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"He's not a calf,” she says, reading my mind anyway.

I grin. "I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

"I imagine human babies are not unlike cow babies."

She tells me Hildie gained eleven grams, and I have it figured out before she can convert it. "Four tenths of an ounce."

"Look at you, converting faster than I can tell you. Oh, and Graham slept a four-hour stretch today."

"Oh, wow. I bet you enjoyed that."

"I panicked that he'd stopped breathing and woke him up to make sure."

"Lis says you never wake a sleeping baby."

"I know, I know."

I send two pictures of the pasture. She sends fourteen pictures of the babies that are virtually identical except for the angle. The only thing that differentiates them to me is Graham wears blue usually, and Hildie wears pink.

"How's it tracking?"

"On track."

It's true when I say it.

Bulls come out the first week of September, which is two men and four days. I get inside at nine instead of eleven, which leaves room on both ends. We stay on the phone for fifty minutes. I don't look at the clock until we hang up.

"I better let you go. I'm getting sleepy, and I need to put these babies in their bassinets."

"Okay, Mackie. If you need anything at all before I come back, let me know."

"I told you we have it. You get that work done, Cowboy, and get back to us. The only thing we need is more of your shirts."

I smile, and we say goodnight. I have at least four more hours of work before I will get to go to bed.

Three thirty comes fast when you go to bed at midnight. I'm dressed in the dark before the coffee finishes. By the time the sky goes gray behind the ridge, I have two horses caught and saddled.

Pulling bulls is horseback. You cut a two-thousand-pound animal out of a herd he doesn't want to leave, and you point him at a gate he doesn't want to go through, and then you do it fourteen more times. They fight every step of it.

One of them, a big red Angus, decides the trailer gate is a wall and takes a run at it. I'm on the other side of the panel, and I don't clear it in time. The steel catches me across the ribs and the hip and takes the wind out of me.

"You all right?" Eli's off his horse and half over the fence. I'm still paying him part time because every day he works is one more day I might be able to leave again. There's no way I will get out of here before November if I don't.

"Get the gate."

He gets it. The bull loads. I climb back on, and my side lights up every time the horse trots, all down the left from armpit to belt, and I ride the rest of the day.

The pairs come down off summer grass, two days of moving cows and calves that string out for half a mile, and a county road crossing where I put Eli high and Wade low and hope nobody comes over the hill fast. Nobody does. It goes clean.

I eat standing at the sink, whatever's in the refrigerator, or ramen, watching the yard light through the window over the faucet.

Tuesday I run out of coffee. Driving to town costs forty minutes I can't find anywhere, so I drink the shop coffee, which tastes like the can it sits in. I do that for two days.

I move my belt in one hole, notice it, and keep going.

While I'm restringing the north fence, the wire whips loose and opens the back of my hand. I wrap it in electrical tape because that's what's in the door pocket, and I finish the run.