The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

The old man at the tank

It is about 190 miles from our place to Gillette, and it took us a little under four hours with the empty trailer rattling behind us in the wind.

We pulled into the sale barn yard on the east edge of town at twenty after three, with the sun already getting low.

I have hauled cattle into that yard a dozen times for sales. On a sale day it is all trucks and dust and men leaning on the fences.

On a Sunday afternoon in November it was quiet, just the wind whistling through the pipe fences and a few head of somebody’s cows in a front pen.

Our heifers were in the back, in two big pens along the far alley. I could see them before I had the truck stopped.

They were bunched up against the wind, black backs all turned the same way, and they were eating.

There was hay in the bunk. Good hay, too, bright green grass hay, forked in fresh and spread out so the bossy ones could not hog it all.

And there was an old man standing in the water tank pen with an axe, chopping the ice out of the tank.

He was a lean, bent old fellow in a blanket-lined denim coat and a cap with ear flaps.

He was taking his time, swinging the axe and then stopping to breathe and then swinging again, and the ice was coming out in sheets and he was pushing them over the side with his boot.

I climbed out and walked over. Sigrid came around the front of the pickup and caught up with me.

The old man looked up at us and leaned the axe against the tank and wiped his nose on the back of his glove.

“You’d be the Brandvolds,” he said. “I figured somebody would come for these girls. I’m Merle Dahlquist. I work the yard on sale days, and I keep my two horses out back, so I’m here most every day whether they pay me or not.”

I shook his hand. It was cold and hard as a fence post. “Leif,” I said.

“This is my wife, Sigrid. Those are our heifers. I am sorry you got stuck with them. Nobody was supposed to leave them here.”

“I gathered that,” Merle said. He nodded toward the back pens. “The pot came in about half past nine this morning. Fellow backed up to the chute and dumped them off and was gone again in fifteen minutes. Didn’t come to the office, didn’t call ahead, didn’t ask anybody anything.”

“There’s no feed contract on them,” I said. “Nobody arranged anything. Whose hay is that?”

Merle looked at the bunk like he had not thought about it. “Mine,” he said.

“Off my stack, out back there. They came off that trailer bawling and looking for breakfast. Bred heifers. I wasn’t going to make them stand there and wait on paperwork.”