Thirty Cows Across the Slough

What Was Left

I stood there with the rain coming down and I looked at the whole thing the way Dad Lindahl taught me to look at a problem. Not at what you wish you had. At what you have.

What we had was the slough.

Mom’s bottom pasture sat in a long hook of land between the river and an old side channel everybody called the slough. Most years it was a ditch with cattails. That morning it was a hundred yards of brown water, moving slow and wide.

On the far side of it was Grandpa’s hill.

That’s what the girls have always called it. It was Dad Lindahl’s father’s pasture first, forty acres of native grass that climbs up off the bottoms to a ridge of cottonwoods. It has never flooded. Not in 1993, not in 2019, not ever.

If those cows could get across the slough, they’d be on high ground in five minutes.

Cattle swim. People don’t always know that, but they do, and they swim better than you’d think. A cow will cross water if she has a leader and something pushing her and a bank she can see on the other side.

What she won’t do is go in by herself.

I called home. Kenzie answered. Kenzie is my oldest, seventeen, and she’d been on a horse since before she could walk.

“Saddle the gray and the sorrel,” I said. “And Brooke’s horse. Put them in the trailer. Bring your slickers. Tell Dad I’m fine.”

There was a pause. Then she said, “Are we swimming them?”

“We’re swimming them,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, like I’d asked her to bring milk home from town. And she hung up.

The Girls

They came in twenty minutes in our old pickup with the horse trailer behind, Kenzie driving, Brooke in the passenger seat with her slicker zipped to her chin.

Brooke is fourteen. She is the quiet one. She reads the whole way to school on my bus and only looks up to say goodbye to the little kids when they get off.

I almost told her to stay in the truck. I had my mouth open to say it.

She saw it on my face and said, “Mom. Grandma’s girls.”

That’s what we all called them. Grandma’s girls. Mom named about half of them. There was Pearl and Dot and Sadie, and there was Biscuit.

Biscuit was the oldest cow in the herd. Fourteen years old, which is old for a cow. Her mother died calving in a snowstorm, and Mom raised her on a bottle in the mudroom for three weeks, with a heat lamp and a towel on the floor.

Biscuit still came to Mom’s voice. You could stand at the fence and say her name, and that old cow would come walking across forty acres to put her nose in Mom’s hand.

I didn’t say anything to Brooke. I just nodded and handed her the reins.

We unloaded on the road above the pasture, where the shoulder was still dry. Kenzie took the gray, a big, steady gelding we’d had nine years. I took my sorrel mare. Brooke took her little bay.

I put Kenzie in a green slicker so I could see her in the rain. I wore my yellow one. Brooke had her orange hunting vest over her slicker, because I told her to.

Then I called Mom.