Part 2
The brush caught Nolan’s sleeves and held them while he tried to work. He cut himself free, dragged the limbs aside, and went back for the next stem.
He began with the small areas Arthur had marked. There was no money for sweeping improvements. Hand tools opened one patch at a time. Old fence wire emerged from tangles, sometimes usable, often rusted through at the bottom.
When he had a section secure, he let the cattle graze it briefly, then moved them on. Some days he spent more time preparing a patch than the animals spent eating there.
From the kitchen window, a full day’s labor barely showed. His shoulders hurt when he lay down. Cracks opened across his palms, caught dirt, and reopened the next morning.
He kept one notebook on the table and another beside his bed. On nights when he couldn’t sleep, he checked Arthur’s drawings against what he had seen. There were times when the neat old handwriting irritated him. The man who had made those observations was beyond having to prove them.
Then shoots appeared in one of the opened sections.
Nolan knelt to examine them, brushing loose dirt away with his thumb. More came in the next patch, then along a slope Arthur had singled out for its ability to hold through dry weather.
He didn’t turn the whole herd into the new growth. He watched how closely the cattle cropped it, moved them, and waited. Some ground recovered quickly. Some needed longer than he wanted to give it.
By summer, he could walk the farm and find evidence of his work without looking for cut stumps. Green spread through openings that had been choked with brush. The cattle put on weight from forage he hadn’t had to buy.
He adjusted his moves, dates, and fences. When a patch lagged, he left it longer. Arthur’s books acquired slips of paper marking the places where Nolan wanted to compare a result.
Late in the season, Esther stood with him beside a group feeding on the restored ground.
“They look ready to sell,” she said.
“They are.”
“Then you’d better find somebody who knows what they’re worth.”
She suggested Dean Beck, a relative who ran a restaurant called Belvero in Lanscott.
Dean heard Nolan out near the restaurant’s back door, where deliveries came in. He asked about the cattle, the grazing, and what Nolan hoped to charge. He didn’t seem especially interested in the auction story.
“I can put it on as a special,” he said at last. “We’ll see what comes back on the plates.”
They agreed to try beef from two animals. Nolan paid a licensed processor with nearly the last money he could spare and delivered the meat with his stomach drawn tight.
Dean kept the offering simple. He didn’t tell the customers about a young farmer, sick calves, or abandoned pasture. Nolan had to wait for the food to answer on its own.
Dean had no need for a sales pitch once he saw the clean plates returning to the kitchen. Over the next several days, requests for another special came with a name Nolan hadn’t chosen: Talvera beef. Dean adopted the customers’ name, and they kept using it.
The kitchen telephone rang a week after the first delivery. Nolan wiped his hands before picking up.
“How many more can you bring me?” Dean asked.
Through the window, Nolan could see a strip of pasture beyond the yard. A year earlier, he had been carrying buckets across that same ground to calves that could barely stand.
“I’ll have to work that out.”
“Work it out soon. I’ve got people asking.”
The news reached the feed store before Nolan next went in for supplies. Gordon was there, listening to another man talk about the restaurant.
“A season’s luck,” Gordon said. “Let him do it again.”
Nolan carried his purchase to the counter and paid. He had a good summer behind him. He still checked Arthur’s books whenever weather or grass failed to behave as he expected.
The following summer held its heat deep into the season. By then, two heifers had calved, restoring the farm’s head count to seventy-eight after the two steers sent to the processor. Nolan entered both births in his book, below the sales.
The nights turned cold abruptly. He would leave the house in a coat, then work in shirtsleeves before noon.
Word came of fever and coughing at a cattle operation several miles south. A few days later, another herd was affected. Before long, the reports came from different sides of Talvera.
Within about ten miles, six commercial herds accounted for nearly a thousand cattle. Gordon carried roughly three hundred and forty. Elvane had about two hundred and five, and Kessara another hundred and fifty. The Whitcomb place ran a hundred and twenty-five. Olsden had around a hundred, Jorren seventy-five.
Nolan knew those numbers because cattlemen knew one another’s business. He began hearing different numbers: how many were off feed, how many were coughing, how many had died since the last report.
He watched his own cattle drink. He checked the approaches to the water and the ground around the feeding areas. On neighboring places, large groups returned repeatedly to the same heavily used spots. He could see how quickly close contact might carry sickness through them. He couldn’t tell which part of one farm’s trouble came from crowding, which from stress, or what else might be involved.
Lydia had never taught him to promise more than he knew.
He kept his groups apart and looked closely at every animal. At the end of each round, he washed the dirt from his hands, opened his notebook, and entered what he had seen.
The reports worsened. Fever took hold in herds that had looked sound only days before. Men who usually argued over prices began speaking quietly at the store, or stayed home altogether.
Nolan slept with his coat hung over the chair beside his bed. Before breakfast, he went through the water points and watched the cattle rise.
In the north group one morning, a cow stretched her neck and gave a deep, wet cough…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇