Chapter 6
The first calf arrived on Tuesday evening, approximately three weeks ahead of the due date Gray had calculated for the earliest-conceived animals in the herd.
He was eating dinner when his phone buzzed. The text from Sully was four words: Calving barn. Come now.
He went to the barn. He ran to the barn, actually.
One side of the barn was an open pen where Jenna’s breeding cows clustered around a large round bale of hay.
The other side of the barn was a row of roomy birthing stalls.
If a cow gave some advance warning that she was getting close to calving, she got to spend a few days in cow luxury, bedded down in knee-deep straw under heat lamps and a surveillance camera.
Sully had installed the cameras after Dillon confirmed they were in for a rough calving season.
Even though none of the cows had shown any indication that they were ready to give birth and it was still early for any of them to do so, Sully had separated out the six cows whose bellies were the largest and most concerning to Dillon and ensconced each of them in a stall.
Sully stood by the half-door of the last stall with his arms folded and an expression that Gray recognized as Sully's version of existential bewilderment.
On a less stoic man, it might have involved visible emotion.
On Sully, it looked like mild surprise accompanied by a complicated internal commentary.
“How big?” Gray asked.
“You'll need to see it to believe it.”
Sully opened the stall door and they went in.
No surprise, the cow was Snowball. She stood over her newborn calf in the middle of the large stall, calm but watchful. Which was to say, she was doing exactly what a mama cow was supposed to do in the aftermath of delivery.
She had cleaned the calf already, and it was trying out its legs with the unsteady focus of the very newly born. It had figured out how to get its front legs thrust out in front of it but had yet to figure out how to unfold its back legs and stand all the way up.
The calf was cream-colored.
The distinctive, warm cream shade of a Charolais. It bore no resemblance to its jet-black Angus mother or the red-bodied, white-faced coloring of its supposed Hereford sire.
The calf was enormous. It was long-legged and deep chested, its head disproportionately large in the way of cattle bred for muscle. It blinked at Gray with pale-lashed brown eyes and made a noise that was half moo and half bawl of complaint. At least it had that in common with its mama.
“Male or female?” Gray asked.
“Male.”
“Have you weighed him, yet?”
“Yep.”
Gray pulled out his notebook and asked reluctantly. “And?”
“One hundred and eight pounds.”
“Wow,” he breathed. The average birth weight for a Hereford-cross calf in a mid-sized Angus dam was between sixty-five and seventy-five pounds.
“C-Section or natural?” Gray asked.
“She managed to deliver it with Dillon and me helping pull it. Dillon says Snowball has a wide pelvis. Some of the other cows won't be that lucky.”
Gray asked, “Can you imagine how big he would’ve been if Snowball had carried him to term?”
Sully shuddered.
“Have you talked with Dillon about inducing some of the most at risk cows early?”
Sully gave him a sharp look. “No. But that’s a good idea. If we can save the smaller cows a week or two of calf growth, we might avoid some of the C-sections.”
Gray shrugged. “Dillon will know how early you can safely induce labor.”
Sully nodded. “I’ll ask him when he’s done flushing out mama. The placenta tore during the birth and Dillon’s making sure none of it got left behind to cause infection.”
Gray noted the gender, birth weight, time, the calf's color, and its conformation. He stepped inside to photograph the calf for his records. It regarded his phone with mild interest, then went back to the business of standing.
Dillon finished whatever he was doing to the cow and carried his equipment out of the stall.
He murmured something about washing up and disappeared while Sully and Gray backed out of the stall to watch the calf make another attempt at standing.
It nearly got all four legs cooperating, but then one gave out and all three remaining legs collapsed at once. The big calf flopped back to its belly.
“I'll say one thing for him,” Sully commented. “He’s a good-looking calf.”
The calf was approximately the size of a Great Dane trying earnestly to be a cow. He thought about the thirty-one other births still pending and hoped all the outcomes were as good as this one.
Gray agreed, “He is a looker.”
Dillon pulled into the Foster Ranch Thursday morning driving a truck that had seen better days and carrying a large thermos of coffee that suggested he had already resigned himself to what lay ahead. He met Gray at the calving barn door.
“Update me,” he said, climbing out.
“The genetic samples came back yesterday,” Gray said. “Charolais sire. Confirmed across all four samples.”
“Shocker of the century.” Dillon surveyed the pasture. “How many calves since Tuesday?”
“Two more. Minerva and Penelope. Both needed assistance from me and Sully.”
“Weights?”
“One-twelve, and one-nineteen.”
“One-nineteen!” Dillon exclaimed under his breath.
“Luckily, Penelope is the largest cow in the herd. But let me tell you. It was touch and go. Sully was on the verge of calling you when Penelope finally managed to push it out.”
Dillon was quiet for a moment. One-hundred-nineteen pounds was, in Gray's amateur assessment, an alarming birth weight for a calf whose dam was half the size of a Charolais breeding cow.
“How’s Penelope?” Dillon asked. “Any bleeding? Trouble expelling the placenta?”
“No and no,” Gray answered. “Sully got the calf positioned just right, and the delivery went well, if slow, after that.”
Gray looked down at his notebook. “I've flagged eight cows for priority attention. They're the individuals in the herd with the largest bellies relative to their frame size.”
Sully piped up. “Any chance we can induce the ones in danger of not being able to deliver? We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Darned lucky,” Dillon retorted. “Calves are fully developed and safe to deliver about ten days before their due dates. Calves born more than four weeks early rarely survive. I’m comfortable inducing any of your cows ten days early.
I can be talked into inducing the smallest cows two weeks early.
Much younger than that and we risk underdeveloped lungs and not enough brown fat to survive Montana temperatures, no matter how many heat lamps you point at them. ”
“Which cow do your calculations say is most at risk, Gray?” Sully asked.
“Number 96.” Gray answered without hesitation. “She's been a front-runner on the weight curve since the beginning, and she’s a lot smaller than Snowball.”
“When is she due? Dillon asked.
Gray referred to his notes. “Based on Jenna’s breeding notes, which are blessedly thorough, 96 is due in twelve days.”
Dillon nodded. “Let’s do it. I'll go get the meds to induce her. And I’ll grab one of the C-section kits I put together.”
Jenna appeared at the barn door, wearing an expression that fell somewhere between resigned and fascinated. She said, “How are my girls?”’
“Getting bigger by the minute. Dillon has agreed to induce labor up to two weeks early to give the smaller cows a chance to deliver naturally before their babies get too big to pass through the birth canal.”
Jenna closed her eyes briefly. “As a woman who’s delivered a baby, I can’t tell you how much sympathy I’m feeling for my cows, right now.”
Gray smiled a little. “I found the lot number on your sperm order. I'll walk you through the documentation tomorrow so you can file a claim against the company. But first we need to get through calving season. Then you can send them a nice, fat vet bill.”
“And hopefully not the replacement cost of any cows we lost in calving,” she said heavily.
“Dillon’s a very good vet,” Gray replied with quiet conviction.
“Okay,” Jenna said with the determination of a woman who’d faced worse and come through it. “What can I do to help?”
By noon, they had successfully induced and delivered three more calves, two naturally, one by C-section.
Sully drafted Dillon’s brother Reno into the birthing operation, as well.
Reno was a bullfighter for the rodeo and outstanding at knowing when cattle were getting ready to panic or rebel.
Not only that, but he knew exactly how to restrain a cow without harming her.
It was an odd skill set and not applicable in too many other situations, but it came in handy today.
They broke for lunch up at the house. Jenna served plates of sandwiches and coffee along with a casserole had mysteriously appeared in Jenna's refrigerator this morning while everyone was in the calving barn.
Gray suspected it was the work of the WoWS. The women struck him as the types to make sure any of their sisters dealing with a crisis were adequately fed.
As they carried their plates to the sink, Dillon said, “The good news is Charolais cattle tend to have healthy calves, good conformation, and excellent birth vigor. These aren't sick babies. They're just big.”
“Very big,” Jenna said dryly.
“Very big,” Dillon agreed. “Have you done the math on their likely market weight?”
“I haven't had time to do anything except stare at giant white calves.”
Gray had already run the numbers because he ran numbers the way other people drank water—automatically and continuously.
He piped up with, “Charolais-cross steers typically finish around fifteen to twenty percent heavier than Hereford-cross steers,” he said. “At current market prices per hundredweight, that translates to roughly—”
He gave her the number.
Jenna set down the plate she was washing and turned to stare at him, soapy water dripping heedlessly off her hands onto the floor.
“Per animal?” she said blankly.