The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

A long spring

Kurt took two weeks off work after the funeral and stayed at the ranch house to finish calving. I called him the second morning and offered to come over.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “Gus is helping.”

“Gus is seventy-four.”

“Then I’ll hire somebody.” There was a long pause on the line. “I need to do this myself, Jill.”

I did not understand that either, back then. I thought he was being proud. I thought he wanted to prove he did not need his little sister, who had always been Dad’s favorite hand.

He did hire somebody. A young man from Killdeer named Jeff, who had grown up on a dairy over by Halliday, came out nights to check the heifers. Gus came over most mornings. Between the three of them, they got the rest of the calves on the ground, and they only lost two, which is not bad for a hard March.

“Your brother’s trying,” he said one Sunday in April.

“I know he is.”

“He’s got no feel for it, Jill.” Gus said it without any meanness. “He reads everything. He’s got a whole notebook. But he goes in that lot like he’s walking into a bank to ask for a loan.”

Pete called Kurt in the middle of April and offered to help with branding. Our own calves were branded the first week in May, same as always, and Pete figured Kurt would want neighbors, the way it has always been done out here.

Kurt thanked him and said he had hired a crew. Four men and a cook, a hundred and fifty a day each, from an outfit that did brandings all over Dunn and Mercer counties. Ropers, wrestlers, a vaccinating gun, the whole works.

“He was polite about it,” Pete told me afterward. “He just doesn’t want us there.”

I said, “He doesn’t want me there.”

Pete looked at me over his coffee. “Maybe,” he said. “Or maybe he doesn’t want you to watch.”