Sixty Cows Down the County Road

I made a note in my head to bring her a pie, and I did, the next week, and we have been friends since.

Past the Jorgensens there was a stretch with no houses at all, just fence and grass and a mile of gravel. The cows settled in.

The dust drifted. Brynn sang a little, which surprised me, the first verse of “How Great Thou Art,” which she had been practicing for the youth group at church.

She sang it mostly to Pistol, I think. But the sound carried back over the herd in the cold air, and Addie turned around in her saddle and looked at me, and we did not have to say anything about it.

The corner is where I had been afraid of. The county road turns west at Elden Moe’s place, and the turn is sharp, and there is a gap in the fence where his old lane comes in.

If the leaders went straight there, they would be into his hay ground and half a mile gone before we caught them.

Brynn loped ahead to sit in the gap. But when she got there, she pulled up short, and I saw her look at something, and then she turned in the saddle and waved her hat at me.

I rode up along the ditch to see. And there at the corner, sitting a gray horse in the gap of the fence, was Elden Moe.

He had on a canvas coat that was older than I am and a hat with a sweat stain halfway up the crown. His gray horse was old too, white around the eyes, standing with one hind foot cocked like he had been there a while.

Elden sat that horse like he had been born in the saddle.

“Morning, Jolene,” he said, and touched his hat. “Heard you might need a hand at the corner.”

I did not know what to say. I had not called him on purpose, and here he was, eighty years old, on a horse, on a cold morning. “Elden,” I said, “who told you?”

“Patty called,” he said. “And Ron called. And that Jorgensen woman called, though I don’t know how she got my number.” He looked off at the herd. “Seems like the whole road knew but me.”

Then the leaders came up on the corner, and Elden did not say anything more. He just walked that gray horse two steps out into the road and sat there, and old Grandma looked at him and made the turn west as neat as you please.

The rest of the herd followed her around the corner like water around a rock. Elden sat his horse in the gap and turned every one of them, all sixty pairs, without moving more than a few feet either way. I have never seen anybody do it better.

When the last of the herd had made the turn, he fell in beside me. “I’ll ride along to your place,” he said. “If that’s all right. Haven’t been horseback since spring. It’s good for me.” I told him it was more than all right.

We rode together without talking much. He asked about Kyle, and I told him. He nodded and said he had broken his own pelvis in 1971, getting thrown off a bronc at a rodeo in Belle Fourche, and he was back on a horse by the next summer.