Chapter 1
Jess saidhe was a fool to let his cows calve this late (or early, depending on your point of view; Judd being an optimist, he liked early). You’re not getting any younger, she nagged. You’re going to kill yourself if you keep this up. A man your age needs to act his age.
She might be right about the killing himself part. At eighty, there wasn’t a lot of spring left in this stringy old bird. But he’d be damned if he’d let himself degenerate into one of those overweight farts with their MAGA hats superglued to their scalps and spend his days down valley at Newsome’s hunkered around a potbelly amongst the jars of pickled eggs and hogs’ feet and jawing about this and that and what the world was coming to.
Jess was also correct about the calves. Most ranchers let their cows calve in February or March, though some went for a fall calving as late as October. Those were generally bigger outfits, those factory jobs with plenty of money for feed because there’d be no pastureland for grazing until spring and most of those factory-style ranchers had neither the patience nor good sense to let their cows eat what was good for them instead of what was good for the ranchers. That always ticked him off, though. Being a small rancher lumped in with the factory farms, that is. He did his level best to make sure his cows were grass-fed all year round. That meant restricting some of his prime grazing land for harvesting only, but it was a way to make sure his herd got grass, even in winter.
The problem was he’d lost fine young calves to that damn diphtheria this summer and all on account of wrecking his knee stepping off that finicky old ladder leading down from the mow. He’d slipped was all. Missed the rung and fell maybe four feet, which was enough to give him what the doctor said was a tibial plateau fracture—he had the man write it out so he could google it—and a couple torn ligaments. He’d been laid up for eight weeks, waiting to heal because, after his search, he decided no one was coming at him with a drill and a knife, no sir. This meant he’d had no choice but to allow his sister’s dumber-than-a-stump boy to “help out.” My God, that near about ruined him. That kid was so busy looking at his damn cell phone, he never did see when the calves wandered into thistle. Like every baby, a calf is a silly creature; everything goes into its mouth. Well, his calves’ mouths got all tore up and then the diphtheria set in and, within three weeks, fifteen calves had pneumonia. Ten died.
Judd’s ranch was small. Ten dead calves in a season was huge. So he’d had no choice but to try and get a jump. Was it a risk bringing out eight new calves now? Sure. Nothing in this life was certain except death and taxes.
But what was worse was to get beat. What was worse was not to try at all.