Part 2
The coyote kept coming, not at the cattle but toward the bright, noisy concentration of birds beside the water.
“Get them back,” Wade said.
Ellen was already moving. She gave the two-note call and walked toward the lane, but the flock’s attention had narrowed to the animal on the bank. The white-shouldered gander charged ahead of the others, wings spread, and struck the temporary net fence Ellen had used to guide the turnout. One foot tangled in the mesh. He fell, rose, and beat the grass with one wing.
The coyote broke into a trot.
Wade rode between it and the flock, shouting as he swung his hat. Ellen ran for the pickup parked at the gate. The horn and engine scattered the cattle before they turned the coyote; it veered along the pond, glanced back once, and disappeared into the grass beyond the rise.
The geese did not become quiet. Their calls followed Ellen as she crossed the torn lane to the trapped gander. He struck at her hands, terrified and powerful. Wade dismounted and knelt on the other side of the mesh, his bad leg held stiff.
“Towel over his head,” he said.
“There’s one in the truck.”
Wade looked at the distance, then stripped off his denim shirt and passed it to her. Ellen covered the bird’s head, folded the uninjured wing against its body, and felt along the other. No bone moved where it should not. The blood came from a shallow cut above the foot, bright against the white feathers.
They freed the mesh and carried the gander to the night pen. Only after the gate latched did Ellen notice Wade standing bare-armed in his undershirt, chest rising hard from the run. A purple mark had already appeared where his walking stick had struck his shin in the scramble.
“You need ice,” she said.
“That bird needs a veterinarian.”
“He needs the cut cleaned and a quiet pen. I’m calling Dr. Laird.”
“Good.” Wade picked his shirt from the grass. “Call her before you decide your mother already wrote the answer.”
Ellen turned on him. “You saw them warn the cattle.”
“I did.”
“The cows bunched before we moved.”
“I saw that too.”
His agreement stopped her harder than an argument would have.
Wade pushed one arm into his dusty sleeve. “The birds gave us warning. Then one ran at a coyote and nearly broke its leg in your fence. Those are two different facts.”
Dr. Laird arrived forty minutes later. The cut required three stitches, but the tendon was intact. She examined the temporary lane, the night pen, and the flock still pacing behind the wire.
“Coyotes will take geese,” she said. “Noise may make this place inconvenient, especially if people respond every time. But don’t turn the birds into a promise they can’t keep.”
Ellen heard Wade shift behind her. She did not look at him.
That night, after the gander settled in a straw-bedded stall, Ellen opened Mabel’s ledger at the kitchen table. The brass clasp left a green trace on her thumb. On a page dated August 1954, her mother had written: Gander line held at west wash. Dogs came when flock called. No loss.
Ellen had remembered the first sentence and misplaced the second. She wrote beneath it in blue ink: August 18, 2010. Alarm carried across water. Human response turned coyote. One gander injured in netting. Alarm is not defense.
The next morning, she called the extension office, then a wildlife specialist. She replaced the loose net with rigid panels, moved the birds’ night pen closer to the house, and began keeping a response log beside the back door. Luis agreed to take two evening checks each week. Ellen paid him for the added hours instead of treating his loyalty as spare labor. Wade came over with a roll of woven wire and a post driver in his truck.
“Clara says this is me asking,” he said. “Do you want help on the west run?”
Ellen almost said no. The refusal had risen so quickly it felt rehearsed.
“Yes,” she said. “But the posts go where I marked them.”
They worked until noon. Wade drove posts while Ellen set the line and Luis stretched wire. Nobody discussed the coyote. When Clara brought sandwiches, Wade took his beneath the cottonwood instead of carrying it into Ellen’s kitchen as he once would have done.
The white-shouldered gander limped for eight days. On the ninth, Ellen released him into the smaller paddock. He crossed to the flock without looking back and resumed his place near the water pan. The following week, when a stray dog came along the county road, the geese sounded and retreated toward the secure pen at Ellen’s call. She marked the response in the log but did not call it proof.
Autumn passed. The flock learned the route between meadow and night pen. The cows stopped lifting their heads at ordinary goose noise and responded only when the pitch changed. Ellen learned it too: complaint, quarrel, courtship, alarm. She could hear the difference through a closed window.
In March, during the first week of calving, the flock called at 2:17 a.m. Ellen reached the south lot in time to find a young cow circling away from a coyote beyond the hot wire while her newborn calf lay wet in the grass. The coyote fled when the truck lights swept the fence. The calf was cold but alive. Ellen carried it to shelter on the rubber floor mat from the pickup, the cow following close enough to fog the back of her coat. Wade saw the tire tracks the next morning and stopped at the gate.
“Luis told me,” he said. “The birds woke you.”
“Yes.”
“That’s worth something.”
“It is.”
He looked toward the white-shouldered gander standing on one leg in the sun. “Still doesn’t make them a fence.”
“I know.”
Wade’s surprise was small, but Ellen saw it. She waited for him to say that he had been right. Instead, he turned his hat in his hands.
“Tom asked me to watch this place,” he said. “Near the end. He didn’t want you carrying it alone.”
The old anger returned with a cleaner edge. “He asked you to help me.”
“Those were his words.”
“Then why do you keep acting like he left you the deciding vote?”
Wade looked toward the meadow. “Because some days I don’t know the difference.”
It was the most honest thing he had said to her since the funeral, and Ellen could not yet forgive it.
“Learn,” she said. “But not from the north rise. Stop watching me.” Wade put on his hat. This time, he did not argue…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇