The Branding I Ran Myself

The Hunters at the Gate

The hunting was worse, because the hunting was cash.

We lease the deer and turkey ground every fall to a bunch of men who come out from Omaha and from Iowa. It is real money.

There are big mule deer in our canyons, and those men will pay to hunt them.

Gil ran the hunting. He met the men, he opened the gates, he collected what they paid.

Most of them paid him in cash in an envelope, the way hunters do, and he brought me what he brought me.

There was no brand inspector for the hunting. There was no paper but what Gil wrote down. For the grass I had the state’s count to check him against.

For the hunting I had nothing but his word, and his word was a hole I could not see the bottom of.

What I could do was call. So I did. I found the hunters’ numbers in Gil’s old spiral notebook in the shop.

I sat at my kitchen table and I called men I had never met and asked them, plain, what they had paid to hunt our place.

One of them, a kind older man from Council Bluffs, went quiet when I told him who I was.

Then he said, “Ma’am, I’ve paid your man four thousand a season for six years, cash, every October. Is something wrong out there?”

Four thousand a season. From one group. Gil had been handing me fifteen hundred and calling it the whole of it.

I thanked that man and I hung up. I sat in my kitchen a long time while the light went out of the day.

Twelve years. Grass money and hunting money, skimmed small and steady, in a hundred quiet pieces nobody would ever catch alone.

When the county attorney finally added it all up, it came to a hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars.

A hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars, walking off our place a little at a time.

And all the while my husband swallowed a fever and a needle and a port in his chest to pay for the treatments keeping him alive.