The Night His Cattle Got Out

The Last Five

We found them a mile south, down by a cattle guard where a ranch road meets the highway.

They had followed the borrow ditch down along the fence, the way cattle will, looking for a way back in.

One of them had slipped on the ice in the ditch and was down on her side.

My heart went right through the floorboards when I saw her. If she had broken a leg, there was nothing I could do for her out there.

But she was just stuck, legs splayed on the ice and too tired to try again.

I got behind her and pushed on her hip, and Dutch barked once by her head, and she lurched up and stood there shaking.

Moving five tired cows a mile up an icy ditch in the dark takes longer than you would believe.

That last mile took more than an hour by itself. I walked it twice, once down and once back behind them.

The deputy drove alongside on the highway with his lights going so nobody would come up on us.

A cattle pot came through from the north around two in the morning, empty, headed home. The driver saw the lights and slowed to a walk.

He rolled his window down and asked if I needed a hand. I told him I had it, and thanked him.

He said, “Well, you’re a better man than me,” and drove on into the sleet.

At 2:40 in the morning, the last cow went through the gap. I said, “Sixty-three,” out loud, and my voice cracked on it. I didn’t care.

The deputy was standing behind me with the flashlight. He said, “Good Lord, son.” That was all he said.

I have thought about it a lot since. It was the best thing anybody had said to me in a long time.

The Fence

Then the fence.

Getting cows back in is only half of it. If you leave a gap, they’ll be back out on the highway in an hour. Weaning cows do not quit after one try.

I pulled my truck around and left the headlights on the corner.

The old cedar post was snapped off flush with the ground, and the bottom was rotted to mush. There was no setting it back.

So I took one of the steel T-posts from my truck bed and the post driver. The ground was frozen on top but not deep.

The deputy held the flashlight while I drove the post, about two feet down, wham, wham, wham, with sleet running down my collar.

It was not a proper corner. A real corner gets a braced H assembly, two posts and a cross brace and a brace wire.

I knew that. But I could make it hold until Ray could set a real one, and that was what mattered.

I tied my new wire onto the good line post twenty feet back and ran it up to the T-post.

Then I hooked the fence stretcher on and cranked until the wire sang. Four strands, the same as the rest of his fence.

I clipped each strand to the post. My fingers had quit working right by then.

I could not feel the pliers. I had to look at my hands to see if they were holding anything.

On the last strand, the top one, my hands shook so hard I dropped the clip in the snow twice.

The deputy got down on his knees in the slush with the flashlight in his teeth and found it for me.

I tied it anyway. It was not pretty. My grandpa would have made me do it over.

But it was tight, and it would hold sixty-three cows for one night, and that was all I needed it to do.

The deputy stood back and looked at it. “I’d have never thought of the wire,” he said.

“My grandpa,” I said. “He always carried wire.”

He got a call on his radio about a car in the ditch twelve miles west. He shook my hand before he left.

It is a strange thing to notice, but I noticed it. He didn’t look at my arms. He just shook my hand.