Thirty Cows Across the Slough

The Second Ten

The second bunch was harder. These were the younger cows, and they’d been standing in the water long enough to be scared of it.

Twice they turned back on us at the edge and scattered through the shallows, and twice Brooke and I rode around them in water up to our stirrups and brought them back.

Brooke’s little bay was shorter than our horses, and when the water got to his chest he started to hop instead of walk. I saw her face go tight.

“Brooke,” I said. “You stay on this side and hold the ones that turn back. You don’t swim him unless I’m right next to you. You hear?”

“I hear,” she said. She didn’t argue. She knew her horse.

So Kenzie led again, and I pushed, and Brooke held the line on the near bank so nothing doubled back past her. She did it like a grown woman. She did it so well I almost cried right there in the saddle.

The second ten went across. One of them, a young cow Mom called Dot, lost her footing at the far bank and slid back into the water twice before she found the old ford. On the third try, Kenzie got off the gray, stood up to her waist in the water, and caught Dot by the ear tag and hauled her head around toward the slope.

I yelled at her to get back on her horse. She did. Dot walked out.

Twenty.

When I looked up at the levee again, Curt’s truck was still there. But now his door was open, and he was standing beside it in the rain.

Abel at the Gate

At the top of Grandpa’s hill, I could see a seed cap and a pair of rubber boots moving along the fence line.

It was Abel. He was walking the wire, checking for breaks, because if one cow found a hole in that fence the whole bunch would follow her back down toward the water. He was eighty years old, in the rain, with his pliers out, splicing a broken wire nobody had asked him to look at.

Then I saw him swing the top gate open wide and wave his arm, and I knew Mom had made it around.

Her pickup came through that gate and stopped on the crown of the hill, and she got out and stood there in her barn coat with her hands in her pockets, looking down at us.

She didn’t wave either. She just stood there. But I knew she was counting.