The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

So Duke had been living with us since February, and in my heart he was already mine. What the lawyer’s paper did was make it a joke.

Pete was in the shop when I pulled in, putting a new bearing in the bale processor. He wiped his hands on a rag and came out and looked at my face and did not ask me anything for a while.

My husband is not a talker. He runs our sixty cows on a half section and some rented grass nine miles south of Dad’s, and he drives a gravel truck for the county in the summer when the cows are out on grass. He is a careful, steady man who thinks before he opens his mouth.

“Kurt get the place?” he finally said.

“All of it.”

“And you?”

“Grandma’s cedar chest. Dad’s tools.” I looked at the truck. “And Duke.”

Pete leaned on the fender. Duke put his head out the window, and Pete scratched him under the chin with one finger.

“You going to fight it?” he asked.

I had thought about that question for ninety miles. I thought about it the way you think about a sore tooth, pushing at it, waiting to see how bad it hurts.

“No,” I said. “It’s what Dad wanted. I’m not going to drag my brother through a courthouse over a grave.”

Pete nodded. He did not argue, and he did not tell me I was right. He just said, “Then we’ll keep doing what we do,” and went back into the shop.

That night Duke slept by our back door with his nose on the step. He faced north, toward the road that ran to Dad’s. He slept that way every night for the next two months.

The whistle

I need to tell you about the whistle, because everything that happened in May came down to it.

My father had a two-note whistle he used on dogs. Low, then high, made with two fingers in the mouth. It carried a long way on a still morning. Neighbors used to say they could set their watches by it in the fall when he was bringing pairs down off the lease.

He taught me when I was eleven. We were behind the calving barn on a Sunday afternoon in April, and he made me do the stop whistle over and over until my lips went numb and I cried from frustration.

He did not hug me when I cried. That was not my father. He handed me his handkerchief and said, “Again.” And when I finally got it, clean and sharp, his old dog at the time, a bitch named Tess, dropped flat in the grass forty yards off.

Kurt never learned the whistles. He was three years older than me, and by the time I was learning, he had already decided he hated the ranch. Or maybe the ranch had decided it about him. I was never sure which.

He was not lazy. He was quick at school and could rebuild an engine at fourteen.

But he was afraid of the cows, and my father did not understand fear in a boy. When Kurt was thirteen, a range cow with a new calf ran him over the panel in the calving lot and broke two of his ribs. Dad helped him up, checked him over, and said, “You turned your back on her. You won’t do that again.”

Kurt did not do it again. He just stopped going into the lot.

After that, the work fell to me. Dad did not plan it that way, I don’t think. It was just that I kept showing up, and Kurt kept finding reasons to be somewhere else. By the time he left for college in Fargo, I was the one who knew which cows kicked and which gate stuck.

Every one of those weekends, Duke or Tess or the dog before Tess was at my father’s heel, and later at mine. I trained Duke with him from the time Duke was eight weeks old. Dad did the whistles. I did the patience.

So when the lawyer read out that the dog was mine, I want you to understand that it was not nothing to me. It was not a joke. But I knew how it sounded in that office, and I knew how it would sound at the café in Killdeer, and that was the part that stung.