The Spring Branding Nine Neighbors Ran

What Walt Did

Around ten, Mike Lindqvist’s horse threw a shoe. Mike was one of only three of us heeling, and the line of calves started to back up.

Brynn and Tyler Lindqvist were sitting on the fence catching their breath, and the fire was burning down for lack of anything to do.

Walt Hagen set down his coffee cup. He walked to his trailer, and he led out an old bay mare that had to be twenty if she was a day, and he climbed on her the slow careful way a man climbs on with a new hip.

Tom started toward him. “Dad. Your hip.”

“My hip’s fine,” Walt said. “My hip’s titanium. It’s the best thing on me.”

He rode into that corral and shook out a loop, and his first throw caught a heifer calf by both heels as clean as anything you ever saw.

He dallied and turned the mare and drug that calf to the fire like he was thirty years old.

The whole crew stopped what they were doing. The Pruitt brothers whooped. The Hagen boys hollered.

Even Kyle, on the tailgate, pumped his fist under the blanket. And Walt just rode back into the bunch and built another loop, like nothing had happened.

He heeled calves for the next two hours. I counted later from the book. Walt Hagen, seventy-four, with a titanium hip, drug sixty-one calves to the fire that day.

The Girls

By eleven o’clock Kenzie and Brynn were filthy from their hats to their boots. Brynn had a hoof print on her thigh where a calf caught her.

Kenzie had split her lip on a calf’s head and bled down her chin and wiped it on her sleeve and kept going.

The neighbor boys worked beside them. Tom Hagen’s boys and Tyler Lindqvist, all about the same ages. At first the boys tried to take the bigger calves, being boys.

Brynn put a stop to that by flanking a calf that had to go two hundred and fifty pounds, all by herself, while three boys watched with their mouths open.

Once, during a short break, I saw Kenzie walk over to the tailgate and lean against her dad.

He put his arm around her, blanket and all, and she put her head on his shoulder for maybe ten seconds.

Then she went back to the corral. I do not think either of them said a word.

Dinner at Noon

At noon the women came. Barb Lindqvist and Walt’s wife, Louise, and Tom’s wife, Kim, and two others, in pickups full of roasters and coolers and slow cookers. Nobody had asked them, either.

Barb had made potato salad. She set it on the plywood and then stood there a second looking at it, and I knew she was thinking of the blue enamel roaster, and of Norma.

She caught me looking at her, and she just shook her head a little and went to get the forks.

The pickup was still on the road. It had been there three hours.