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Case in point, I blinked, realizing I’d lost track of what he was talking about. “Wait, sorry, sorry,” I said, waving my hand. “Can you repeat that last part?”
“I was just saying that whenever we do find a calf, I’ll show you how to tag the ear. Ninety percent of the time, there won’t be a problem and we’ll just find a calf on the ground, mama’s taking good care, and all we need to do is tag the baby and log them into our system.”
I nodded. Okay, that didn’t seem too hard, except for the tagging part. “Does it hurt them?”
That smile again from Reece.
I blinked and looked away, squirming on the seat of the ATV. Not especially helpful, since it was still rumbling between my legs. I’d never, in my whole life, had my body feel so… well, so awake on me.
“Oh look, over there,” Reece said suddenly. “See that red lady?”
I frowned and held a hand over my eyes in the direction he was pointing. I saw a group of cows. Most of them were brown, a few a lighter brown.
“Her. Look, the one that’s separating herself a little from the others.”
Okay, I did see one pulling away a little. She was sort of waddling, shuffling back and forth. It was definitely easy to tell the pregnant ones from the non-pregnant ones. They looked like they’d swallowed a barrel.
“I think she’s about to pop,” Reece said. “You can see she’s uncomfortable. A cow about to give birth will separate out from the herd like that, and go between lying down and standing up. It’s the first stage of labor, and it ends when the fetal membrane or water bag breaks. It can last from two to six hours.”
“Should we go closer?”
“Nope. Just means we should keep an eye on her. And clock the time.” He pulled out his phone. “It’s ten o clock now. Next time we come around we will go closer and see if her water’s broken. Then comes hard labor, which shouldn’t take longer than two hours. If it does, we start to get concerned, like we did with Bessie’s birth.”
“’Cause it can mean something’s wrong?”
He nodded. “Exactly.”
I shivered. “What do I do if I’m out here alone and run into that?”
“Come get one of us.”
“That’s the answer I was hoping for.”
“Don’t worry, we don’t expect you to know what you’re doing. You’re just our eyes on the ground so I don’t have to be out here riding around all the time doing the basics. That’s all we’re asking of you, just the basics. The complicated stuff we’ll still handle.”
I nodded. Okay, the more he talked, the more I felt I could probably handle this.
Until a few hours later when we came back by to check on Red as Reece had taken to calling her, and it seemed, magically, there was now a calf on the ground beside her!
“Oh my gosh!” I cried as we drove up. “Look! Look!”
We’d gotten lunch after Reece had driven me around the rest of the pastures. He’d sketched out a rough map of the land to help me orient myself—it was a bit overwhelming. The ranch was two thousand acres large. Two thousand!
Then we’d done a little more work on the bunkhouse. I hadn’t quite finished yesterday. And now, here we were again. And there was a new baby cow!
“Excellent,” Reece said, hopping off the ATV and then unzipping a bag on the back of it.
He showed me how to load the tagging gun, then held it out to me. “Just grab the ear and push the trigger as quick as you can. You don’t always have a lot of time since the moms can be protective of their newborns.”
I blanched. “Don’t you think I should watch you do one first?”
He smiled his Reece smile. “No better way to learn than by doing. The more you do while I watch and can run interference with Mama cow, the better.”
I gulped. “Um. Sure.”
I wore a pair of gloves Ruth had lent me and I awkwardly grabbed the gun from him. A tag with #4 stuck out from what was essentially a giant ear-piercing gun.
“Just get the ear in between here,” Reece pointed at the little slot in the gun, “and pull the trigger.”
I looked around at all the cows milling around us to see where their ear tags were placed and they all seemed to be in the flappy part, but not too near the edge. Okay, okay, I could do this. I could totally do this.
Except, as we got closer and closer to Red and her small baby, still wet from afterbirth, I was pretty sure, nope, no way could I do this!
But Reece was there beside me, talking to the mama calmly and jovially, congratulating her on her baby and then he was all, “Go, do it now. You got this. Go for it before she gets riled.”
