The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

Lyle and the price

Lyle Pettibone had bought our calves for twenty-two years. He is sixty-six, a tall, slow-talking order buyer out of Billings with a hat older than my daughter and a spiral scale book he writes in with a carpenter’s pencil.

In August, sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, he had priced my calves for October delivery. Steers at three seventy-two a pound, heifers at three thirty-eight, weighed on the corral scale, two percent pencil shrink.

That meant he took two pounds off every hundred to account for what a calf would have drunk and eaten that morning.

He priced Royce the same day, same numbers. Then he said what he says every year. “I write a check to whoever owns the calf on the scale. You two sort them, I’ll weigh them, and nobody has to like each other to get paid.”

That was fair. Lyle has always been fair. The trucks were coming at seven thirty, three cattle pots from the trucking outfit in Big Timber, and the calves were going to a feedyard in Nebraska.

Once a calf goes up that chute and the pot door closes, that calf is a line on a scale ticket and nothing more.

My forty-seven steers at about five hundred and eighty pounds came to right about a hundred thousand dollars before the heifers.

Thirty-eight of them, the number I counted later, came to about eighty thousand. That was most of my operating note at the bank in Harlowton.

That note was due in December. It had paid for my hay, my mineral, my vaccine, and the diesel in my pickup since last fall.

Kenna’s school clothes came out of it. The new well pump came out of it. Eighty thousand dollars is not rich people money on a ranch. It is the whole year.