Part 2
“My father’s,” Grant said. “He put it on the young cows in the breeding herd. The last time would have been nine years ago.”
Nora’s hand went to the sale papers on the dashboard. Grant saw the movement and shook his head.
“I’m not saying she belongs to me. We sold them. I just didn’t know where all of them ended up.”
He asked her to look for the mark on the others. When she said she would have Ruth check during the health work, he nodded but made no move to collect his tools. Nora had never seen him stand in a yard without finding something to correct.
Ruth remembered the Broken Diamond project. Grant’s father had managed a small conservation herd assembled from several carefully documented populations. Researchers had kept ancestry records and stored samples; the ranch had provided land and care. It had ended in debt and disagreement, with animals dispersed through private sales.
Some would be dead by now. Others might have calves and grandcalves whose history had become no more than a line in somebody’s purchase book.
“A mark gets us started,” Ruth told Nora. “It doesn’t tell us who’s related to whom, or whether every animal in that pen came from the same place.”
She knew Dr. Maren Holt, a geneticist who advised the small Prairie Bison Partnership. Maren agreed to search for reference material and help arrange a comparison if usable records survived. She made no offer to buy the herd, and Ruth warned that the work would take months.
For the time being, Nora still had forty animals to feed.
By December, she had thirty-nine. An older bull deteriorated despite treatment, and Ruth recommended putting him down before his distress worsened. Nora called Eli at Mae’s house, where he was finishing homework while Mae’s daughter made supper.
She told him before Ruth carried out the decision. He asked whether it was Sixteen, then whether the bull was hurting, then said he would rather stay at Mae’s until after dark. Nora let him.
That night he wrote the temperature at the kitchen table. He left the next line blank instead of asking what to put there, and she did not fill it for him.
The other animals improved slowly. Ruth completed the necessary health work, and Nora began using more of the repaired enclosure, then adjoining leased ground as she finished fence repairs and secured the owners’ agreement to the change in stock. She moved hay sites, checked water, and measured what remained after grazing. Places that looked brown from the road still held grass a cow could use; other places needed to be left alone.
In January, after a storm, Eli found the herd on the western ridge. He knocked on Nora’s bedroom door with his boots already on.
“They’re digging,” he said. “With their faces.”
She drove him out along the service lane. Sixteen stood on a patch where the wind had kept the snow shallow, sweeping her broad head from side to side. Dark stems appeared beneath her muzzle. Nearby, other cows opened their own feeding hollows, while smaller animals used places already cleared.
Eli started to laugh, then covered his mouth as though the sound might disturb them through the closed window. Sixteen emerged from a deep sweep wearing a white cap that collapsed over one eye.
“She’s got an eyebrow,” he said.
Nora laughed too. It surprised her enough that she missed the next thing he said and had to ask him to repeat it.
They watched until his side of the windshield fogged.
Grant came that afternoon to retrieve the panels Nora had replaced with permanent repairs. He watched the bison from the outer lane while they loaded his flatbed. When Nora mentioned the hay bill, he gave her a number for a supplier he had already checked.
Then he said his offer for Willow Bend still stood.
“With the bison now?”
“We’d have to discuss that.” He tightened a strap, tested it, and tightened it again. “But I could carry them while Ruth gets answers. You wouldn’t have to finance the waiting.”
“You can stop coming over if you’re tired of watching me work.”
“I’m tired of you acting like the only thing anybody can take from you is acreage.”
Nora laid the next panel down too hard. Grant waited until it stopped rattling before he spoke again.
“Ben asked me to keep an eye on that well. I should’ve pushed you sooner. It was failing before you brought forty head home.”
“Thirty-nine.”
“Yes,” he said. “Thirty-nine.”
She disliked him most when he did not argue. After he left, she found the pump estimate and put it beside the ledger, where she could no longer pretend it was a job for some other month.
In February, Maren found archived samples and enough of the old inventory to make testing worthwhile. Collecting new samples meant paying a trained crew to put the herd through proper bison handling facilities, with Ruth supervising. Nora agreed to the estimate, then called a man who had offered to buy Ben’s blue flatbed.
It was their second truck, expensive to keep insured and seldom used now. Selling it would cover the sampling work, another load of hay, and part of the pump repair. Nora made the decision while Eli was at school and arranged pickup before he came home.
The buyer was late.
Eli got off the bus as the man secured the truck to his trailer. Nora saw her son stop beside the mailbox. He did not come up the drive until the last chain was tight.
“I meant to tell you,” she said.
“Before what?”
The buyer busied himself with a strap that was already fastened. Nora explained about the insurance, the crew, the fact that they had another truck. Eli looked at the blue cab while she talked.
“I’m not asking you to buy it back,” he said finally.
She stopped. He rubbed the heel of his shoe into the gravel, leaving a pale furrow.
“I would’ve liked one more time in it. That’s all.”
Nora asked the buyer for a few minutes. He set his keys on his own hood and walked down the drive to make a call.
She climbed into the cab from the passenger side. Eli took the driver’s seat, touching the seam Ben had repaired with black tape. The truck smelled of old upholstery and the peppermint candies Ben kept in the door pocket, though there had not been a candy there for two years.
“He let me change gears,” Eli said. “When we were parked.”
“I remember.”
“You said it didn’t count.”
Nora remembered that too. She had been carrying groceries and trying to get them both inside before the ice cream melted. Ben had winked at Eli over her shoulder.
“It counted,” she said.
Eli reached under the dashboard and unwound the wire holding Ben’s small brass compass. He worked it loose without asking for help. Nora stayed beside him, wanting to explain again why selling the truck was necessary, but he had already told her that he understood.
“Next time,” he said, “tell me while the thing’s still here.”
“I will.”
“Even if I’m going to be mad.”
She nodded. They sat another minute before he opened the door.
A crew brought portable handling equipment the following week, and Ruth supervised the sample collection. She checked the labels against the herd list before sending the samples to the lab.
The well repair improved the flow, but the contractor warned that the well itself recovered slowly. He recommended more storage and a second source before summer. The estimate exceeded what remained from the truck.
She bought a used storage tank, began setting money aside, and took two short survey jobs. When Eli brought home a Saturday robotics schedule, she signed it, then called Mae to arrange rides on the weekends she would be working. It cost her two afternoons helping Mae replace flooring in a trailer, a trade she made without mentioning it to her son.
Spring came dry. The grazing that Nora had expected to use first barely grew, and she delayed moving the herd onto it. Several cows were plainly pregnant, making the water figures in her ledger harder to dismiss.
One warm afternoon in May, Sixteen left the group and circled a hollow below the shed. Ruth, already scheduled to check another cow, watched from the lane and told Nora that calving appeared to be starting. They had enough distance, cover, and time to let her settle.
Nora went to check the storage tank before joining Eli at the viewing gate. Its gauge had barely moved since morning, though the well should have been refilling it. At the barn hydrant she found her son holding the handle up, staring at a thin trickle.
She stepped beside him and put her hand beneath it. The water weakened, broke into drops, and stopped against her palm. “How much is left?” Eli asked. Nora looked at the notebook under his arm. He already had a pencil ready for the answer…
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