The Steers She Sorted Into His Pen

The scale

Lyle came down off the catwalk and switched the readout back on. He wrote a line across his scale book under the last mark he had made, and he said, to nobody in particular, “Thirty-eight head, orange tags, sorted back south. All right. Let’s weigh some cattle.”

We weighed my steers in drafts of ten, five drafts, the last one seven. Kenna ran the scale gate for me.

Each draft walked onto the platform, settled, and Lyle read the number and wrote it down. They averaged five hundred and eighty-one pounds before the shrink.

My forty-seven steers weighed out at twenty-seven thousand three hundred and seven pounds. Less two percent, at three seventy-two.

Lyle did the arithmetic in the book, checked it twice, and turned the page around so I could see it.

With the heifers, it came to a little over a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.

That is a big number to write down. It is not a big number to live on. By the time the note was paid and the lease and the vet and the fuel, I would have enough to winter my cows and pay my taxes and maybe fix that well house roof. That is what a calf check is.

Then they weighed Royce’s steers. Forty-one head, yellow tags. The pen that had been crowded to the boards an hour earlier looked half empty.

I did not watch the scale while his drafts went through. I went and loosened Biscuit’s cinch and gave her a drink at the tank.

The inspector

The pots had sat backed against the chute with their gates shut, because nothing leaves a Montana corral without a brand inspection. The brand inspector pulled in at about a quarter past eleven, dusty and apologetic, a heavyset man with a clipboard who has inspected cattle in Wheatland County for longer than I have been married.

He looked at the pots, looked at the scale book, and then looked at Lyle.

Lyle walked him through it. Both owners, same brand on every calf, ear tags to separate them. He showed him the marks in his scale book, thirty-eight lines with tag numbers beside each one.

I handed the inspector my little green calving book, and he paged through it, matching numbers.

He took his time. Then he went up and stood on the catwalk and looked down into my steer pen, the orange tags showing on every ear, and he came back down and wrote out his paperwork with my name on my calves.

He did not make any speech about it. He tore off my copy and handed it to me.

Royce had come over by then. He stood behind the inspector while he wrote, and when the inspector was done, Royce reached over and signed where he needed to sign, agreeing to the count.

He did not argue one number. He signed it, and he capped the pen, and he handed it back.