Part 6
Ray moved the clip to the outside of the crew gate that night, out of reach of any paw, and for three weeks, Opal and Wren lived on either side of a fence.
The cow did everything right. She didn’t crowd. She fed at the hay feeder nearest the calf’s pen and rubbed her neck on the post by the corner, making a rasping noise that Wren learned to follow. She stood for hours at the fence with her head lowered, breathing on the calf through the wire. The first time their noses touched, on the fifth day, Opal held perfectly still for nearly a minute. Mags, watching from the barn, took off her hat and turned away for a moment.
Wren learned a second map. Opal’s footfalls, heavy and slow and four-beat. The burble of the river below the yard. The hay feeder chains. Ray’s whistle. On the twelfth day she walked to the far end of her pen to follow the rasping sound, farther from Boone’s lane than she had ever gone on purpose. Boone got up from the head of the lane and stood watching her.
On the twenty-second day, they opened the gate between the pen and the big yard. Opal came in slowly, and Wren went to her, and the cow lowered her long neck and put her chin on the calf’s back, and that was that. Mags said she’d seen a lot of introductions and that one was about as close to nothing as they ever got.
Boone saw it differently. He walked his lane twice as often. When the two giraffes drifted to the far side of the yard, out past the live oaks where the ground dropped toward the river, he went to the end of the chain-link and stood at the crew gate with his nose through the wire, and he didn’t eat until they came back.
“He’s lost his job,” Mags said.
“He’s got a job,” Jo said. “He hasn’t figured out it’s still the same one.”
Gil called on the last Thursday of June, at dusk, while Jo, with both giraffes already shut in the barn for the night, was out in the yard checking the hay feeder by the crew gate. The rescue’s insurer had raised the premium again and Gil needed her signature on a grant report she’d started in April. He was tired and cranky and, underneath, glad to hear her voice, and she was glad to hear his. She wedged the phone between her ear and shoulder, came back out into the lane through the crew gate, and let the gravity latch drop behind her, talking about bat houses and match funding all the way back to the trailer, past Boone lying loose at the head of the lane. Ray was in San Antonio for the night. The snap clip hung where she had looped it over the post to free her hand.
She saw it the next morning at a quarter after six, coming down the porch steps with her coffee, ten minutes after Mags had let the giraffes out into the yard. The crew gate at the far end of the lane stood half open, and the lane was empty.
She put the cup down on the step without looking where it went.
Boone was in the giraffe yard. He was eighty yards out past the live oaks, trotting at his stiff, rocking dawn pace toward the river end, where Wren stood beside Opal at the water trough. He wasn’t running. He was going to his calf the way he had gone down the aisle in Kansas, steady and unhurried, as if this were simply a place he ought to be.
Opal had seen him first. She swung around to face him, all fourteen feet of her, and put herself between the dog and the calf. Her ears went flat. She stamped one front foot into the red dirt hard enough that Jo heard it from the porch.
A giraffe could kill a lion with that foot.
Jo ran. She was fifty-seven and her knees told her so, but she ran the length of the lane in her house shoes, and when she reached the open gate she knew three things at once. She couldn’t call him; Boone had never come to his name in his life. She couldn’t go out to him; a person walking toward the calf would only bring the cow down on all of them. And she had left her phone, with Walt’s son humming in B-flat on it, on the kitchen counter.
Boone was forty feet from Opal. The cow had begun to sway her neck in long slow arcs, and Wren, behind her, had gone rigid with her ears turning every direction at once.
Jo did the only thing she had. She sat down in the open gateway, in the dirt, where a dog would lie if he had a gate to keep, and she started to hum.
It was the wrong key. It was too fast at first, and her voice shook, and she made herself slow it down to the pace of a man walking up with a bucket.
Boone’s ears came around. He stopped and turned his head and looked back across the yard at the gate, at the woman sitting in it, as if he had heard something he’d been waiting for.
He turned toward her. Opal saw the dog’s back turn and came at him with her front leg already rising…
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