Page 1 of Runaway for the Grumpy Daddy

Chapter 1

Boone

I knew before I had my coat off that the calf was coming wrong. You learn the sounds. A cow laboring right has a rhythm to her — work and rest, work and rest, like a tide. This one, Heifer 62, had gone ragged. Short grunts stacking up on top of each other, no rest between them, the sound of an animal working hard and getting nowhere.

My breath hung white in the lamplight when I let myself into the pen at four a.m. Mid-March, and the cold still owned the nights out here, whatever the sun promised at noon. The heat lamps threw amber down the row of pens, and 62 lay on her side in the deep straw, flank heaving, one eye rolled back to watch me come. First-calf heifer. Everything happening to her body was happening for the first time, and she was scared the way only a first-timer gets scared, that white-eyed panic that makes them fight the very thing trying to save them.

"Easy," I told her, low. "Easy, mama. Just me."

I kept talking while I stripped off my coat and shirt — bare to the shoulder in air cold enough to bite, and I barely felt it. I never do, once the work starts. I washed my arm in the bucket I'd set by earlier, soaped it slick to the shoulder, and knelt behind her in the straw.

"Gonna find out what's got you stuck. That's all. Nothing you have to do but breathe, girl."

She groaned when I went in, a long, low complaint, and her whole body clamped down around my arm hard enough to grind the bones of my hand together. I waited it out. That's most of this work, the waiting — knowing when to move and when to be still, and being able to be still while three hundred pounds of muscle tries to crush your arm flat. When the contraction passed, I went deeper, reading with my fingers what my eyes would never see.

Tail. Tailhead, and the small hard curve of hips, and no feet anywhere.

Breech. True breech, both hind legs folded forward under the calf's body, coming rump-first into a passage built for a diving calf, nose and forefeet leading. My stomach did the thing it always does — one cold drop, then level again. A breech doesn't wait. The cord pinches early, before the head's anywhere near air, and every contraction from here on was working against us both.

"All right," I said, and kept my voice exactly where it had been, because she was listening to it more than she knew. "All right, mama. We've got some work to do, you and me."

I could have gone for Cash. Ten minutes up the hill, ten minutes back, him swearing and stumbling into his boots. The thought came and went in less time than it takes to say it. Twenty minutes was the calf's whole life. I had two hands and I knew how to use them, and I have never in my life asked for help I could get by without. That's not pride. That's just arithmetic I learned young.

I went in after the first leg.

There's a way to do it, and it doesn't have much to do with strength. You push the calf forward, back into the room of the womb, working against everything the cow's body wants. 62 fought me, bearing down, and I had to hold that calf off the pelvis with a steady pressure, not shoving, just refusing, the way you refuse a green horse without ever jerking the rein. Then down along the leg, past the hock, finding the small slick hoof folded under, and here's the part that matters: you cup that hoof in your palm before you bring it around, because a hoof dragged bare across the wall of the womb will tear her open from the inside, and she'd never know why she died.

My hands make coffee mugs look like doll furniture. Cash says it, the town thinks it. Inside that heifer, working blind in a space with no room to spare, I moved a hoof the size of a silver dollar through a quarter-turn arc, shielded in my palm the whole way, and never left a mark.

"There's one," I told her when the leg came straight, hoof pointing home. "Good girl. There's one. You're doing fine."

The second leg came harder. She was tiring, her contractions turning ropy and irregular, and the calf had shifted with the first correction so I had to find it all over again by feel, my shoulder jammed against her, my cheek against her hide, my breath and hers fogging together in the lamplight. Hock. Cannon. Hoof, tucked deep. Cup it. Bring it around slow. Slow. She bore down and I held everything exactly where it was — the strength for that part isn't in the arm, it's in the patience — and when she eased, I finished the arc and felt the second leg run true.

Two hooves in the passage now, hind feet coming, and I got the chains from the bucket and looped them above each fetlock, doubled below, so the pull would spread across the bone instead of snapping it.

"Now you push," I said, "and I'll pull, and we'll meet in the middle."

She pushed. I pulled with her, timing it, easing off between — and the calf came, hocks, stifles, and then stopped like it had hit a wall.

Hips. The calf's hips had locked in her pelvis, the widest part wedged in the narrowest, and I felt 62 feel it too. Her next contraction came weaker. The one after that barely came at all. Her groaning flattened out into something worse than groaning — a heifer giving up, deciding in whatever place cattle decide things that this was how it ended, and lying still to let it.

"No, ma'am," I said. "Not tonight."

I got the angle right — down, hard down toward her hocks, because a calf comes through a cow's pelvis in an arc, not a line, and pulling straight back is how fools kill both of them. I rotated the calf a quarter turn to walk those hips through the widest part of her, set my boots, and pulled. Not a jerk. A long building pull, everything my back and shoulders had, metered out steady as pouring water, and I talked the whole time because she needed the sound even if she'd quit believing in it.

"Easy, mama. I've got you. I've got you both."

Something gave. The hips cleared with a shift I felt in my teeth, and then the rest came in a rush, ribs and shoulders and head sliding free in a hot slick of fluid, and the calf landed in the straw at my knees.

Limp. Yellow-stained and limp, eyes shut, not breathing.

I cleared its mouth with two fingers, stripped the membrane from its nose, hauled it up by the hind legs to let the fluid run — steam pouring off its wet hide into the freezing air like the calf was smoking. Nothing. I laid it down and took a stem of straw and worked it up one nostril, twisting. Nothing. I rubbed then, both hands, hard, dragging the towel of my palms along its ribs the way its mother's tongue should have been doing, rough enough to insult it, rough enough to make it mad if there was anything in there to get mad.

The barn held its breath. I could hear the lamp humming. I could hear my own heart.

Then it came. A sneeze. A wet, rattling, offended little explosion — and the calf dragged in a breath that shook its whole body.

I let out a breath of my own, one long exhale I'd apparently been holding since four o'clock, and for a second I put my forehead down against the calf's wet flank and just stayed there, feeling the small ribs start to breathe in and out. Heifer calf. Loud already, starting to complain.