The Night His Cattle Got Out

Weaning Time

Three weeks later, the first week of November, Ray and Joyce loaded their calves and hauled them to a sale barn three hours south.

Ray had been weaning that week. Every rancher out there knows what that means.

If you have never been around it, here is the short version.

You take the calves off the cows, and for two or three nights the cows stand at the fence and bawl for them. All night long. They don’t eat much. They walk the fence line.

Some cows will lean on a fence when they’re bawling like that. Some will try to go through it.

A good fence holds them. A fence with a bad post in it is a different story.

Hannah had told me Ray had a rotten corner post on the northeast side, right along Highway 2.

He had meant to replace it in September. Then the hay ran late, and then the calves needed working, and then it was November.

Ray and Joyce planned to stay the night down there after the sale, at a motel, and drive back the next morning.

The calf sale ran late into the evening. It does that time of year, with every rancher in three counties selling at once.

Hannah worked nights that week at the hospital in North Platte. I was home in Thedford with Dutch and a pot of chili and a football game I wasn’t really watching.

Around nine, the weather radio on my kitchen counter went off. Freezing rain and sleet, overnight, north winds twenty-five to thirty-five miles an hour. I remember thinking I was glad I wasn’t hauling anything.

I went to bed at ten-thirty. I left my phone on the nightstand, ringer up, because that is a mechanic’s habit out there.

When a truck dies on a ranch at midnight, somebody calls you.

The Call

At 11:52, my phone lit up the whole bedroom. It was Hannah. She never calls during a shift unless something is wrong, so I was sitting up before I even said hello.

“Dad’s cows are out on Highway 2,” she said. She was talking fast and low, the way people do at a nurses’ station. “The deputy called me because he couldn’t raise Dad or Mom.”

“Did you try them?”

“Eleven times. Dad’s goes straight to voicemail. He always lets it die at night, he says it’s a leash. Mom’s goes to voicemail too. She keeps it in her purse on silent, and they’re in some motel out there.”

I was already pulling on jeans. “How many are out?”

“The deputy doesn’t know. Most of them, he thinks. He’s got his lights on so nobody plows into them, but he can’t do it alone, Cody. He’s one man in a sedan.”

“I’m going,” I said.

She was quiet for a second. “I can’t leave. We’re short two nurses and I’ve got a man on a drip I can’t hand off. I’m sorry. I know what he said to you. I know.”

“Hannah. It’s cows on a highway in the sleet. It doesn’t matter what he said to me.”

I want you to understand that I meant it. I wasn’t being noble.

Anybody who has ever seen what a pickup does to a cow at sixty miles an hour, and what a cow does to the people in that pickup, would have gone.