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“How can I help?” I asked.
Reece looked my way. “Oh shit. Get outta here. She’s too unstable.”
The cow’s head swung my way. She took several steps toward me across the barn.
“Hi, pretty mama cow?” I said uncertainly, taking a few steps backwards.
She mooed angrily in my direction and stomped more steps towards me.
Reece took the few moments of distraction to leap down from the tractor. “In you go, Mama,” he said, shoving on her backside, then quickly dancing out of the way when she bucked with her back legs. But she did run forward—right into the chute.
Reece again moved quickly, faster than I would have thought possible. He locked in the bar behind her back legs and then closed the front of the chute bars around her neck to hold her in place.
His whole body slumped backwards after he got her locked in. The cow rammed back and forth in the chute, but was finally caught safe.
“Oh my God, are you okay?” I asked, running forwards towards Reece. I didn’t know the guy, but that was just— He’d almost been trampled by a cow.
Reece just sucked in a big breath and nodded. Then he said, “Okay, now we gotta get the calf out of her.”
Whoa, damn. I looked back at the cow in the chute, feeling my eyes go big. I’d been so concerned with catching the angry runaway cow, I’d all but forgotten about the reason we were trying to corral her in the first place.
“Do we call a vet?”
Reece had the flashlight up and was already yanking open cabinets and sorting through stuff on the shelves on the sturdiest of the barn’s walls. “Don’t I wish,” he said.
Then he must have found whatever he was looking for because he rushed back.
My mouth dropped open when I saw that he was holding a small length of chain. I backed away. “What are you going to do with that?”
“Pull the calf,” he said, not looking my direction. He was too intent on his task. “Can you hold this?” He shoved the flashlight at me. “Keep it pointed at the birth canal.”
I grabbed it because he was letting it go and moving on whether I was ready or not. I held the heavy flashlight and tried to keep it steady as he wrapped the chain in small loops around the two hooved legs that were extending out the back end of the mother cow.
And then he did exactly what he’d described. He started pulling on the chains, literally yanking the calf out of its mother.
“Push, mama,” he said, as if the mother could understand any of what he was saying. Whether or not the cow was pushing, Reece was definitely pulling. Pulling so hard his muscles strained against his flannel shirt.
It was cold outside, but after a few minutes of pulling, sweat beaded on his forehead. The calf had slid a few inches out, but if Reece’s occasional slipped swear words were any indication, it wasn’t going as smoothly as he hoped.
“Dammit, we’re gonna need the big calf-puller. Can you hold this so it doesn’t slip back inside?”
Oh crap, he was talking to me?
“Uh, okay.”
He’d hooked a handle onto the chains and we did the most awkward handoff. “Just keep pulling,” he instructed. “Don’t let it slip back in.”
Great. No pressure. I dug my feet into the dirt that made up the ground of the barn and pulled as hard as I could to keep up the pressure of pulling that Reece had started while he disappeared into the darkness.
The mother cow was no less restless now that we were yanking a calf from her womb, the poor calf straddled half-in, half-out.
“How long can the calf last like this?” I asked. “Isn’t this bad for it?”
“Sorry, I should have told you. It’s probably already gone. To be breech for that long, there’s not much hope. But we’ve got to get it out to save the mother.”
His words hit me like a brick to the face. It’s probably already gone.
I didn’t stop pulling, though. It was just a cow, I tried to remind myself. A commonplace enough tragedy.
Still, there were stupid tears in my eyes by the time Reece got back with a contraption even more medieval than the chains.
It was a long pole with a T shape on the end that he braced against the back end of the cow. Then he attached a crank to the handle of the pull chains. Instead of us pulling, he turned the crank. Braced against the back of the cow’s behind and legs, it had far more pulling power than either of us.
And inch by inch, the calf emerged from its mother.
Finally, in one last whoosh, the calf came all the way out and fell in one slippery plop onto the floor of the barn enclosure.
