Thirty Cows Across the Slough

The First Ten

Kenzie rode the gray right down the slope into the slough like she was riding into a stock tank on a hot day.

The water came up his legs, up his chest, and then all at once he was swimming. I watched his head stretch out and his ears point forward. Kenzie leaned up over his neck, a hand full of mane, reins loose, exactly the way her grandpa taught her.

I swung my mare in behind the bunch and cut out ten head, and Brooke came around the other side, and we pushed.

The lead cow balked at the edge. They always do. She put her nose down to the water and blew at it and swung her head back toward us.

“Hup!” I said. “Hup, girls. Go on.”

Brooke slapped her rope on her chaps. The cow behind the leader shoved. And the lead cow stepped in, and slid, and went under to her ears and came up swimming.

Then they all went. Ten black heads in the brown water, noses up, eyes white, swimming after Kenzie’s gray horse.

I rode in behind them.

I want to tell you what it’s like, because people who haven’t done it don’t know. The water is cold, even in April. It comes up over your boots and then your knees, and then your horse drops out from under you, and you are floating, and the only thing holding you up is a thousand pounds of animal working for both of you.

You don’t pull on the reins. You don’t fight. You hold on, and you look at the far bank, and you let the horse do it.

The current took us downstream maybe forty feet before we got across. I could feel it pulling at my legs. One cow got swept wide and Kenzie turned the gray back for her, swimming sideways, and got her pointed right again.

And then the gray’s feet hit bottom on the far side and he came lunging up that old ford, water pouring off him, and the cows came up behind him one after another, and stood on Grandpa’s grass, shaking themselves like dogs.

Kenzie turned around in the saddle and looked at me. Her face was soaked and white and grinning.

“Ten,” she said.

The Levee

It was when I turned my mare around to go back that I saw Curt’s truck.

There’s an old levee that runs along the far edge of the bottoms, between the river and the county road. It’s high and gravel-topped, and the county keeps it open for exactly this kind of morning.

Curt’s pickup was parked on top of it. Not the semi. His pickup. He must have dropped his second load at the sale barn and driven back out the long way, around by the bridge.

He was just sitting there, with the engine running and the wipers going, watching us.

I didn’t wave. I didn’t do anything. I turned my mare toward the slough and swam back across for the next ten.