The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

The Gather

We saddled in the half dark. My horse was a big sorrel gelding named Rooster that Earl had started for me six years before, and when I swung up on him I had to sit still a minute until the feeling passed.

We rode out to the meadow in a long loose line and brought the pairs up in the first light. The Sandhills in May are the greenest thing God ever made.

The grass was coming hard and the hills rolled away like waves, and the mist lay in the low places along the river.

Then we sorted. The men on horseback cut the cows out the gate and back to the meadow, and the calves stayed behind in the corral, milling and calling.

It took about an hour. By seven we had nearly three hundred calves penned and the cows strung out along the fence, bawling for them.

Tom Hagen had already built the fire. We brand with a wood fire on our place, the old way.

He had cedar going and the irons laid in the coals in a row, and the smoke went up white and straight in the still morning air.

The Tally Book

I backed our pickup up close to the corral, with the tailgate facing the fire, so Kyle could see everything. Kenzie helped him out of the cab.

He wore his ball cap and sat on the tailgate, and I put the patterned wool blanket from the sofa over his shoulders.

We have kept the same kind of tally book for as long as I have been on that ranch.

A little green notebook from the farm store, with a column for heifers and a column for steers and a pencil mark for every calf that comes off the fire.

On the first page, at the top, whoever keeps the book writes the date and the crew.

For twelve years, the first name on that list was in Earl’s handwriting, because Earl always kept the book. He would write his own name first, then everybody else’s down the side.

I watched Kyle open the new book to the first page. His hands were so thin that spring.

He uncapped his pen and held it a while, and then he wrote something across the top in big letters, slow, pressing hard.

Then he turned it around and held it out to me.

At the top of the page, where Earl’s name had always been, Kyle had written: Kenzie Sorensen. Brynn Sorensen. And under that, smaller: Crew.

I stood there by the tailgate with my rope in my hand and read it twice. The smoke drifted between us.

Kyle did not say anything. He just looked at me, and his eyes were wet, and so were mine.

“They’re the crew now,” he said quietly. “They’re what we’ve got. I wanted it wrote down.”

I handed the book back to him and turned away fast and got on my horse, because if I had stayed there one more second I would have come apart in front of nine men who had driven out before dawn to help me.