Part 5
The coyotes were still two hundred yards from the cow, but they had stopped yielding ground to the trucks.
Ellen called Noah on the radio. “Bring the late pairs to the old gate.”
“The gate’s wired.”
“Not for long.”
She took the bolt cutters from her pickup. Wade had wrapped the top rail after Tom’s funeral with three turns of twelve-gauge wire and finished it with the small backward twist he used on every permanent closure. Ellen remembered standing on the other side while he worked, too tired at the time to understand that he was closing more than a cattle lane.
The first cut snapped through the dark. The geese jumped back, then surged forward again when the old gander called. Ellen cut the second turn and pulled the wire free.
Wade’s headlights appeared behind Noah’s. He climbed out before the truck stopped moving, walking stick in one hand.
“What are you doing?”
“Opening the gate.”
“Your meadow won’t carry both herds.”
“Then we won’t leave them both here.”
“Ellen—”
“I need you on the inside corner. Noah brings the pairs. Luis holds the Avery cows north of the pond.”
Wade looked past her to the cow on the ground. For one beat she expected the old resistance—the warning, the calculation, the decision made aloud in her direction.
“Where do you want the portable panels?” he asked.
She pointed. “Make a wing off the gate so they don’t break toward the water all at once.”
Wade went.
Noah gathered the Mercer herd with his truck while Ellen and Luis widened the lane. The geese’s alarm changed as the coyotes shifted in the grass, giving Ellen a direction even when the lights lost them. She did not treat the sound as sight. Each time it changed, she searched until she saw what had caused it.
The first cows came through at a trot. Wade held the panel wing from the safe side, calling them past him in the flat, ordinary voice he used in a sorting alley. Calves followed close to their mothers. On the Avery side, they slowed at the sight of the geese, then moved toward the water under pressure from the animals behind them.
Thirty pairs crossed. Then forty.
The laboring cow did not rise.
Noah parked his truck between her and the nearest coyote and approached on foot with a calving sled. Ellen drove the outer arc, horn sounding in short bursts while Luis swept the fence with light. The coyotes retreated beyond the wash but did not leave.
When Ellen returned to the gate, Wade was trying to climb through the panel wing.
“Stay where you are,” she said.
“That’s my cow.”
“And Noah has her.”
“He needs another set of hands.”
“He has mine.”
She passed Wade the radio and crossed with a clean towel and rope. The cow had delivered by the time Ellen reached her. The calf lay breathing but slow, its mother exhausted and confused by the lights. Noah cleared the calf’s face, rubbed it hard through the towel, and waited for the cow to turn toward it.
“Give her room,” Ellen said.
They backed away. The cow lifted her head, caught the calf’s scent, and began to lick. Her first attempt to stand failed. On the second, she got her hind legs beneath her and remained there, front knees folded, sides heaving.
The flock sounded from the gate.
Noah looked toward the dark. “They’re close.”
“Close enough. We move now.”
They laid the calf on the sled and drew it slowly toward the opening. The cow rose when it moved and followed, stumbling once before finding her balance. Ellen kept herself between the pair and the outer pasture, not because her body could stop a coyote but because the truck lights and Noah’s engine were behind her and the clear route was ahead.
At the gate, the white-shouldered gander stood with his neck stretched, calling toward the dark. Wade had pulled the rest of the flock aside with Ellen’s two-note call. It came out badly in his lower voice, but the geese had yielded enough space for the cow to pass.
The moment her calf crossed, she followed. Noah swung the gate. Wade fastened it with a length of chain, not the old wire.
The coyotes remained beyond the fence. The geese continued to call until the last Mercer calf joined its mother near the water. Then, by uneven degrees, the meadow quieted.
Noah counted ear tags while Luis closed the portable lane. Forty-six pairs stood inside the Avery fence. The cow that had calved made forty-seven. Her calf found its feet beneath the yard light, fell against her foreleg, and tried again. Only when Noah read the last number over the radio did Ellen allow herself to look toward the dark beyond the gate.
The white-shouldered gander had stopped calling. He drank from the shallow edge of the pond, then walked back to the flock with one wing held slightly lower than the other, the old stiffness from his first summer still visible when he tired.
Ellen stood at the pond’s edge while two herds drank from the same shrinking water. The practical cost of what she had done arranged itself in her mind: trampled sedge, accelerated grazing, more hay, more labor, disease risk, a separation job when the emergency ended. None of it was abstract.
Wade came beside her. Dust coated his shirt, and the hand around his walking stick trembled from exertion.
“How long?” he asked.
“My grass had thirty-one days. With yours, maybe eighteen.”
“You should have left the gate shut.”
Ellen turned to him. “Would you have?”
Wade looked at the cow licking her calf beneath the yard light. “No.”
“Then don’t tell me I should have done less than you would have.”
He rubbed a thumb over the top of his stick. “I suppose I have.”
There were a dozen possible answers, most of them deserved. Ellen was too tired for any that would last.
“At daylight, we inventory hay,” she said. “Then we call the veterinarian about combining the groups. After that, we decide what leaves.”
Wade nodded. “And the gate?” he asked. “The chain stays until we decide together.” He handed her the bolt cutters. “Tell me where to start in the morning.” By dawn, the two herds were grazing as one, and the South Meadow had eighteen days left in it…
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