The Heifers an Old Man Fed for Free

The truckers

The yard was busier on Monday and Tuesday. A sale barn is never really empty on a weekday.

And every one of them asked about the heifers. It is not normal to see somebody’s bred heifers sitting in the back pens on a non-sale week, eating somebody else’s hay. Cattlemen notice a thing like that.

Merle told them. He did not tell them in a mean way, and he did not make a speech about it.

When a man asked him whose heifers those were, Merle just told him what had happened, plain as reading a sale bill.

“Fellow named Rusty Brandvold hauled them halfway for his cousin,” Merle would say.

“Got a better-paying load and dropped them off here Sunday morning without a word to anybody. Cousin’s hauling them the rest of the way himself, with a gooseneck, fifteen at a time.”

And the man would look at the heifers, and then look at my little silver trailer, and then look at Merle’s stack with the two bales gone out of the end of it.

He would not say much. Cattlemen mostly don’t. But you could see him putting it away.

One of them was a hauler out of Gillette named Thane, who runs a pot of his own.

He was in on Tuesday morning when we got back, and he came over to where I was standing at the chute and shook my hand.

“I’d haul the rest of them for you,” Thane said, “but I’ve got calves going to a sale Wednesday and Thursday both, and I’m booked through the weekend. I’m sorry. If you were still waiting next week, I’d make room.”

“I appreciate that,” I said. “By next week I’ll be done.”

He nodded. He looked over at the back pen where Merle was easing the next fourteen up the alley.

Bev, who runs the office at the sale barn, came out that same morning with a paper cup of coffee for each of us.

“I’m not charging you yardage,” Bev said. “Merle asked me not to, and I wasn’t going to anyhow. The manager agrees. He called me back last night.”

She handed Sigrid her coffee and squeezed her arm, and then went back inside out of the wind.

The snow

Tuesday was the hard one. The wind came up harder in the night, and by the time we loaded the third bunch it was blowing the old snow off the fields and across the highway in long white snakes, so you could not always see the center line.

The radio said ground blizzard north of Gillette, travel not advised for light high-profile vehicles.

A stock trailer is about as high-profile as it gets, and with only fourteen head in it you do not have much weight to hold you down.

I asked Sigrid if she wanted to stay at the motel. She looked at me like I had asked her if she wanted to stop being married to me, and climbed into the pickup and fastened her seat belt.

We drove the whole way at forty miles an hour. Twice I pulled over and stopped on the shoulder while a gust went through, and the trailer rocked on its springs and the heifers shifted and bawled.

Sigrid kept a hand on the dash both times and said nothing.

Once, about ten miles north of the state line, she said, very quietly, “Lord, keep us on this road.”

That was all. I said amen. I don’t think either of us thought about it much. It is just what you say.

It took us almost five hours to get to the lease. When we got there, the wind had dropped some in the river bottom, and the corral was sheltered by a line of old cottonwoods, and the heifers came off the trailer into calmer air and went straight for the grass.

Sigrid counted them. “Forty-two. Forty-three. Forty-four.” She drew another line in the book. “Fourteen to go, Leif. One more.”

We got back to Gillette at dark that night, and the yard was empty except for Merle’s pickup by the stack.

He was out in the pen with a flashlight, chopping the ice out of the tank again, because the wind had been blowing all day and it had skimmed over.

“Go to bed,” he said when I came over. “I’ve got it.”

“Merle,” I said.

“Go to bed, son,” he said, and I did.