The Joke Calf That Topped the Sale

I watched how he moved through the snow out to the water tank, every morning, the way you’d watch a child learning to ride a bike.

Tatum marked his hip height on the barn wall with a carpenter’s pencil and put her own height next to it as a joke.

By January, he was taller at the hip than the top of her head.

One February afternoon a neighbor stopped by to borrow a set of chains.

He stood at the fence and looked at Pocket a long time. He has run cows for fifty years and doesn’t waste compliments.

“That the joke calf?” he asked. I said it was. He spat in the snow and shook his head slowly. “Well,” he said. “Somebody’s going to be embarrassed.”

I had always planned to sell him, and Tatum knew it from the very first night.

We raise cattle to sell them. A bull on a cow outfit our size is never a pet.

The question was where. I could have sold him private, or hauled him to the sale barn in Belle Fourche, where he’d bring a commercial bull price and go out the back door.

But Pocket was a registered Angus bull, by one of Harlan’s herd sires and out of one of his good cows.

His breeding was as good as any bull Harlan was going to sell.

The only difference was how he’d been raised. And there’s only one place in our county where the serious bull buyers all sit in one room on one afternoon.

That’s the Voss Angus production sale, the second Saturday in March. Harlan has always kept an open consignment section at the end, a handful of registered bulls from other breeders.

It was his way of being a good neighbor and collecting a commission at the same time. Any registered bull that passed a breeding exam could be entered.

I asked Tatum first. It was her bull. I told her plainly that Harlan might use it to embarrass us both, in front of three hundred people.

She thought about it longer than I expected. Then she said, “He doesn’t get to decide what Pocket is worth. They do.” She pointed west, toward the whole county. “The people with the money.”

In mid February, our vet came out and gave Pocket his breeding soundness exam.

He checked his feet, eyes and legs, measured him, and looked at a semen sample under the microscope in his truck.

Pocket measured thirty-seven centimeters, which is very good for a bull just past fifteen months old. His semen came back excellent. The vet pulled his glasses down his nose.

“Becca,” he said, “where did you get this bull?” I told him Harlan had given him to my daughter as a joke. He laughed a long time, then stopped and looked at Pocket again and said, “Huh.”

That afternoon I hauled him to the elevator scale in town. Twelve hundred and forty pounds, standing in my trailer.

The scale man said it was the heaviest yearling he’d weighed all year.

That night I called Harlan. When I told him who it was, there was a short silence, and then he said, “Becca,” in the same voice he’d use for a hailstorm.