The Sledding Hill We Built on Our Pasture

Bodie watched them too. He was sitting at the kitchen table with his chin on his arms, and he did not say anything for a long time. His blue sled was leaning against the wall by the door.

“It’s my fault,” he said finally. “Everybody can’t sled now because of me.”

I sat down across from him. I wanted to say something wise, and nothing came, so I just told him the truth the way I understood it, which was not much.

I told him the post was an accident, and accidents happen, and we did the right thing by telling Mr.

Kask and saying sorry. I told him what Mr. Kask did after that was his own choice and not Bodie’s fault.

“But why did he do it?” Bodie asked.

“I don’t know, bud,” I said. “Sometimes grown ups are hurting about something else, and a little thing tips them over. I don’t know what it is with Mr. Kask. But it’s not you.”

He thought about that. Then he said, “Can we make a new hill?”

I laughed, because he said it like you would say, can we make a new sandwich.

Then I looked out the kitchen window, past the calving barn, at the long white rise of our own pasture.

We run about ninety head of cow calf pairs on a half section a mile east of town.

It is mostly flat, like everything else up here, but there is one place behind the calving barn where the ground rises and then falls away toward the creek.

It is not as steep as Orvin’s hill. It is longer, though.

From the top, where we keep the round bales in winter, to the bottom by the creek willows, it runs a good two hundred yards with a fair drop the whole way.

Nobody had ever sledded it. It was pasture, and in summer the pairs grazed it and in winter it just sat under the snow.

I had walked up it a hundred times checking heifers and never once thought of it as anything but ground.

I put my boots on and walked up there with Bodie. The snow was deep, almost to his waist in the low spots, and crusted on top from the wind.

You could not have sledded it as it was. You would have sunk to the handles.

That night at supper I told Kurt what Bodie had said. Kurt looked at me over his coffee for a while, and then he got up and went to the window and looked out at the dark where the rise was.

“Skid steer,” he said. “And the old bedspring out behind the shop. If I pack it down a few times with the bucket and drag the spring behind to smooth it, it might set up.”

“Could you do it by Saturday?” I asked.

He looked at Bodie, who was holding very still at the end of the table, the way kids do when they want something so much they are afraid to move.

“I can try,” Kurt said.

Kurt started the next morning as soon as he finished feeding. He has an older skid steer, the one he uses to scrape the lots and move bales, and it starts fine in the cold if you plug it in overnight.

First he moved the cows. The pairs were wintering in the south pasture by the bale feeders, but a few heifers had been drifting up toward the rise, and he did not want anybody’s kid meeting a heifer at the bottom of a run.