The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

I heard from a neighbor that Harlan had told the men at coffee that Becca Lund had herself a pet now, and wasn’t that about right. It stung. I won’t pretend it didn’t.

But I knew something Harlan had forgotten. A calf with a slow start is not necessarily a poor calf.

If you don’t ruin him trying to make up time, he can grow into exactly what he was bred to be.

Harlan’s way, and plenty of registered breeders’ way, is to push bull calves hard on corn and protein from weaning to sale day.

It makes them big and slick and fat under sale ring lights.

It doesn’t always hold up in a pasture.

A bull pushed that hard can come up sore footed and melt away his first breeding season. The ranchers who buy those bulls know it.

I decided to grow Pocket the way I grow my own replacement heifers.

Slow, on grass and good hay, with just enough grain to keep him growing steady. I wanted a bull that could walk.

That first summer, I turned him out behind the house on a little pasture of crested wheatgrass with two old cows for company.

He followed them around like a lost uncle.

Tatum walked out to see him every evening. She taught him to lead on a halter a little at a time.

She’d walk him a lap around the pen, scratch his poll, and turn him loose.

I worried she was making a pet of him. A pet bull grows up dangerous, because he doesn’t respect you.

But she handled him firmly and never let him push on her once.

“He has manners,” she told me, very serious, with the rope coiled in her hand. “He just doesn’t have a lot of people who expect him to use them.”

In July, I put up my hay. I cut and baled a hundred and forty acres of meadow off my own ground and my folks’ place, mostly grass with some alfalfa in the low spots.

I ran the swather and Tatum ran the rake.

My dad, who is seventy-four and should not be on a baler anymore, ran the baler anyway. It made about three hundred and ten round bales.

I set aside the best twenty, the green ones from the low meadow, and told Tatum they were Pocket’s.

She painted a big orange P on the end of the first bale so nobody would feed them by mistake.

The second winter is where Pocket started to turn into something. Some calves just grow and some calves fill in.

He did both at once, the way a boy does at fifteen.

By the first of December he weighed about seven hundred pounds. By the first of January, a little over eleven hundred.

He was not flashy, and he didn’t carry the fat Harlan’s bulls carried.

But he was long and deep, with a big rib and a smooth shoulder, and he walked out like a cat.

I fed him that good hay every morning and five or six pounds of rolled barley and oats.

I watched his feet. I watched his stool.