Ropers drag the calves out of the herd by the heels. Ground crews flank them, two to a calf, and hold them down. Somebody runs the irons from the fire. Somebody vaccinates. Somebody castrates. It runs like a machine when it’s going right.
Elsa had been dragging calves at neighbor brandings since she was twelve. Small ones first, on the edges, when the older men took a break. This was the first year she had asked to start the day as one of the ropers at our own place.
Doyle said yes before I could say anything. He was proud of her. He had shaped her first rope himself in the barn, stretched it between two posts for a week so it would lay right.
Earle didn’t say no that morning. He just watched. I should have read that better than I did.
So why didn’t I stop it? Why didn’t I walk up and tell Earle to get off my daughter’s horse right then?
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Because a branding is not a place for a family fight. Thirty neighbors had given up their Saturday. Calves were down on the ground with irons hot. If I had started it there, the whole pen would have stopped, and every one of those people would have gone home with our business in their mouths.
And because Elsa grabbed my sleeve before I could take a step toward him.
“Don’t,” she said. “Mom. Don’t you dare.”
“He can’t do that to you.”
“He already did,” she said. “If you go over there it’s worse. Everybody will say I needed my mom.”
I looked at her. Fifteen years old with dust on her cheek and her jaw set exactly like her grandmother’s. I knew she was right, and I hated that she was right.
Doyle was at the fire. He’d had his back to the herd with an iron in each hand when it happened, and by the time somebody hollered at him, Earle was already roping.
He came over with his gloves still on. He didn’t look at me. He looked at Elsa.
“You want your horse back?” he said quietly. “I’ll go get him right now.”
She thought about it. I watched her think about it.
“No,” she said. “Let him have him. I’ll wrestle.”
And she did. She pulled on a pair of borrowed gloves and went to the ground crew, and for the rest of that day she flanked calves with Elliot Hager’s boy, who outweighed her by sixty pounds.
She flanked fifty or sixty calves. I lost count. She did not say one word to her uncle.