Part 4
Graham Whitcomb got out and didn’t lean on the truck. He didn’t smile, either. In fifteen years Maggie had never seen him arrive anywhere without the face he wore at sales, and seeing him without it was like looking into a store after closing.
He walked to the fence and stood a full minute looking at the bull. The bull stood across the pen and looked back.
“I’d like to buy him,” Graham said. “Eight thousand. Cash, and I’ll haul him this week.”
It was a real number. It covered the operating note due in October, the winter hay, and the water line she’d been patching for two years with clamps and prayer. It covered boots for Ruby that weren’t taped at the toe. Maggie made herself stand there and feel the whole size of it before she opened her mouth.
“Why?”
“Buyers have been asking me about him.” He kept his eyes on the bull. “Men I’ve sold to for ten years, calling to ask what else I’ve been giving away. I’d rather be the one who has the answer.” Then the sales voice came back. “It’s a generous offer. Generous, for what he is.”
He said generous twice. Maggie had grown up at sale barns, and she’d watched plenty of men say a word twice when they were selling something.
“No,” she said.
“Twelve.” Nobody had asked him to go up.
“No.”
“Fifteen.” Both of his hands were on the top rail now, and for half a second something came up under the politeness in his face and went back down.
Maggie told him to wait. She walked to her truck, took the folded sheet out of the glove box, and brought it back. He took it, and she watched him read his own signature.
She didn’t raise her voice. There was nobody there to perform for.
“You said he wasn’t worth the diesel,” she said. “You wrote it down and dated it. Troy was standing right there, and so was Ray.” She nodded at his chest. “You still have my dollar?”
His hand went to his shirt pocket before he could stop it. It was a different shirt, nine months on. He had reached for it anyway.
He looked at the page much longer than it took to read. Every version of the argument he could make would end with him explaining why a calf he had valued at a dollar was worth fifteen thousand, and he was too smart to start one. He folded the paper along its old creases and handed it back.
“Call me if you change your mind.”
He drove out slower than he’d come in.
That night Maggie sat at the kitchen table with the bills fanned out, and the fifteen thousand sat among them like another person at the table. She didn’t regret it. She didn’t sleep much either. Around midnight Ruby came down for water, took one look at the table, and put the kettle on without a word. At some point in the last year she had picked that up from her mother.
Two days later, at seven in the morning, a mud-caked flatbed with Montana plates stopped at her gate. The man who climbed out was Cole Brandt, forty-seven, who had spent twenty years evaluating breeding bison for outfits from Alberta down to the Nebraska Sandhills and had driven four hundred and ten miles on the strength of a story Earl Pickett told at a sale barn in Billings. He shook her hand, apologized for the hour, and asked if he could look.
He walked to the fence and said nothing for most of a minute. He moved along the rail slowly, stopping at the rise of the shoulder, the line of the back, the set of the hind legs, and the depth through the heart. At one point he crouched to look at the front feet from low down, an angle Maggie had never seen anyone bother with.
“How old?”
“Fourteen months, near enough. End of May, Ray thinks.”
Cole turned back to the bull and stayed that way a while. “I’m going to ask you something,” he said, “and I don’t mean anything by it. You’re certain of that date?”
“I’ve got the transfer paper. Ray’s intake photos from October. Measurements every week since the second day, twice a week since December.”
Cole Brandt had appraised bison for two decades. He stood at her fence in the July heat and counted months on his fingers, because the animal in front of him didn’t match the number he’d been given. Watching him do it, Maggie understood that the story didn’t belong to Harlan Creek anymore.
He asked whether he could take photographs, and whether he could bring two other men the next week.
After that the trucks came, first in ones and twos and then in small clusters. Working ranchers pulled up with stock trailers still hitched and sale catalogs on the dash, out of Colorado, Montana, and South Dakota. A man drove up from the Nebraska line with his teenage son, and neither said a word for ten minutes. Maggie painted a sheet of plywood and propped it by the gate: NOBODY INSIDE THE WIRE. It was the only rule she ever had to enforce. She kept working the whole time, because the paddocks still had to be moved on schedule no matter who was watching.
Some of the men who leaned on her fence that summer had laughed at her across Hazel’s counter in November, and all of them knew she remembered. Most of them handled it the way ranchers handle that kind of thing, with a long pause, a remark about how dry it had been, and a hand resting on the rail.
One of them was Dale Sorensen, who had said teacup buffalo in front of a room full of people more than once. He asked whether she’d be selling breeding rights once the bull matured.
Maggie looked at Burdock, then back at Dale. “Thought he wasn’t worth the hay.”
Dale opened his mouth, shut it, and then laughed at himself, which was the only thing left for him to do. He came back twice that fall and bought her coffee both times, and she never raised it again.
In August, Hazel called at suppertime.
“Graham’s telling buyers your bull is Whitcomb genetics,” Hazel said. “Born on his ground, out of his cow, out of his program. Says it real gentle, like he’s only setting the record straight.” She paused. “And Maggie? Some of them are nodding…”
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