The Dog Who Brought the Cows Home

Gus calls

Branding at Dad’s was always the second Saturday in May. Kurt kept the date, which surprised me. I thought he might not even know it.

On the Friday night before, I was washing supper dishes when the phone rang. Pete answered, said, “Evening, Gus,” and handed it to me with a look on his face.

“Jill,” Gus said. “I wanted you to know how it’s going over here.”

“How’s it going?”

He sighed into the phone. “Your brother got the crew out a day early to gather. He figured with the four-wheelers they’d have the pairs in the big corral by supper and could start first thing in the morning.”

“And?”

“And they got eleven pairs in.”

I sat down at the kitchen table. Pete sat down across from me.

“Eleven,” I said.

“They ran them hard,” Gus said. “The cows went right up into the ash draws on the north end, past the old homestead, where you can’t take a machine. Calves got split off from their mothers. Bawling all over the hill. The crew boss is a decent man, but he told Kurt he’s not climbing those draws on foot, and his horses aren’t here till morning.”

Dad never gathered that pasture with machines. In fifty-one years, he never once did. He gathered it with one horse and one dog, quietly, at first light, and the cows walked down the hill in a long line like they were going to church.

The cows knew Duke. They had known him their whole lives. Most of those cows had been moved by Duke every spring and fall since they were heifer calves.

“What’s Kurt going to do?” I asked.

“He’s going to try again at six,” Gus said. “Crew’s coming at eight to start working calves. Hired horses coming with the crew. But Jill, those cows are stirred up now. You run a cow like that, she remembers.”

“Did Kurt ask you to call me?”

“No,” Gus said. “No, he did not.”

I thanked him and hung up and sat there with my hands flat on the table. The dishwater was going cold in the sink. Duke had come in from the porch and was lying under the table with his head on my foot.

“Well,” Pete said.

“He didn’t call me,” I said. “He told you he’d hire it out. He laughed at the lawyer’s office. Pete, he laughed.”

“I know.”

“If I go over there, it looks like I’m rubbing his face in it.”

“Maybe.”

“And if I don’t go over there, those calves get run up and down that hill all day tomorrow by men on rented horses who don’t know where the water is or where the fence is down on the north side.”

Pete waited. He is good at waiting.

“They’re Dad’s cows,” I said, and that was when my voice went.

Pete reached across and put his hand on top of mine. His hands are big and rough from twenty-five years of baling wire.

“They’re your brother’s cows now,” he said gently. “But they were your dad’s. And Duke’s his dog, and Duke’s yours. You go over there in the morning, I’ll haul your mare. If Kurt tells you to leave, we’ll leave and we’ll go to the café and have pancakes. That’s all it costs.”

I lay awake until three. I kept hearing my father saying “again,” and my own eleven-year-old lips going numb.