Part 4
Light had always ended the argument. That night the coyotes held their ground.
Luis drove the inside fence while Ellen moved parallel to him on the outer track. The white-shouldered gander led the flock toward the secure lot, stopping every few yards to call back at the rise. The cattle came willingly but fast, calves pressed between cows, dust lifting around their legs.
One coyote slipped out of sight. Ellen found it again farther south, already circling toward the Mercer boundary. That was the new fact. The animals were not testing one entrance and retreating; they were dividing around the light.
She called the county dispatcher, who put her through to the wildlife specialist on duty. He advised keeping the herd concentrated, removing anything that might draw predators, and varying the deterrents while his office assessed the pattern at daylight. Ellen and Luis stayed out until three. By then the coyotes had gone, but the meadow felt occupied by their absence.
At seven, Ellen called Wade.
“You seeing coyotes before dark?” she asked.
There was a pause. “Some.”
“How many calves?”
“That isn’t why you called.”
“How many?”
“Two confirmed. One missing since Sunday.”
Ellen sat down at the kitchen table. The Mercer ranch calved later than she did, and its youngest calves were grazing a broad north pasture with brushy draws. “Move them off the draws.”
“No water anywhere else.”
“Your south well?”
“Down to four gallons a minute.”
She looked through the screen door toward her own ponds. The lower one had shrunk, but the springs beneath the sedge still fed it. The grass around it was holding because she had rested that section in May. It could carry the Averys into September if she managed it closely. It could not carry two ranches for long.
“Noah has the day-to-day now,” Wade said. “Talk to him.”
Wade’s son arrived an hour later with a legal pad, a pasture map, and none of his father’s need to disguise fear as advice. At forty-nine, Noah Mercer was thick through the shoulders and patient at a gate. Ellen had grown up racing horses against him along the section road. Since Tom’s death, they had treated each other with the constrained courtesy of people who knew that any disagreement would arrive home wearing their fathers’ names.
Noah spread the map across Ellen’s hood. He had marked water output, cattle numbers, calf ages, and the locations of the losses.
“I can bring the late pairs south,” he said. “That puts them along your boundary. I can add a night check, but Dad can’t ride those draws anymore and I’m already sleeping four hours.”
“Hire somebody.”
“Everybody competent is working his own place.”
He glanced toward the flock. “Would a mature group settle on our side?”
Ellen knew what he was asking. She also knew what the rumor had promised him.
“Not this week. They know my route, my shelter, my call, and these cattle. Move them and you may get frightened geese looking for home. Even if they stay, all they give you is warning.”
“Warning would help.”
“Only if someone can answer it.”
Noah folded the map. “Then teach me what I can use now.”
They walked the south boundary until noon. Ellen identified two places where coyotes could approach under cover, a washout beneath the old woven wire, and the abandoned gathering gate between the properties. Tom and Wade had once used that gate to move cattle between ranches during branding. Wade wired it shut after Tom died, when Ellen said she would work her own herd.
At the washout, Noah knelt and ran one hand beneath the lowest strand. “They’ve been through here.”
“At least once.”
He looked up. “You were right to call.”
Ellen almost answered that she had spent twelve years being right. The sentence came ready-made and clean enough to taste. She let it go.
“Bring the late pairs south,” she said. “I’ll put a portable light on my side of the wash. Luis and I will take the midnight check for three nights. After that, we reassess.”
Noah nodded. “I’ll pay your hours.”
“You’ll take the four o’clock check.”
“Done.”
The county held a drought meeting in Valentine two days later. Producers filled the extension hall and stood along the back wall. The discussion moved from water hauling to emergency grazing, then to predator pressure. When somebody mentioned Ellen’s geese, heads turned with the quick relief of people offered a simple answer.
A rancher from the east end of the county asked how soon she could deliver a hundred goslings.
“Next spring,” Ellen said. “And they won’t replace fencing, checks, or a response plan.”
“But you haven’t lost a calf.”
“I lost one to exposure in March and another to a difficult birth. I haven’t confirmed a predator loss this year.”
“Because of the geese.”
“Because the geese alarm, and we respond. Because the calves are close, the weak ones come in at night, and the fence is maintained. Young birds turned loose now would be more vulnerable than your calves.”
The disappointment in the room had weight. Ellen could have taken deposits that afternoon. She could have let twelve years of laughter become twelve minutes of orders. Instead, she wrote the wildlife specialist’s number on the whiteboard and offered to show any producer her response log.
From the back wall, Wade said, “Listen to the part where she tells you it’s work.”
His tone was rough enough to sound like criticism. Several men laughed, not at Ellen this time but from fatigue. She saw Wade’s expression and knew he had meant to support her. Knowing did not make the old tone easier to bear.
Outside, beneath the thin shade of the building, she stopped him beside his truck.
“You were agreeing with me,” she said. “Why did you make it sound like a correction?”
Wade leaned on his stick. “And you still wait until I say something badly before you tell me what I meant.”
“You had twelve years to ask about the work.”
“You had twelve years to tell people the birds weren’t doing it alone.”
“I did.”
“When they asked to buy. Not when they praised you.”
The accusation was unfair in shape and accurate at its center. Ellen had corrected numbers and claims. She had not corrected every admiring version of the story. Some part of her had enjoyed watching people build a legend out of the thing they once mocked.
Wade opened his truck door. “I was wrong about the geese. You’ve known that a long time. I’m not wrong that you like me owing you.”
He drove away before she could answer.
For the next three weeks, Ellen and the Mercers kept the two herds separate and the watches shared. Predator visits became less frequent near the lights and more frequent along unlit fence. The drought continued. Wade’s south well dropped again. Noah began hauling water and moved forty-seven late-calving pairs to the boundary pasture.
On the second night of shared watches, Ellen taught Noah and Wade the recall. Noah’s version was high and uncertain, but the geese turned toward him when he shook the feed pail. Wade’s came out too low. The flock stared at him until Ellen repeated it, then followed both voices into the pen. Wade practiced once more after he thought she had walked away.
Ellen watched his grass disappear by degrees. Each evening, the Mercer cows pressed closer to the woven wire, drawn by the smell of water and green sedge on the Avery side. She calculated carrying capacity at the kitchen table and closed the ledger without writing anything.
On August 6, the white-shouldered gander sounded at 11:38 p.m.
The call came from the south boundary, not the west wash. Ellen reached the old gathering gate and found the flock crowded behind it. Across the wire, a Mercer cow was down in labor, separated from the herd. Two coyotes moved along the far edge of the light, and a third stood between the cow and Noah’s approaching truck.
The gathering gate was still wrapped in Wade’s wire…
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