The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

The stack

His stack was behind the barn, along the fence where he kept his horses.

It was small round bales, the kind that weigh about 800 pounds, maybe twenty of them stacked two high under a tarp weighted down with old tires.

I could see where he had pulled two bales out of the end of the stack and rolled them out with his little pickup and a hay spear, and then forked it into the bunks by hand. That is a lot of forking for a man of seventy-one.

“I’ll pay you for it,” I said. “Whatever you want for it. And the yardage, and your time. You should not have had to do any of this.”

Merle shook his head before I got to the end. “Put your wallet away,” he said.

“I don’t sell hay to heifers. That hay’s for my horses, and my horses have got plenty. These girls needed it worse.”

“Merle, that’s not right,” I said. “Hay’s $140 a ton this year. You’ve put two bales into my cattle and you’ll put more into them before I get them out of here.”

He picked the axe back up and went back to chopping the last of the ice.

“Then you’d best get them out of here,” he said, not unkindly, and that was the end of that conversation.

Sigrid had gone to the fence to look at the heifers. She is better at reading cattle than I am, and I trust her eye more than my own.

She stood on the bottom rail and looked them over one at a time.

“They’re all right,” she said when I came up beside her. “They’re a little shrunk, but they’re all right. I don’t see anybody limping. That one in the corner with the torn ear tag is still nervous, but she’s eating.”

I let out a breath I had been holding since the church steps.

Then I looked at the sun, which was sitting maybe a hand’s width above the hills to the west, and I knew we were not hauling anything that night.

Doing the arithmetic

A 24-foot gooseneck will take fourteen to eighteen head of cattle depending on their size.

With bred heifers the size of ours, carrying calves, I would not put more than fifteen on at a time. Fifteen, fifteen, fourteen and fourteen makes 58.

Four trips. Each one was 190 miles north from Gillette to the lease and 190 miles back empty, and with a loaded trailer on a two-lane highway in the wind you do not drive it fast.

Call it four hours each way, and an hour on each end for loading and unloading.

Sigrid had the tally book out of her coat pocket, the little spiral one she keeps for the herd, and she was writing the numbers down in pencil while I talked them out loud.

She has kept the books on our place since the day we bought it.

“That’s three days if nothing goes wrong,” she said. “And something will go wrong.”

“I know it,” I said.

“And diesel,” she said. “That truck does nine miles a gallon loaded if you are lucky. You’re looking at better than seven hundred dollars of fuel, on top of what we already paid him.”

“I know it,” I said again. And then, because she was waiting, I said, “I don’t know what else we do, Sig. They can’t stay here. Merle can’t feed them all week, and I won’t let him.”

She closed the tally book and put the pencil behind her ear. “I didn’t say we weren’t doing it,” she said.

“I said it’s going to cost. I like to know what a thing costs before I pay for it.”

Merle came over from the tank while we stood there. He leaned on the fence beside me and looked at the heifers too.

Three of us in a row on that fence, with the wind in our faces, looking at 58 black heifers like they were the last thing standing in the world.

“Pens are fine for the night,” Merle said. “Tank’s open. I’ll be back out at six to feed my horses, and I’ll throw them another bale while I’m at it. You two go get a room and get some sleep.”

I started to argue again and he held up one gloved hand. “Son,” he said, “I have been feeding cattle in this yard since before you could drive. Go get some sleep.”

So we did. We got a room at a motel by the interstate, the kind with the doors facing the parking lot, and I lay awake most of the night listening to the wind and thinking about my cousin.