Nine Tanks Nine Weeks and One Axe

The cows were standing at the first tank with their heads down, bawling, when I pulled into Dad’s yard at ten after twelve on a Thursday in January.

It was 31 below that morning, and it had barely climbed to 18 below by noon.

I still had my mail satchel on the seat beside me and my uniform pants on under my coat.

I had not stopped to change. Dad had called the post office and asked for me, and he never calls the post office.

“Wren,” he had said, “I can hear them from the house.”

That was all he said. He did not have to say anything more. A man who has run cattle for fifty years knows what that sound means, and so does his daughter.

I got out of the truck and walked to the tank by the yard pen. The ice was four inches thick and smooth as a dinner plate.

There were no broken slabs in the snow beside it. Nobody had touched it in at least two days.

The cows crowded me. They were not mean about it, just desperate, pushing their wet noses at my sleeve like I might have water in my pockets.

Forty bred Angus cows, every one of them due in April, and every one of them dry as a bone.

I went into the machine shed and found Dad’s old axe hanging where it always hung, on two nails above the workbench, the handle worn dark where his hands had been. I took it down and went back out.

The first swing bounced. The second one bit. By the fifth I had a crack running across the tank, and by the tenth I had a slab loose that I could lever up with the blade and drag out onto the snow.

The water underneath was black and steaming. The first cow got her nose in before I had my axe clear.

Then they were all shoving, and I stepped back and let them have it, and I stood there breathing hard in the cold with tears freezing on my face.

Then I went to the next tank. There were nine of them.

Dad broke his hip on the ninth of December. He went out to the barn just after daylight to check a heifer that had been off her feed, and he stepped on a patch of ice by the barn door where the eave drips every afternoon and freezes every night.

He lay there for close to forty minutes before he could drag himself to the fence and pull himself up enough to reach the phone in his coat.

He called the ambulance first and me second. He told me later he had thought about doing it the other way around.

They put a pin in his hip at the hospital in Minot and sent him home five days later with a walker, a bottle of pills he would not take, and a sheet of exercises he did twice a day like he was being graded on them.

Dad is 74. He has lived on that place his whole life.

My grandfather homesteaded the north quarter, and Dad bought the rest a piece at a time with money he did not have, over thirty years of payments and dry summers.