Part 2
“Then tell me how not to,” Maggie said.
Ray told her right there in the trailer, with the calf’s breath fogging against the slats. A body that had gone without that long had rearranged its chemistry to live on nothing. Hit it with too much feed too fast and the blood would dump its phosphorus and potassium trying to keep up; the heart would falter and the muscles would quit, and it would look like kindness the whole time. So: good grass hay in small amounts, often. A measured scoop of protein supplement. Warm water at every hour. A mineral mix he would adjust as they went. No grain, nothing that tasted like a reward.
She got home after dark and rebuilt her corral by headlight. It took two hours. Her daughter Ruby, nine, came out in pajamas and muck boots and held the flashlight without being asked, steadying it with both hands whenever Maggie swore at a bolt.
“Is he going to die tonight?”
“Probably not tonight.”
Ruby considered that. “Then I get to name him.” She had been picking burrs out of his coat through the trailer slats, the hooked brown kind that grew thick in the draws, and by morning she had decided on Burdock. Maggie let it stand. It was better than the tag number, and it was accurate.
The first three weeks were no miracle. Burdock learned to stand, but he stood like a folding table and spent most of his time lying down. He ate small and slow. Twice that first week he went off feed completely, and Maggie sat on an overturned bucket in the dark, listening to him breathe and doing arithmetic she didn’t like. Ray came every other day and changed the mineral mix twice, reading nothing but the manure and the way the hair lay along the ribs. Maggie learned to read the calf the way she read weather, in small signs that meant little alone and a great deal together.
By the middle of November, he was cleaning up every meal and waiting at the gate when she came out with the bucket.
She did not make him a pet. It was the first thing she told anyone who asked and the first rule she gave Ruby. She handled him for treatment and talked to him, because she talked to everything on the place, but she never scratched his head and never let him lean on her. She never let him learn that a person could be moved by pushing.
“Whatever he learns at two hundred pounds,” she told Ruby, “he’ll remember at fifteen hundred.”
She built the permanent pen out of heavy pipe, set the posts three feet down, and hung every gate to swing both ways. Ray walked it and said it was the most sensible thing he’d seen anyone do with a rescued bison. Then he added that it wasn’t a long list.
By Thanksgiving, word had gotten around Harlan Creek. Hazel Dunning, who ran Dunning Feed & Supply on the north end of Main and had run four hundred mother cows before her knees gave out, heard it three times in one afternoon from three men who each thought they were first. One said Maggie Tolliver was raising the smallest bison in Wyoming. Another said she ought to charge admission. The third called it the teacup buffalo, and that was the name that stuck, because it was short and mean and a man could say it to a woman’s face and then claim he was kidding.
Hazel told her the next time she came in for mineral. She said it plainly and watched Maggie’s face while she said it, because in sixty-two years Hazel had found that how people took a thing told her more than whatever they said back.
Maggie laughed once through her nose and set her bags on the counter. She didn’t defend the calf or explain the ration or say a word about cannon bones. What she said, counting out bills, was, “He’s gaining.”
He wasn’t gaining fast. There was no morning when she walked out and found a different animal. But he gained every week, in a line so straight she could have laid a ruler on it, and starved animals didn’t usually do that. Most came back in a rush, stalled, and spent the rest of their lives parked below where they should have been. Burdock didn’t stall. The legs that had looked so absurd under that skeleton in the rain were starting to make sense, because the rest of him was catching up.
She had started a notebook on his second day, a hardback ledger from the drugstore that lived on the seat of her truck. Each week got a page in pencil: date, estimated weight, heart girth, height at the shoulder, hip width, feed offered, feed refused, weather, anything odd. It never crossed her mind that anyone but her would read it.
Ray came the first week of December to draw blood and stayed forty minutes past the job, reading the notebook on her tailgate and flipping between October and December twice.
“Who told you he was a runt?”
“Everybody. Starting with Whitcomb’s crew.”
“They may have had it backward.” A runt, Ray said, was born small on a small frame, with a ceiling no feed could lift. What she had was a big frame starved so early that nothing ever filled it in. From a truck window, the two looked identical. One had nowhere to go. The other had been holding its place in line the whole time, waiting for the groceries to catch up with the blueprint. He’d seen it once in a horse, never in a bison, and he could be wrong. He wrote down the hip measurement himself before he left.
After that she bought a proper weight tape and measured twice a week.
Winter came down hard in January, the kind of Wyoming winter where the wind did more damage than the cold, and it went through the ranch budget the way it went through everything. Hay jumped eleven dollars a ton in three weeks after two big outfits east of town bought early and heavy. Maggie sold the hay rake she’d been meaning to fix and a set of panels that had been her father’s, and both checks went to feed before they cleared. Ruby’s winter boots split at the toe in December; Maggie wrapped them in duct tape and promised new ones in spring.
At the kitchen table one night, Ruby, who could be practical in a way that stopped Maggie in her tracks, asked whether they were going to be okay.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “But it’s going to be a boring spring.”
Whitcomb Land & Bison had a different kind of winter. In mid-February, Graham held his annual seedstock showcase with a heated tent, catering, and a banner across the main gate, and the county paper called him an industry leader twice in one article. Maggie read it at the kitchen table and put it in the kindling box.
The next Saturday she walked into the feed store and straight into the tail end of the showcase crowd: four ranchers in good coats with their thumbs hooked in their belts, and Graham among them, buying nothing. He let her get her bags on the counter before he spoke.
“That dollar calf still breathing?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her cart, three tubs of mineral and a few sacks of protein, then back at her. “Hope you’re not spending a hundred to turn one into two.”
All four men laughed. One laughed a beat too long and then studied the floor. Maggie paid and carried the tubs out herself, and she didn’t give Graham the argument he’d come for.
When she came back for the last tub, the men had gone. Hazel stood behind the register with the receipt tape torn off and held up between two fingers.
“He thinks you’re broke,” Hazel said.
“I am broke.”
“Broke looks different on paper. Broke buys the cheap sixteen-percent pellet and prays. You haven’t bought a sack of pellet since October.” She ran a thick finger down the tape. “You buy the chelated mineral, the one with the copper and selenium that actually does something. You bought native seed in February. Step-in posts and a spool of polywire every three weeks like clockwork.” She laid the tape on the counter between them. “So what are you building out there, Maggie?”
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