Part 2
“We haul water,” Nell said. “Every day if we have to.”
It was an answer, not a plan, and Abby knew the difference. Before Ben had drawn the first tube of blood, Nell had committed nearly a third of the pump reserve. By morning, with medication, laboratory work, hoof supplies, and the first delivery of better hay added in, the bull had become the largest unplanned expense on the farm.
Ben marked fill lines on two white buckets so nobody would let him drink too fast. He showed Nell how much hay to offer and when, and warned her that loading a starved animal with grain could do more harm than hunger already had. The bull received fluids, pain relief, and the first treatment for the infection in his feet. Ben left at 1:20 a.m. with blood samples in a cooler and a promise to call after the clinic opened.
Nell slept for ninety minutes in a lawn chair outside the pen. Each time she woke, Abby’s question was waiting.
The bloodwork ruled out several of the things Ben feared most and confirmed the rest: anemia, dehydration, protein deficiency, and the strain of prolonged neglect. His fecal test showed enough parasites that treatment had to be paced. Nothing in the results promised recovery, but nothing required them to stop.
For twelve days the bull’s world narrowed to clean water, measured hay, medicine, dry bedding, and the distance between lying down and standing. Nell kept a legal pad on a nail inside the shed. She wrote down what he ate, what he left, his temperature, his manure, each treatment, and how long he stayed on his feet.
Abby added a column without asking: LOOKED AT FOOD / ATE FOOD. On the fourth day, she drew a hard line through LOOKED.
“That’s not data,” Nell said.
“It is if he quits doing one and starts doing the other.”
Nell left the column.
They called him Otis because Abby refused to keep saying “the bull” in front of him. Nell said he did not care. Abby said that was no reason to be rude.
Otis did not behave like a grateful rescue. He flinched from the rattle of a sorting stick, swung his head when Nell crowded his sore side, and once drove her backward into a panel hard enough to bruise both shoulders. After that, Ben made her hang a sign on the gate: BULL—DO NOT ENTER ALONE.
“He’s not a dog,” Ben said. “Feeling sorry for him won’t make him safe.”
So Nell learned to work him through a protected opening, and Abby stayed outside the second fence. Otis learned the sound of the red feed scoop and the click of Nell’s tongue. Their arrangement was practical before it was anything else.
The hoof abscess opened and drained. The swelling eased. His appetite returned in increments so small that only the legal pad made them visible. Eleven pounds of hay became fourteen, then sixteen. On day thirteen, he rose before Nell reached the shed and stayed up while she changed the bedding beneath him.
Abby had been pretending to finish a worksheet on the overturned trough outside the pen. She set down her pencil.
“Don’t make a big deal,” Nell whispered.
“I’m not.”
Neither of them moved until Otis lowered his head and began to eat.
The pump coughed twice that week. Each time, Nell stood at the kitchen sink listening to air hammer through the pipes. She took extra bookkeeping hours at the farm-supply cooperative and began leaving before Abby’s bus came. Abby fed the chickens, checked Otis’s water from outside the gate, and taped his legal-pad sheets to the refrigerator when they filled.
Nell kept saying the extra hours were temporary. By the third week, Abby had stopped asking whether she would be home before the bus.
At the feed store, customers had already begun calling Otis the hundred-dollar bull. Some asked about him kindly. Others wanted the pleasure of hearing that Grant Coyle had been right.
Grant himself did not joke. When Nell loaded dewormer and hoof blocks at the counter, he glanced at the invoice and said, “How’s he walking?”
“Better.”
“Any respiratory trouble?”
“No.”
He nodded as if reviewing an employee’s report. “Keep him off your cows until you have a clean test panel and a breeding exam.”
“Ben and I have discussed it.”
“Good.” Grant picked up his receipt. “Then one of us is getting through to you.”
Nell waited until he left before signing her own bill. She hated that his advice remained sound after his manners had spoiled it.
By October, Otis’s hip bones no longer looked sharp enough to cut a hand. His winter coat came in black and dense over the old dull hair. He still favored his left front foot on hard ground, and Ben warned that neglect had likely left damage they would manage rather than erase. But when Nell turned him into the small quarantine paddock, he trotted six strides, kicked once, and stopped as if embarrassed by the effort.
Abby laughed for the first time in days. Otis came to the fence at the sound and extended his nose toward her sleeve. She held still. He breathed against the cloth, warm and grassy, then went back to the hay.
Nell wrote TROTTED on the legal pad that evening. Abby drew a box around it.
Three weeks later, Ben returned to recheck the left foot and give fall vaccinations. Otis had gained enough that the chute groaned when he leaned into it. While Ben worked low, Nell rubbed mineral oil around a crusted patch inside the bull’s right ear.
“Hold the light,” she told Abby.
Beneath the dirt and scar tissue was a row of blue-green characters, blurred at the edges but still legible: CV 614.
Abby reached for the plastic auction tag fixed lower in the ear. Its number was 1907.
“Those don’t match.” Ben straightened and took the light from her. He studied the tattoo, then the faint remains of a freeze brand under the hair on Otis’s hip. “They’re not supposed to,” he said. “That’s a breeder’s tattoo. Somebody meant to know exactly who this bull was…”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇