The Branding I Ran Myself

The Hired Man We Trusted

I should tell you who Gil was before I tell you what he did.

If you think I am a fool you would be partly right, and I would rather you knew the whole of it.

Gil Rasmussen came to us twelve years ago off a ranch down by Mullen that had sold out. He was fifty then, a widower, quiet.

Good with a horse and better with a wrench. Wayne liked him from the first handshake. We run cows in the Nebraska Sandhills.

It is the middle of nowhere, where the grass rolls in hills like a green sea and the nearest stoplight is forty miles of gravel away.

It is a two-person outfit that needs three people. Gil was the third.

He had the little house down by the calving barn, rent free. Beef in the freezer, a ranch pickup, and the fuel in it.

We paid him a manager’s wage on top of that.

It was not a fortune, but it was fair for the country. I will say that to his face if I ever have to.

For years he earned every dollar. He pulled calves at two in the morning in a March blizzard.

He fixed the windmill when the gearbox froze. He knew which old cow would jump the east fence, and he knew it before she did.

Wayne trusted him the way you trust a man you have been snowed in with. Because Wayne trusted him, I trusted him.

Because I trusted him, I quit reading the parts of the books that Gil handled.

That is the piece I own. I handed a man the grazing lease and the hunting money and I quit looking.

Looking felt like calling him a liar, and he had never once given me a reason. Or he had, and I did not want to see it.

There is a difference between a man who has never lied to you and a man you have never caught.