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“Slow down,” he called out in my ear from behind, his chest pressed up full against my back.
I nodded and down-shifted with the button like he’d shown me, slowing us, still a good distance from the cows. “What is it?” I asked him.
“We want to watch to see if any of them look like they’re about to drop a calf.”
I pulled the ATV to a stop. “How do you tell? What are the signs?”
He shrugged, eyes still examining the herd. “You start to learn how to tell.”
“Not helpful. If I’m supposed to be out here looking for this by myself, I’ll need more to go on.”
“Okay, well, legs hanging out of a cow are a pretty good sign.”
“Gee, thanks, I’d have never figured that part out for myself.”
He chuckled again. “But there are some other tried and true ways.”
“Such as—” I waved a hand.
“Well, if you see a cow acting weird. Not like herself.”
I could feel my eyebrows lift. “How am I supposed to know how cows normally act?”
“You’ll learn.”
He spoke so confidently. And as if I’d be around long enough to learn the ins and outs of cow behavior.
“I’ll still come out twice a day the first week to teach you what to watch for. But it’ll be helpful to have you doing all the other trips so I can work with Jer to get the ranch up and running. Your job will be with the newborns, checking on them like we just did, making sure they’re up and moving. Plus keeping an eye on the moms who are laboring. Some days it’ll be busy and some days we might not have any newborns at all. But since the calves are the most important part of the ranch, we try not to lose a single one.”
I nodded, suddenly feeling a little wowed that they were allowing me to be part of such an important task. And then immediately worried. “Wait, don’t you think you should give this job to someone who has more experience? Like Ruth?”
Reece just smiled. He had a bad habit of doing that, especially since his smile was particularly lethal to parts of me I’d rather not acknowledge at the current moment. Okay, my nether regions, it was my nether regions. Every time he smiled at me it made me go liquid. Not helpful for my concentration.
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?”
