The Yearling Bull at His Gate

The first week of November

We run fall-calving cows, which means our calves come in September and we breed in November, December and into January. It is a little backwards from most folks around here, but it spreads out the work for a teacher who has summers free.

That fall I had done something new. I had taken my ag class out for a timed artificial insemination demonstration on our own cows over Halloween weekend. A neighbor who does AI for half the county walked the kids through it, and we bred all thirty that way.

So that November, Biscuit was only our cleanup bull. He would go in with the cows around the middle of the month and catch anything the AI missed. Until then he was in the pen by the barn, eating hay and bawling at the cows over the fence.

On the first Thursday of November, Clay came home from the dealer and stood in the kitchen doorway with his coat still on.

“Dad’s bull is down,” he said.

I set the dish towel on the counter.

“He was chasing a heifer along the creek Tuesday and stepped in a washout,” Clay said. “Snapped the right hind leg clean. Dad had the vet out, but there’s no fixing a leg like that on a bull that size. They put him down yesterday morning.”

“In the middle of breeding.”

“First week of it. He turned him in with the cows on the first.”

Sixty cows. That was what Werner ran now. Sixty fall-calving black cows on the home place and the quarter he rented across the road. And no bull.

I knew what that meant better than anybody in that house. Every cow that did not settle that season was a cow eating a year of hay with no calf to show for it. At the prices that fall, a missed calf was well over a thousand dollars, times however many he could not get bred.

“Is he finding another one?” I asked.

Clay shook his head. “He’s been on the phone two days. The bull sales are done this time of year. Anybody with a decent bull is using him. One fella in Kansas has a two-year-old, but he wants eleven thousand and Dad would have to go get him.”

“Is he going?”

“He hasn’t said.”

“Did he call you?”

Clay looked at me a long time. “No,” he said. “I heard it from Vance at the parts counter. His brother does Dad’s vet work.”

I went to the window. Out in the pen by the barn, Biscuit was standing with his nose over the top board, looking out at our cows on the hill.

He was two now. He had grown into his shoulders. A two-year-old bull in good shape can cover a good many more cows than a yearling, maybe twenty-five or thirty, and if a man is careful and checks him, he can be pushed for a few weeks.

Sixty was a lot. It was too many for one bull for a whole season. But it was not too many for the first three weeks, while Werner found a second bull for the rest. And three weeks was exactly how long ours could wait.

“Clay,” I said.

He already knew. He had married me.