The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

The gray mare

Biscuit was tied at the trailer with her saddle still on. I untied her, checked my cinch, and swung up.

My hands were shaking a little. I put them flat on her neck for a second and felt her warm under my palms, and I said the only prayer I had time for, which was just, help me do this right.

I rode down the outside of the alley to the gate of Royce’s steer pen. Inside were eighty calves, more or less, and somewhere in all those black hides were my thirty-eight.

I had my calving book in my shirt pocket and my eyes and a good horse, and that was all I needed.

Then I heard hooves on the hard dirt behind me. Merle, who ranches the place south of the lease and has known me since I was a girl, came trotting up on his sorrel gelding.

He is seventy-three. He did not ask what was going on. He had seen it from the road.

“I’ll take the pen gate,” he said, and swung down and opened it a horse’s width.

A minute after that, Ardith came in from the other side on her bay. She is Merle’s neighbor to the west, sixty-eight years old, a widow who still calves out a hundred and twenty head by herself.

She rode to the gate of my steer pen at the end of the alley and held it open from the saddle without a word.

Two neighbors. Neither of them said one thing about Shawna or about Royce. They just held the gates.

One at a time

There is a way to cut a calf out of a bunch on horseback, and it is slow, and it does not look like much from the road.

You ride in easy. You let the calves drift away from the horse and string out along the fence.

You pick one, and you put your horse between that one and the others.

Biscuit knows the work better than I do. When I leaned toward a calf, she leaned with me.

When the calf tried to duck back into the bunch, she stepped across in front of it before I asked her to.

The first one was right at the front, a big, stout steer with an orange tag reading 14.

I knew 14. He was out of an old black-baldy cow I called the Duchess, born the second week of March in a snowstorm, and I had carried him to the barn across my saddle.

I eased Biscuit in behind him, turned him toward the gate, and Merle swung it just wide enough.

The steer trotted out into the alley. I followed him up toward the sort gate, past Shawna, past where Lyle stood on the catwalk, and Ardith swung my pen gate and he went in.

“One,” Kenna said, from the top of the chute.

I had not asked her to count. She just did it. She was sitting on the plank side of the loading chute with her hair blowing loose, and she said it loud enough that everybody in the corral heard it.

I rode back down the alley. The second one was in the middle of the bunch, tag 31. Biscuit worked him to the fence, I turned him out, and he went up the alley. “Two,” Kenna said.