The Gate In The North Fence Line

The cattle were black against the gray light, eleven of them, heads down in my hay meadow like they had paid for it.

I stopped the pickup on the section line and sat there with the engine running. It was a quarter after six on the second Tuesday of August. The sun was a thin orange line over the hills east of Merna.

I knew whose cows they were before I got out. Bart ran straight black Angus, and he ear-tagged everything in yellow. I could see the tags from the road.

I walked the line first. That was how my dad taught me. You do not go chasing cattle until you know how they got in, because if you do not fix the hole, you will be chasing them again by noon.

The hole was not a hole. It was three of them.

Somebody had cut all four strands between two T-posts, about a hundred yards apart from each other, three times along the quarter mile. The cuts were clean. The wire had sprung back and curled on the ground in loose gray loops, the way barbed wire does when it lets go under tension.

Cows do not carry wire cutters.

I stood there in my chore coat with my hands in my pockets and looked at the curled ends for a long time. I was thirty-six years old. I had buried my dad two Februaries before. I had run the place alone since, and I had never once had a fence cut.

My name is Polly. I farm a little over three hundred acres outside Merna, in Custer County, Nebraska. Most of it is pasture and some of it is hay meadow, and three days a week I keep the books at the co-op in Broken Bow so the farm does not have to pay for everything.

The thirty acres of hay meadow along the north line were the best ground my dad ever had. That summer was dry from early summer on. The prairie grass had come in short and cured golden standing up, but it had come.

I had planned to swath it that Friday. It was the hay that was going to get my cows through January.

Eleven black cows had spent the night on it. They had eaten the tops off about fourteen acres and laid the rest down flat, the way cattle do when they walk and bed in standing hay. I did the math standing in the ditch. Twelve tons, give or take, at the hundred and eighty dollars a ton hay was bringing that year.

Twenty-two hundred dollars of winter feed, gone in one night.