has been burned every spring since before there were fences on it. Within a week the black hills had a green fuzz on them you could see from the road.

After a burn, nobody has a reason to go out to a pasture until turnout. It sits at the end of a dead-end township road. That gave me three weekends.

A half mile of fence is two thousand six hundred and forty feet. With a steel post every rod, that is a hundred and sixty T-posts. Five strands of barbed wire is ten rolls. Add hedge posts for the braces at each end and one in the middle, a bucket of clips, and a twelve-foot gate.

I knew right where to start, and that is its own story.

In the middle of the north fence, a quarter mile from either corner, there has been one hedge post taller and thicker than the rest for as long as I can remember. I measured from the corner stone with a three-hundred-foot tape to be sure, and it was within a hand’s width. I marked the south fence the same way.