The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

The middle of it

After the first ten or so, it got harder. The calves that were easy to reach were gone, and the orange-tagged ones left were mixed back in the middle of the pen, turning their heads so I could not read the tags.

A calf will hide behind another calf the way a child hides behind his mother’s skirt.

I would ride in, let the bunch drift, and read ear after ear. Yellow. Yellow. Yellow, orange. Then I would have to wait for the orange one to come to the edge on its own.

You cannot rush it. You push a bunch of calves too hard and they pile into a corner, and somebody gets hurt.

Once, I cut a steer out and was halfway to the gate before I saw his tag was yellow and just dirty, caked with mud from the water tank.

I turned Biscuit and let him go back into the bunch. “That one’s Dad’s,” Kenna called down, and I said, “I know it, honey,” and a couple of the truck drivers laughed, not mean.

Lyle never moved from the catwalk. Every time a calf went past under him, he looked at the tag and made a mark in his scale book with his carpenter’s pencil.

I could hear the pencil on the paper over the bawling, or I thought I could.

Shawna stood at the sort gate. She had to swing it south for every calf I sent up the alley, because Lyle had told her to hold the gate, and the gate had to go one way or the other.

So for every one of my calves, she put her hand on that gate and swung it open toward my pen.

I did not say a word to her. I did not look at her more than I had to, to make sure she had the gate open.

I was not there to make her suffer. I was there to get my calves.

The ones that took longest

Somewhere around twenty-five, I had one I could not get. Tag 84, a short, thick little steer, a late calf, born near the end of April, and he was smarter than most of the men in that corral.

Every time I got close, he slipped between two bigger calves along the far fence.

I tried three times. On the fourth time, one of Royce’s hands, the taller one, stepped quietly into the pen on foot with his sorting stick.

He did not say anything. He just stood where the calf would want to duck, and when the calf turned, there was a man there, and it turned back toward me.

I nodded to him. He nodded back. That young man worked for Royce, and he did not have to do that.

I have thought about it since. Sometimes the smallest thing a person does in a corral tells you more about him than anything he says in church.

Tag 84 went up the alley, and Kenna said, “Twenty-six.”

By then it was getting on toward nine thirty. The sun was full on the corrals and the frost was gone.

The calves had quit bawling so loud. The cows in the back trap had settled some. It had gotten very quiet for a shipping corral, and every number Kenna said seemed to carry a long way.

“Thirty,” she said. “Thirty-one.”

Royce had not moved from the rail. He was watching every calf, and I could see his jaw working.

His own crew was watching his wife’s sort get unwound, one calf at a time, and he had to stand there in front of them and let it happen.