Part 2
Then the ribs lifted under her palm, a short, catching breath like a hiccup, and dropped again.
Nora got behind him, set her shoulder against his spine, and heaved. He was light, but he was all angles, and his legs kept folding the wrong way. On the third try she got him up on his brisket. She jammed a bale of straw against one side of him and her own coat against the other and held him there with her knee until his breathing steadied into something she could count.
She drove the last eleven miles at fifteen miles an hour in her shirtsleeves with the heater on high. She didn’t feel cold until she pulled into the yard, and then she couldn’t stop shaking.
Tess was walking up the lane from the mailbox with her backpack hanging off one shoulder. She took one look at the trailer and started running.
“Is that a buffalo?”
“Bison. And he’s sick, so you stay outside the gate until I say.”
Tess stayed outside the gate for almost a minute. Then she came in and took the other end of the orange calving sled without being asked, and together they dragged him across the yard to the box stall in the old horse barn, the only place on the property with four solid walls. He lay on his chest in the straw and looked at them. Tess crouched just out of reach, the way she’d seen her mother crouch beside new calves, and asked whether he was going to die.
“Maybe,” Nora said. “Not if we’re careful.”
Sam’s truck came up the lane at eight-thirty with one headlight out. He stood in the stall door under the bare bulb and worked through a handful of sunflower seeds before he said anything, and Nora knew him well enough to let him.
“Refeeding syndrome,” he said finally. “For two or three months he’s been running on almost nothing. His whole metabolism has rearranged itself to get by on that. Give him a big meal and his body tries to process all of it at once. To do that it pulls phosphorus and potassium right out of his blood, and he hasn’t got any to spare. Then his heart goes, or his breathing does. And the whole time, it looks like he’s getting better.” He spat a hull into his palm. “Every winter somebody rescues a starved horse and gives it all the good hay it wants. They call me on day three. I hate those calls.”
“So what do I feed him?”
He told her and made her write it down. Half a pound of grass hay every four hours to start, weighed on the kitchen scale, and a little more each day only if he cleaned up the last of it. No alfalfa. Warm water every time she went out. A measured cup of protein supplement morning and night. A mineral mix he’d bring tomorrow and adjust as they went. No grain. No treats. Nothing he’d love.
“Weigh him with a tape every week,” Sam said. “Write it down. Write everything down. If he dies, I want to know why.”
Before he left, he took pictures with his phone from three sides, the calf blinking in the light. “For the file,” he said.
Nora wrote everything in the back of a spiral feed-account book from the co-op, because that was what was on the seat of the truck. That night she started the first page: Oct 27. 158 by Ashby scale ticket. Lying sternal. Drank 2 qt warm.
Tess found the bill of sale on the kitchen counter at bedtime and read it out loud.
“You paid two dollars for him?”
“I paid Grandpa’s two dollars for him.”
Tess thought about it with her toothbrush in her mouth. “Then he’s Deuce,” she said. Nora had been calling him “the calf” in her head and planning to keep it that way until he lived long enough to deserve a name. But Tess was right, so he was Deuce.
The first three weeks took everything Nora had. Deuce learned to stand on the fourth day, splay-legged and swaying. He spent most of every day lying down and ate each small ration as if he expected it to be taken away. On the ninth day he refused feed altogether. Nora spent that night in the stall on a folded horse blanket with a lantern and her father’s old veterinary handbook open on her knees, reading the chapter on rumen function by a light that kept guttering. Sam came the next day and changed the mineral. On the sixteenth day Deuce scoured, and Sam changed it again and said a word Tess wasn’t supposed to hear.
After that, the numbers began to climb.
Nora built the permanent pen out of drill pipe her father had hauled home from oil leases in the eighties and stacked behind the shop, swearing it would be worth something someday. She set the posts four feet deep with a rented auger before the ground froze and welded the rails herself. She chained every gate top and bottom, because Arlo used to say a bison could lift a single chain with his nose and never break a sweat. Sam walked the fence line end to end and allowed that it was better than what Preston Ashby used for his bulls.
She made a rule and told it to Tess before Deuce had been home a week. They would doctor him, feed him, and talk to him, because Nora talked to everything on the place, including the tractor. But nobody scratched his head, nobody fed him from a hand, and nobody let him lean.
“Everything that’s cute at a hundred and seventy pounds,” Nora told her, “is a broken rib at fifteen hundred.”
Tess was ten and practical. She nodded once and kept to the rule better than Nora did.
By the week before Thanksgiving, Deuce had his head over the stall door every time the house door opened.
Bev Strand had run the counter at the Kettle Butte Farmers Co-op for four years, since the Pinecrest auction barn closed. Before that, she had clerked there for twenty-eight years, writing every buyer number, lot number, and price on every sheet. She claimed to remember most of them, and nobody had caught her wrong yet. She was sixty-seven and kept her reading glasses on a beaded chain her granddaughter had made.
She waited until Nora set a sack of mineral on the counter. “They’ve got a name for him in here,” she said. “Thought you’d rather hear it from me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Pocket buffalo.” Bev watched her face. “Curt Rasmussen came up with it. Said it three times Tuesday between ten and noon, and the third time somebody finally laughed.”
Nora counted out her bills. She thought about Curt, who had once rolled a feed truck into Plum Creek and needed her tractor to pull it out. She thought about saying so.
“He finished everything I gave him this morning,” she said instead. “First time.”
Bev took the money and didn’t say anything else, but she wrote something down on the back of a receipt after Nora left.
The first snow that stuck came in early December. Nora and Tess taped Deuce in the pen that Sunday with the cloth tape stiff from the cold, Nora working it around his girth through the rails while Tess held the feed book and the pencil.
Tess read the number, then flipped back a page, then another. “It’s the same,” she said.
“Same as what?”
“Same as he gained last week. And the week before.” Tess frowned at the page. “Is the tape broken?”
Nora took the book and looked. Starved animals she’d known came back in a jump and then quit, and spent the rest of their lives a notch short. Deuce wasn’t jumping. He was climbing, the same few pounds a week, steady as a fence line.
Sam came the next Saturday to draw blood. His reading glasses were in the truck and he wouldn’t walk back for them, so Tess read him the book from the beginning while he leaned on the tailgate with his eyes shut. When she got to the hip widths he made her read the column again, slower.
Then he opened his eyes and looked at Deuce, who stood broadside at the pipe rail watching all three of them.
“Nora,” Sam said. “Who’s been telling you he’s little?”
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