The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

Ropes and Smoke

I rode into the corral and built a loop. There is a rhythm to heeling calves, and Earl taught it to me, too.

You ride in slow and quiet, you let the calves settle, you pick one and lay the loop under its hind legs as it steps, and you dally and turn for the fire.

My first loop was a good one. I caught a big black bull calf by both heels and turned Rooster and drug him toward the fire on his side, the way you are supposed to, smooth and not too fast.

That is the picture I keep in my head from that morning. The May sun coming up over the hills behind the barn.

My braid down my back under my hat, my denim shirt already dark with sweat at the collar, my leather chaps dusty to the knee. The smoke rising off the fire.

Kyle on the tailgate in his ball cap and his blanket, with the book on his knee. And Kenzie and Brynn running out in their jeans and their hats to meet my calf.

They had wrestled calves before, a few, at other people’s brandings. But never like this.

Kenzie went to the head and Brynn went to the back legs, and they got that calf down and stretched out on the ground, Kenzie with her knee on his neck and Brynn sitting back hard with a heel in each hand.

Steve Pruitt ran the iron. Mike Lindqvist gave the shots, blackleg and the seven-way. Tom Hagen worked the knife on the bull calves.

The whole thing took maybe forty seconds. Then the girls let go and the calf jumped up and trotted off, mad, and Kyle made a mark in the steer column.

“One,” Kyle said, loud enough for all of us to hear.

Walt Hagen, standing by the fire with his coffee, raised his cup to him.

The Pickup on the Road

It was a little after nine when I saw it.

I was coiling my rope, waiting for the girls to finish a calf, and I happened to look past the corral and up the long slope of grass toward the county road.

There was a pickup parked on the shoulder of the gravel, a good half mile off. Just sitting there. The engine was not running, because there was no exhaust in the cool air. Nobody got out.

I did not need to see the driver. I had looked at that pickup parked by our barn every working day for twelve years.

Walt saw it too. I watched him see it. He looked at it a long while over the rim of his coffee cup, and then he turned his back to the road and went to the fire and picked up an iron.

Kenzie came over to my stirrup, wiping her hands on her jeans. “Is that him?” she asked.

“That’s him,” I said.

She looked at it for a while. Then she said, “Does he think we can’t do it without him?”

I did not answer her.