“That’s what I’m here for.”
The heifer surged forward with a grunt of pain, driving her weight against my hands. I dug my heels into the dirt and held on, leaning into her, keeping her from spinning or going down.
“Hold her,” Rowan said, his voice tight now with effort.
“I’m holdin’ her as best I can,” I said through gritted teeth.
It took a few minutes that felt longer than they were. The heifer trembled and groaned, and I kept my grip and kept talking, and Rowan worked with a focused, quiet intensity that I found myself watching in the corner of my eye.
He was good at this. Better than I expected. There was a precision to the way he moved, an economy of motion that came from genuine skill rather than performance. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He was just doing the work.
It almost made me think he wasn’t such a fucking idiot. And I began to understand what Brooks saw in him.
“There,” Rowan said. “Okay. She’s going to push now. Let her.”
I loosened my grip but kept my hands on the halter, and the heifer did exactly what Rowan said. She was clearly exhausted, but pushed nonetheless. And then the calf plopped onto the straw, the heifer delivering it like it was nothing.
“Good girl,” I found myself cooing, letting the heifer go.
Rowan cleared the calf’s mouth and stepped away, letting the cow get down to business licking the calf clean. He stripped off his glove and walked over to me, the pair of us leaning against the fence.
“You make a decent assistant,” he grinned, giving me a nudge. “Brooks said you knew how to handle animals.”
“You gotta when you grow up on a ranch,” I replied, marveling at this small miracle of life that I’d nearly forgotten about completely.
“I bet you’d make a good rancher,” Rowan said. Then he turned before I could reply, looking back at the woman standing nervously behind the fence. “She’s gonna be alright. Calf looks healthy. It’s a heifer.”
“Oh thank God,” the woman sighed in relief. “I thought we were gonna lose her.”
“Not today, you’re not,” Rowan smiled.
He hopped the fence and headed with the woman back toward his truck. Probably to talk about aftercare or billing or something. But I stood there a moment longer, just watching as the calf experienced its first few moments in a much bigger world.
“A good rancher…” I mumbled, repeating Rowan’s words.
The words sat in my mouth like something I couldn’t quite swallow.
Could I be a good rancher?
I hadn’t thought of myself that way in years. Hadn’t thought of myself as anything connected to this land or this life since I was sixteen years old and my father’s voice rang in my ears as I left home for what I thought was the last time. I’d spent the better part of two decades constructing a version of myself that had nothing to do with cattle or calving or the particular smell of a barn at dusk. And yet here I was, standing in a stranger’s pen with manure on my boots and straw on my jeans, feeling something that I couldn’t quite name and didn’t entirely hate.
The calf had found its legs already, wobbly and knock-kneed, bumping its head against its mother’s flank with the clumsy insistence of a newborn looking for milk. The cow licked it with that single-minded tenderness that animals sometimes showed and people, in my experience, didn’t. Everyone except for Mike that was…
I watched longer than I meant to.
By the time I climbed back over the fence and made my way toward Rowan’s truck, he was finishing up with the woman, both of them standing near the tailgate while she wrote something on a check. She looked less tense now, her arms uncrossed, her whole posture different from what it had been an hour ago.Rowan had done that. Walked onto her property, done the work, and left the place better than he’d found it.
I leaned against the side of the truck and waited.
“You need anything else, you call me,” Rowan was saying, tucking the check into his shirt pocket. “She’ll be tired for a few days. Make sure she’s drinking and let the calf nurse as much as it wants.”
The woman nodded, then glanced over at me. The suspicion was mostly gone now, replaced by something more neutral. “You’re James Callahan’s boy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because there wasn’t much else to say to that.
She studied me for a moment with the particular appraisal of someone who’d known my father and was trying to find him in my face. I’d gotten used to that look since arriving in Sagebrush. I still didn’t like it.
“He talked about you,” she said finally. “Near the end.”
