The Cows That Still Knew Her Horn

And Granny lifted her head.

She swung it toward the sound, slow, the way an old cow does when she is not sure.

Then she let out a long low bawl, the one she always gave when the truck came over the hill.

She started walking.

She had to shoulder her way out of the pile. The cows around her bawled and gave ground, and then she was clear, walking straight toward my window at a slow, heavy walk.

“Shake it, Gus,” I said, not loud. “Just a little. Just a few at a time.”

He shook a handful of cubes off the side of the flatbed. They vanished in the snow, but Granny could smell them. She dropped her nose, found one, and kept coming.

I let the truck roll east along the fence in low range, the slowest that old engine would go, and tapped the horn again.

Behind Granny, a second cow pulled out of the pile, and then a third.

In the side mirror it went like a zipper coming undone. One cow after another peeled away from the fence and fell in nose to tail, until a black line was stringing out behind my truck.

Gus said something I couldn’t hear. I looked back through the cab window, and he was laughing and crying at once, his face red, snow in his eyelashes, shaking cake into the line.

“Mom,” he said, louder. “Mom, they know you.”

I couldn’t say anything back to that. I just nodded and kept my eyes on the fence line and kept my two fingers near the horn.

That first mile took about forty minutes. Every hundred yards I tapped the horn and called, and every few yards Gus shook out a few cubes.

Granny walked right behind the tailgate the whole way, frost on her back, looking at nothing but the truck.

At the corner, snow had drifted against the gate. Curtis came up on foot and kicked the drift away and swung it open. He didn’t look at me.

I pulled onto the county road and the cows came after me, one at a time, through the gap. The line was so long by then I could not see the end of it.

On the road, the wind came straight from the left. This was the hard part.

A cow walking crosswind wants to turn her tail to it and drift into the bar ditch, and once one does it, the next one follows.

“Keep shaking, bud,” I said. “Steady. Don’t stop.”

His gloves were wet through and the cubes were wet, but he never stopped.

Every few seconds another handful went off the right side, onto the road, where the cows would find it if they kept to the road.

Halfway down that mile, where the creek runs under the road through a culvert, a young cow balked.

She was a two-year-old Curtis must have kept back last fall. She stopped dead and turned her tail to the wind, and the cow behind her stopped too.