Claiming Ground by Laura Bell

Author:Laura Bell [Bell, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59289-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

Tim and I had bonded early on in adversity. We’d been left in charge of the ranch on one of the rare occasions when Stan and Mary took a break to travel, usually after Christmas and before the crush of heifers calving in February. At the time, he was a skinny high school kid; I was eleven years older but still a green hand. We managed many things well, and I’m sure we were thanked and appreciated for it, but I remember best what went wrong.

It was winter and must have been a Saturday or Sunday because Tim was there to help feed. A cow was lying on the feedground with her uterus prolapsed out onto the straw and frozen ground. We saddled horses and herded her and her young calf gently down the lane and back to the corrals. She seemed able to walk all right, though slowly, and occasionally would stop and strain as if wanting to push it all out. In the calving shed, we locked her head into the stanchion, gave her a heavy dose of penicillin in the muscle of her hip, and washed the prolapse with a bucket of warm antiseptic water. Using all four hands, we worked the mass of it back inside her and held our hands flat against her hind end while she strained to undo our work.

“She needs sewed up,” he said.

“Yes. Stan’ll be home tonight, right?”

“Yes.”

“Should we call a vet?”

We calculated the cost. This was the early eighties when interest was high and calf prices shockingly low, a time that many ranchers didn’t survive and the ones who did took in hunters, contracted fencing jobs, cut corners and let pickups and paint grow old. That winter, with a quiver in his lip, Stan had asked me to take a fifty-dollar monthly pay cut to help make ends meet, and I said yes. The line between making it and losing it was that close, and we weren’t about to call a vet frivolously. Smeared with blood and mucus, we leaned into her hind end and weighed our decision.

“So this is just a prolapse, right?,” I ask. “We see it all the time on the mountain. A cow will have some of her uterus hanging out and it isn’t pretty, but she doesn’t die. Nobody gets too upset about it, do they?”

“No, we just get her into a corral, then cleaned up, sewed up and shipped to town to the sale.”

“Is this the same?”

“It looks worse, maybe, but I think it’s the same.”

“I do, too.” And after a long pause, I say, “All right, then. We’ll wait for Stan?”

“Yeah, wait for Stan.”

We broke a clean bale of straw for her and covered the stall with it. When we turned her loose, she lay down in it and pushed her uterus back out into the straw. When Stan got home that night and went to the barn to sew her up, she was already dead, her calf curled up in the straw at her side.

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