The Branding I Ran Myself

What I Did With It

I want to tell you I knew right away what to do. I did not.

I sat with it for most of a week before I told Wayne. He was weak, and I was afraid of what it would do to him.

When I finally did tell him, at the kitchen table with all the papers spread out, he did not rage.

He looked at the brand slips and the phone numbers in my handwriting. He was quiet so long I thought he had drifted off.

Then he said, “I pulled calves with that man. I sat up with him the night his dog died.”

That was all. No cussing, no fist on the table.

Just a tired man taking the measure of twelve years and finding one of the posts he leaned on was rotten clear through.

“I’m going to the sheriff,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “You should.”

And I did. I drove to town with my steno pad and the brand papers.

I laid it all out for the deputy and then for the county attorney. Every number, every call, the whole cold trail of it.

The county attorney was a careful young man, and he took it seriously. He had an investigator go through it.

That spring he filed charges, theft by a person in a position of trust, a felony. The real thing, with a case number and a court date.

People ask me, when they hear this, why I did not just let the law handle it.

Why I turned around and ran a branding myself three weeks later instead of waiting on a courtroom.

Here is the plain answer. A case like that takes a year, maybe more.

The attorney told me so himself. Hearings and continuances and a trial if it ever gets that far.

The law grinds, and it grinds slow. But calves do not wait on a courtroom. Ours were born in March.

By the middle of May they were big and strong and the flies were coming.

They had to be branded and vaccinated and worked before we turned the pairs out to summer grass. That cannot wait a year.

That cannot wait a week.

The branding was coming whether the trial ever came or not. And the man who always set the branding was the man I had just fired.

So the branding was mine.