Sixty Cows Down the County Road

Gathering took longer than the drive would. The pasture is a full section of rolling grass with draws cut through it, and sixty cows can lose themselves in it if they want to.

We rode the draws and pushed the pairs up toward the gate.

The calves were weaning size by then, five hundred pounds and more, with their winter hair coming in. The old cows knew something was happening.

They lifted their heads and started walking toward the gate before we ever got close, the way they always do in fall.

By eight we had all sixty pairs bunched at the gate. I counted them twice. Addie counted them once and got the same number.

Brynn counted them three times and got fifty-nine, sixty and sixty-one, and we told her to quit counting.

Then Harlan swung the gate open, and the lead cow, an old black cow we call Grandma, walked out onto the gravel and turned north toward home like she had been waiting all summer to do it.

The rest followed her. That is how it works. You do not drive sixty cows so much as you start one in the right direction and keep the other fifty-nine from having better ideas.

Brynn loped up the ditch to get ahead of me. Her job was the corners and the yard gates, to sit her horse in the gap and turn the leaders before they turned themselves.

She is small, and Pistol is quick, and the two of them have a way of making a cow change her mind.

Addie took the side, riding along the herd in her gray coat on Edna, keeping the calves from slipping through the barbed wire into the borrow ditch.

She did not say much. She never does when she is working. She just watched every animal, and moved before they did.

I rode point, out in front of the herd, with Tip working back and forth at Rusty’s heels. Point is where you set the pace, and it is where the dust is not.

My mother rode point. My grandmother rode point. I figured I could ride point.

It was the prettiest morning. I want you to see it the way I saw it. The gravel road ran straight north between two barbed-wire fences.

On both sides was rolling brown prairie, all the grass cured out and gold-brown in the sun, running off to the edge of the sky.

The sky was so blue it almost hurt. There was just enough wind to keep the dust moving off to the east.

You could see for miles, the Kessler place, the next place past it, and way off the cottonwoods along the creek where our home place sits.

Sixty black cows and their calves were walking down the middle of that road, nose to tail, in no hurry at all.

The calves bawled for their mamas whenever they got separated, and the mamas answered, and the whole herd sounded like an old church choir trying to find the note.

Brynn started whistling up front. She does not whistle songs, exactly. She just whistles, loud and high, the way her dad taught her when she was four, and the cows have always liked it. They walk better when she whistles.