Page 41 of Roughneck

“All right. Over here. This way. Atta girl.”

Finally, Isobel managed to get the cow to the fence near the eight-foot long swinging gate door. Before the cow could run away or move again, Isobel dropped the lariat and hurried to the gate to pull it toward them to enclose the heifer. Finally the heifer was secure, nose toward the apex of the V created by the side of the fence and the gate. Bessie wasn’t going anywhere till her calf was born. The whole close-the-cow-in-with-the-paddock-door thing was another trick she’d learned from the dairy farm.

“Maybe Cassandra?” Isobel offered conversationally while she knelt down to open up the surgical box and grab out a long plastic sleeve. She fit the glove on over her left hand and then pulled the sleeve all the way up her arm to her shoulder. “Or something classic, like Helen?”

Here goes nothing. She squeezed some lubricant on her hand. With her right hand she held onto the gate and with her left, she reached right up into the cow’s hoo-ha.

And reached.

And reached.

She was almost shoulder deep before she felt was she was looking for. A little hoof, and further in, a head. She felt around. Nose, jaw, and there it was—the mouth.

She stuck her finger inside and the little mouth started sucking on her finger. A grin cracked her face.

The baby was alive.

You never knew when labor had gone on for an abnormally long time. Another of the tools in Hunter’s truck was a calf-cutter. In the case of dead calves, sometimes you had to cut the calf up in order to pull it out and save the mother’s life.

She liked that Hunter had left the calf-cutter in the truck and hadn’t just automatically brought it out. It indicated a sort of optimism. Or at least a commitment to trying every other option before going to that extreme.

But this baby was alive, and Isobel was going to keep it that way.

She felt around some more. Okay, there was one front hoof and… yep, there was the second one. The calf was in the right position. It must just be oversized. If she remembered her statistics right, oversized calves were the trouble in ninety percent of problematic calving cases.

Which meant she was going to have to put that calf puller and her own muscles to good use.

She withdrew her arm and breathed through her mouth, trying to ignore all the goo that came out with it.

A glamorous job this was not.

She reached down for another glove and then grabbed the chains of the calf puller. They had little cuffs on the end to attach around the baby calf’s front hooves.

Here went nothing. She dove back in, this time with both arms, each hand holding a chain.

The cow bucked forward.

“Oof!” Isobel was knocked off balance, stumbling forward with the cow. There wasn’t far for the cow to go—unless she nosed at the gate to push it open. Which she immediately did.

The gate started to swing back, widening the V and making space for the cow to get loose. Isobel yanked her right arm out of the cow and grabbed the gate to pull it back in position.

“Cassandra!” Isobel yelled. “Naughty cow!”

Once the heifer was still, Isobel tried again. But the second she took her hand off the gate to try to attach the first chain around the calf’s hoof, Bessie/Cassandra was taking off again.

Isobel grabbed the gate at the last second to stop her, again.

Hair had escaped Isobel’s ponytail but she couldn’t push it out of her face because, yeah, cow goo all up and down her arms. She tried to blow it out of the way but it just settled right back in place.

She pursed her lips and huffed out a breath. She needed three hands—two to put the chains on the baby calves hooves and one to hold the gate shut—but obviously, she only had two. And Hunter was just sitting there behind her, probably gloating and laughing at her.

Ugh!

Okay, well maybe she could get the cow to lay down. If she would lay down, that would solve all of Isobel’s problems.

“Why don’t you take a load off, honey?” Isobel crooned, pushing down on the cow’s rump. “Let’s have a lie down.”

The cow just started to the side again, knocking into the gate so that Isobel had to grab it before it opened again.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com