Part 3
“Grass,” Maggie said.
Hazel waited, because one word wasn’t an answer yet.
So Maggie told her, standing at the counter with the last tub on her hip. She had never said it out loud to anyone but Ray. She had split her two big pastures into nine paddocks with single-strand polywire and step-in posts, and she moved the stock every three to five days instead of turning them loose on eighty acres for a season. She had overseeded the worn spots with western wheatgrass, green needlegrass, and a little purple prairie clover, and she rested each paddock until the roots came all the way back. That was the part almost nobody had patience for. It cost labor instead of money, which was the one trade she could afford. On weekends Ruby measured grass height with a school ruler and wrote the numbers in the back of the notebook in careful, square handwriting.
“By spring,” Maggie said, “that grass is going to do what everybody else pays the mill for.”
Hazel was quiet a moment. “Nobody around here does that.”
“Nobody has to, if they can afford the pellet.”
Hazel folded the receipt into her apron. “Come in Thursdays. I’ll hold the mineral at last month’s price as long as my supplier does.” Hazel had her own margins, and they both knew it. Still, Maggie drove home with the numbers a little less wrong.
The change came so gradually, a pound here and a quarter inch there, that Maggie stopped being able to see it, the way you can’t see a child grow when you live in the same house. Then, the last week of March, she came out at six with the feed bucket and found Burdock standing broadside in the low orange light, and she stopped walking.
His shoulder had come up into a real hump with muscle behind it. His chest had dropped and widened. His coat was thick and dark brown, with the oily shine along the ribs that a healthy bison carries and a sick one never does.
Ray came out that week with the tape. He ran it around the heart girth, read it, frowned, and ran it again from scratch. Then he coiled it slowly.
“Catch-up growth,” he said. “Starve a young animal through the wrong window, then give him everything, and the body runs hot until it gets back to what the bones planned on. Most never get the chance. Most get culled in September by somebody doing sensible math.” He looked at the notebook on the tailgate, not at her. “You fed him for frame, not fat, and you gave it time. If he holds this through summer, a few people in this county are going to be eating their words.”
In early May, Earl Pickett, who ran yearlings north of her and had known her father, drove past and pulled over so fast he put his outside tires in the bar ditch. He stood at her fence with his hat in his hand until she walked down.
“Where’d you buy the bull?” he asked cheerfully.
“Didn’t buy him.”
“The big one. By the tank.”
“So do I.”
Earl knew the teacup buffalo story like everybody else, and the arithmetic wouldn’t close for him. He asked to see the tag and walked the fence until he could read it. He read it twice, said a word, and apologized for it.
“What in God’s name are you feeding him?”
“Grass,” Maggie said, and she could see he didn’t believe that either.
By June the talk in Harlan Creek had turned all the way over. The same men who’d laughed in November now asked Hazel what Maggie was buying and cornered Ray in parking lots to ask whether she was slipping something into the ration. At the spring stockgrowers’ meeting, Graham tried to get ahead of it. Any calf will look like something in a picture, he told a table of ranchers, if you pour enough into it. The trouble was that no pictures existed. Maggie had no sign, no photos, and had never spoken to the paper. Earl said so across the room, loud enough to carry, and it got quiet in a way Graham didn’t enjoy.
Ray ended that argument without meaning to join it. In June he scored Burdock for his own records by hand, along the ribs and the tailhead, where a fattened animal carries its cover. Five out of nine: dead middle, nothing extra anywhere. Everything that had grown on him was bone, muscle, and lung.
Three weeks later, Maggie’s well pump quit, and Hazel drove out with a pallet of mineral herself because she had the afternoon. While Maggie wrestled the pump housing, Hazel walked down to the fence to see what the county wouldn’t shut up about.
She stood there a long while. Then she got close enough to read the tag and went very still. She read it again, took off her glasses, cleaned them on her shirttail, and read it a third time. When Maggie came down wiping grease onto her jeans, Hazel hadn’t moved.
“I know that prefix,” Hazel said.
She remembered tag prefixes the way other people remembered phone numbers, and this one belonged to a set of bred cows Whitcomb had bought at the Hatcher Rim dispersal, up along the breaks, after the last of that family died. Hatcher Rim cattle had never been known for fast growth. They were known for big mature frames, heavy bone, feet and legs that lasted forever, and a stubborn way of coming through hard winters. They were also slow to finish and cost more to carry to maturity than a commercial program wanted to pay.
“Graham’s spent six years selling that blood down the road,” Hazel said. “Doesn’t fit his calendar.”
Maggie sat on the tailgate and worked it through while Hazel listened. Burdock’s mother must have been one of the last of that set, an older cow already on her way out, and when she went, nobody chased down her calf, because he carried the same slow blood they were getting rid of. He had been written off twice before he was five months old, once for his breeding and once for his condition, and each reason had covered for the other.
She went inside and took the transfer paper out of the kitchen drawer. It was all there in Graham’s handwriting: one bull, bison calf, the tag number, consideration of one dollar, signed and dated. Whatever Burdock was, he was hers. That night she moved the paper to the glove box of her truck, and she couldn’t have said exactly why.
On the third Tuesday of July, at eleven in the morning, a gray three-quarter-ton came up her dirt road and stopped short of the cattle guard…
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