Thirty Cows Across the Slough

The Last Ten

There were ten cows left in the corner, and the water had come up another foot since we started. It was nearly to their backs now. A couple of them were standing with their heads high, bawling at the sky.

And in the back of the bunch, holding still the way old cows do when they’re tired, was Biscuit.

“She’s going to be last,” Brooke said. “Grandma said.”

“I know.”

We pushed the last ten to the edge. They went in better than the second bunch. Maybe they’d seen the others go. Maybe they were just tired of standing in the cold. Nine black heads went out into the slough behind Kenzie’s gray, and the current took them wide, and they swam.

Biscuit stood on the edge and didn’t move.

She just stood there, with water around her belly, and looked across the slough. Her ears were down. Her legs were shaking. She was fourteen years old and heavy with a calf, and she had been standing in cold water since four in the morning.

I rode up beside her and put my hand on her neck.

“Come on, old girl,” I said. “Come on, Biscuit. Mom’s waiting.”

She didn’t move.

And then from the top of the hill, over the rain and the river and all of it, I heard Mom’s voice.

“Biscuit!” she called. “Biscuit, come on, girl! Come on!”

Mom has a voice that carries. She called the boys in from the field for thirty years with it. And I watched that old cow lift her head and find her.

Biscuit’s ears came up. She took one step, and another, and then she walked into that slough like she’d been waiting for permission. She went under and came up swimming, and she swam straight for the sound of Mom’s voice.

I rode in right behind her. Brooke came in on my left with her little bay swimming hard, because I’d said she could swim him if I was right next to her, and I was.

The Bank

Biscuit was slow. The current pulled her wide, farther than any of the others, down past the old ford toward the cut bank. I swung my mare downstream of her to block the current and pushed with my knee against her shoulder, and she swam, and I talked to her the whole way.

“Good girl. Good girl. Almost there.”

We came in about twenty yards below the ford, where the bank was steeper and the mud was deep. Biscuit got her front feet on the bank and her back end sank in the soft mud, and she stopped.

She just stopped. She was done. She laid her head down on the grass at the top of the bank with her hindquarters still in the water, and she groaned.

I slid off my mare into the water up to my chest. Kenzie rode down and threw me a rope, and I got it around the old cow’s horns and behind her front legs, and Kenzie dallied it around her saddle horn.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. Just hold it. Don’t pull her yet.”

I put my shoulder under Biscuit’s hip. I pushed. The mud held her like concrete.

That’s when I heard the splash behind me.

Curt

I turned my head, and it was Curt.

He’d come down off the levee and around the far end of the slough on foot, through the cottonwoods, and he had a pair of chest waders on. He must have had them behind the seat of his pickup, the way every man out here does in April.

He didn’t say anything. He waded in next to me, up to his chest in that brown water, and put his own shoulder under Biscuit’s other hip.

“On three,” he said. “Kenzie, you back that gray up slow when I say.”

“Yes, sir,” Kenzie said.

“One,” Curt said. “Two. Three.”

And we pushed, and the gray backed up one step at a time, and that old cow came up out of the mud with a sound like a boot pulling out of a stock tank. She scrambled, slipped, caught herself, and walked up onto Grandpa’s grass.

Thirty.

Every single one.