The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

“Mom, there’s orange in Dad’s pen.” Kenna said it from the top of the loading chute, not loud, the way you say a thing you hope you’re wrong about.

I was shoving the last draft of my heifers onto the scale and I did not look up right away.

I should have. My daughter is fifteen and she does not say things she has not checked twice.

She had her gray hoodie on, her hair blowing loose in the wind, and one boot hooked on the plank side of the chute, and she was pointing past me.

I latched the scale gate behind the heifers, climbed two boards up the fence, and looked where she was looking.

Royce’s steer pen was the big one on the north side, the pen with the water tank and the broken corner post we have been meaning to fix for six years.

It was full of black backs. That part was right. It was shipping day, and his steers were supposed to be in there.

But along the near side of the pen, where the calves were crowded up against the boards, I could see the tags. Yellow, yellow, yellow, orange. Orange. Orange, orange, yellow.

My tags are orange. Royce’s are yellow. That was the whole system. That was how two people who could no longer sit at the same supper table were still running cattle on the same grass until the lease ran out in the spring.

At the swinging sort gate, halfway down the alley, Shawna stood with her white sorting stick held across her body like a rifle.

Short brown hair, navy fleece zipped to her chin. She swung the gate north for a calf, and the calf went north, and it had an orange tag in its left ear.

She did not look at me. She looked at the next calf coming down the alley and swung the gate again.

The way it was supposed to work

I will tell you how we got there, because people who have never run cattle with somebody they used to be married to always ask the same question. Why were we still on the same place at all?

Royce and I were married nineteen years. We ran a cow-calf outfit on a little deeded ground east of Harlowton and a summer grass lease north of town, a long hilly piece that belongs to an old family who has leased it to Kimbroughs since before either of us was born.

When the divorce came, the judge split the cows down the middle by count. Ninety-six head apiece. But you do not split a summer lease in the middle of a grazing year.

The landowner’s lease runs to the first of April, and it was written in both our names, so we ran the cattle together until then.

The brand was the other trouble. Our brand, a Rafter K, had been in both our names since the year we married.

The decree gave it to Royce. I applied for my own brand with the Department of Livestock in February, and it came through in July.

By then the spring calves had already been branded with the Rafter K. Every one of them.

So the ear tags were all we had. In March and April, I calved my ninety-six cows in the lot by the house and Royce calved his at his new place across the creek.

Every calf of mine got an orange tag. Every calf of his got yellow.

I punched those tags myself. I want that understood. I knelt in wet straw and spring snow with the tag pliers in one hand and the calf’s head under my knee, and I wrote the number on each tag with a black marker and wrote the same number in the little green calving book I keep in my shirt pocket.

Ninety-one live calves out of ninety-six cows. Forty-seven steers and forty-four heifers. I kept ten heifers back for replacements, so I was shipping forty-seven steers and thirty-four heifers that morning.

I knew those numbers the way I know my own phone number.