Part 7
Eighteen months after the September exam, the first calf sired by Agustín came on a windy night. Heifer 527 had been laboring when Emilio made his late round. The water sac had appeared, but the next forty minutes brought no progress. He checked his watch twice, walked as far as the truck, and felt the old argument assemble itself: first-calf heifers could take longer; she was still standing; he might call Ana out for nothing. He called while those thoughts were still only thoughts.
Ana arrived to find the heifer already in the calving pen, the lights on, clean ropes and water set outside the gate. She examined 527 and said the calf’s head was slightly turned. It was not yet a catastrophe. It would have become one if they had waited long enough.
The wind pressed dust against the calving-shed door and made a loose roofing screw chatter overhead. In the work lights, sweat darkened 527’s flanks. Each time she strained, Emilio felt the old urge to pull harder and finish the danger by force. Ana kept one hand near his wrist, not restraining him, only giving him the exact moment to hold and the exact moment to wait.
They worked quietly. Ana corrected the position and directed the pull while Emilio kept tension when she asked and released it when she did not. A red bull calf slid onto the straw, lay still for one terrible second, then shook his head and drew a wet breath.
Emilio cleared straw from the calf’s nose. The heifer turned and began licking him with frantic, rasping strokes.
“I wasn’t sure she needed you,” Emilio said.
Ana sat back on her heels, breathing hard. “You weren’t supposed to be sure.”
He nodded. Neither of them mentioned the calf they had lost four years earlier. The living one struggled onto his chest between them, and for once the past did not have to be argued into a different ending.
Four months later, the sale barn put Lot 23’s old photograph on a bulletin board beside the notice for its summer parasite workshop. Someone had written ASK GARZA ABOUT THE BIRDS underneath it. Emilio crossed out THE BIRDS and wrote THE PLAN.
Ana demonstrated how to count the same marked areas on each animal, and Blake described the pasture where he had reduced routine applications without abandoning the counting sheet. Emilio answered questions about shade, isolation, feed, and how much donor blood a bargain bull could add to the true purchase price. When a young breeder asked what the caracaras had contributed, Emilio pointed first to the columns for red-cell levels, treatment, weight, and appetite. Only then did he show him the bird count in the margin.
Ana posted La Parra’s first-year results exactly as they appeared in the notebook. Seven animals had required targeted treatment after the spring rains, and several cows had stayed open. After another exam in May of the previous year, Agustín had gone out with eighteen cows; fourteen calves were on the ground by the workshop. Two had feet Ana wanted watched, and one red heifer with a white mark under her chin followed Emilio whenever he carried a feed bucket. Beside the calf count, Emilio had written the difficult birth and the weeks Agustín needed extra rest.
Mora still grazed near the house, and Ana brought her apples on Sundays. Beyond the south pasture, the resident caracara pair raised one juvenile that landed too close to tails and fled whenever a cow twitched.
On a hot morning a little more than two years after the auction, Ana and Emilio worked the sample group through the pens. She called out numbers while he wrote them in the combined notebook. They disagreed over whether one cow crossed the treatment threshold, counted again, and discovered Ana was right by two ticks.
Emilio treated the cow.
“I expected at least ten minutes of debate,” she said while they cleaned the chute.
“I can still give it to you.”
“Too late. It’s in the record.”
Linda came from the house carrying three glasses of iced tea. She set them on the same fence post she had used the day Agustín failed his first exam.
“Your grandfather would be pleased,” she told Emilio.
He watched Ana close the medicine case. Once, he would have answered for a dead man. Now he knew better.
“He would have questions,” Emilio said.
“Then he would fit right in,” Ana replied.
Beyond them, Agustín stood under the mesquite, broad and red in the broken shade. The adult caracara landed first. The juvenile followed badly, wings flaring, and bumped against the bull’s shoulder before finding its balance.
Agustín turned one dark eye toward the young bird. Then he lowered his head and held still.
Ana picked up the notebook and walked toward the next gate. Emilio took the glasses from Linda, followed his daughter, and opened it before she had to ask.