Thirty Cows Across the Slough

Mom on the Hill

Mom’s house sits up on a rise at the edge of the bottoms, with a gravel road behind it that climbs around the far side of Grandpa’s hill. She’d already been out to the cows once at daylight and come back up soaked to the waist.

“I’m going to swim them across the slough to Grandpa’s,” I told her. “The girls are with me.”

She didn’t argue. She is not a woman who argues about cattle with someone who knows what they’re doing.

She said, “Don’t you let those girls go in deeper than the horses can stand. Not without you right there.”

“I won’t.”

“And Rae.” Her voice caught for just a second. “Biscuit’s slow now. She’ll be last. Don’t you leave her.”

“I won’t leave her, Mom.”

“I’ll drive around and open the top gate,” she said. “And I’ll call Abel.”

Abel and Florine

Abel and Florine are the neighbors on the hill side. Abel is eighty and still checks his own fence. Florine makes the best bars at every funeral in the county and never brings the recipe.

Their place runs along the top of Grandpa’s hill, and there were two wire gates between the hill pasture and the road where Mom could get her truck in.

Mom called them. I heard later that Abel was out the door before Florine had hung up, in his rubber boots and his seed cap, with his fencing pliers in his coat pocket.

Florine came behind him in their car with an armload of old bath towels and a thermos.

None of that was asked for. It just happened, the way it happens out here when the phone rings early and somebody’s voice sounds wrong.

Into the Water

We rode down the lane into Mom’s bottom pasture. By then the water in the lane was up to the horses’ knees.

The cows heard us coming and started bawling louder. They knew those horses. They knew my voice and the girls’ voices. You could see them shift and turn their heads toward us, all thirty, crowded in that corner with the water around them.

I counted them twice. Thirty. Every one.

“Here’s how we do it,” I said. “We don’t push them all at once. We cut off ten at a time. Kenzie, you lead. You swim the gray across first and they’ll follow a horse. Brooke and I push from behind.”

“What if they turn back?” Brooke asked.

“Then we turn them again,” I said. “As many times as it takes.”

The slough was about a hundred yards across at the narrow place where the old ford used to be. The near bank was a gentle slope. The far bank, on Grandpa’s side, was a cut bank about four feet high in most places, but at the old ford there was a sloping spot where cattle had walked down to drink for a hundred years.

That was where we aimed.

I said a prayer then. Not a long one. Just the one my grandmother used to say over the dishpan when things were bad. Lord, you know what we need. That was all.

Then I said, “Okay, Kenz.”