The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

About Rusty

Rusty is my uncle’s boy. He is three years younger than me, and when we were kids he followed me everywhere, to the creek, to the hay field, to the sale barn with our dads.

I taught him to rope. He was the best man at my wedding.

My uncle hauled cattle his whole life with a straight truck, and when he passed four years ago Rusty took what he left and bought a used semi and a cattle pot.

It was about $180,000 between the two, and every penny of it borrowed.

I had been proud of him for doing it. Hauling cattle is hard, lonely work, and he was good at it, careful with stock and on time.

I had sent him business. I had told other ranchers in our end of the county to call him.

What kept me awake was that I had trusted him with the best thing we had, and he had set it down in a strange pen in a strange town like a sack of feed he did not need anymore.

Sigrid was awake too. Around two o’clock she said, into the dark, “He’s in some kind of trouble, Leif. A man doesn’t do that unless he’s in trouble.”

“Maybe so,” I said. “He could have told me.”

“Yes,” she said. “He could have.” And after that neither of us said anything else, and I suppose we both slept a little.

The first load

We were at the yard Monday at a quarter to seven, with the sky just going gray in the east.

Merle was already there, standing by his horse pen with a coffee can of oats. He had fed the heifers. Of course he had.

He helped us load without being asked. He took a sorting stick and walked into the back pen and eased fifteen heifers out of the bunch and up the alley toward the chute, talking to them low the whole time, the way the good old hands do.

Sigrid stood at the trailer gate with the tally book and counted them on. “Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

Cattle do not leave Wyoming without a brand inspector’s signature. Merle had called the man at home Sunday night, and he met us at the chute at seven, looked over the brands and the ear tags, and wrote one certificate for all 58 head, good for the week. I folded it into my shirt pocket.

Then I swung the gate shut and dropped the latch and pinned it, and we were moving by seven-thirty.

Highway 59 runs north out of Gillette through a lot of empty country.

There had been a storm the week before, and the snow was still lying in the bar ditches and in the low places, crusted hard and blown into drifts along the fence lines.

The wind came out of the northwest, steady at thirty and gusting harder, and I could feel it lean on that trailer every time we topped a rise.

We crossed into Montana a little before nine. There is not much at the line, just the sign and a cattle guard and more grass.

Then it was another long hour to Broadus, and then north from Broadus up the river road to the lease.

The family that owned the lease had the corral gate open for us.

I backed the trailer up to the corral, and Sigrid climbed out with her tally book, and I swung the back gate open and stood aside.

The heifers came off one at a time, a little stiff, blinking in the sun. They stood in the corral a minute with their heads up, smelling the new country.

Then the first one put her nose down and found the grass, and the rest followed.

Sigrid counted them off. “Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.” She wrote it in the book and drew a line under it. Then she looked at me and said, “Fifteen down, Leif.”