Chapter Two – Lila.10 #2
The sound that came was wrong while I was being suffocated by grief. Wind. Harsh bloodthirsty blasts, reminding me of the storm that built the night Ethan died.
We’d been having wind all week, the cold ridge wind that arrived after dark and worked through every gap in the weatherboarding.
But this was something else. Sustained and mean, it pressed against the window frames without letting up, a continuous force rather than a gust, and somewhere beneath it was the particular rattle of the back door when the la
I made my way to the kitchen, looking through the window. The turmoil of crimson was softened by the edges of soft yellows as the sun rose its weary head.
But as I looked past the intensity of the dawn light, I focussed on the yard, the fence, the south pasture beyond. I pressed my palm flat to the cold glass and looked.
The fence had gone in two places. Not bent, not leaning, but gone, the posts snapped clean and tilting toward the ground, the wire running loose between them in long sagging loops.
The posts at the south end of the paddock were the ones I had been meaning to replace since September, the ones where the wood had gone soft and brown along the grain and gave when you pushed them.
I had looked at them and thought about them and written them on a list and then not gotten to them, because there was always something more urgent. Now two of them were on the ground.
The gate to the lower paddock was open. I could see it swinging on its one good hinge, a slow arc back and forth in the wind, and the paddock beyond it was the wrong shape: too open, too empty, not the packed closeness of livestock in a small space.
I counted what I could see. My breath fogged the glass and I wiped it.
Not enough. I followed the logic of the broken fence line south, toward the place where the pasture gave way to scrub, and the scrub gave way to the gravel shoulder of the county road.
A road where cars sped down, ignorant of any dangers waiting for them.
Dangers like my cattle! If they were out there, they wouldn’t last that long.
I stepped back from the window, sat down and turned sideways to pull on my boots, struggling with the enormity of my baby bump. After pulling on my thick Winter coat and gloves, I ventured outside.
The wind hit me full across the face, a mean, flat cold that found the tops of my cheeks and the back of my neck above the collar.
The yard was coated with warmth of the morning sunrise; and a feed bucket rolled ahead of me, stopping in the far corner.
The small gate to the kitchen garden was open, banging against the fence post in irregular time, and I went over and latched it on my way past.
When I’d reached the paddock fence, I could see hoof prints everywhere leaving a trail out and towards the south, toward the road.
I stood at the broken post as my hair wiped around me and the wind hurtled past, then I turned south and started walking.
The south pasture held nothing but sludgy mud from last night's rainstorm and icy grass.
It gave enough evidence of where the cattle had been, with hoof prints clustered near the water trough, a scatter of manure still faintly steaming in the cold, a length of orange fencing tape I had run between posts last week to redirect the herd away from the soft ground near the drain.
The tape had come loose on one end and was snapping in the wind, a flat, rhythmic crack.
I pulled it free, coiled it around my fist, and kept moving.
The wind didn’t let up. It came off the ridge in long, sustained pushes that hit me differently depending on which direction I was facing: flat in the chest when I walked into it, shoving at the back of my jacket when I turned.
I kept one arm crooked under my belly as I walked the uneven ground, steadying the weight of it over the frozen ruts and the places where the mud had heaved overnight.
My breath came out white and disappeared.
I found three of them behind the hay barn, sheltered in the narrow strip of windbreak between the barn wall and the equipment shed.
They stood together in the cold with the stillness cattle have when they have found the best available option and committed to it.
I moved them back toward the repaired section of the paddock, working around behind them, arm out, moving slow and wide.
The makeshift barrier took me twenty minutes to string: two fence posts driven into the soft earth with the back of a hammer, the orange tape run between them, a repair that would hold until it didn’t.
I stood back and looked at it, one hand pressed flat to my lower back.
“That’ll do,” I said, without conviction, to no one.
The creek was half an hour south on foot.
By the time I heard it I could already feel the ground changing under my boots, giving way to something wetter and less decided.
The willows along the bank had lost their leaves and stood with their bare branches trailing in the current, moving in the wind with a dry, clicking sound.
Two of them were in the creek bed. Hock-deep in the cold water, standing with the mute endurance of animals that have gotten themselves into a bad situation and are waiting for someone else to resolve it.
I stood on the bank for a moment and looked at the water.
It was dark and quick, cold enough that even from the bank I could feel its cold rising, and then I stepped in.
The water went over the tops of my boots immediately.
The cold was a specific, physical thing, wrapping both feet and rising above my ankles.
I exhaled hard through my nose and kept moving, both arms out, reading the creek bed through my soles one step at a time as the stones rolled and resettled beneath me.
Somewhere in the middle I stopped being able to tell where the cold ended and my feet began.
I reached the nearer animal, then the farther one, and got my hand through its halter.
I brought them back across the creek and drove them north. My boots soaked through and stayed soaked. The cold moved up from my feet as I walked, settling in my ankles, and I focused on the ground ahead and kept my breathing even.
The ones I couldn’t find were the three that had gone south.
I walked the fence line twice in the long afternoon, the wind working against me the whole way, my eyes moving from the churned mud at my feet to the road beyond the treeline every time I crested the rise.
The road was visible in glimpses through the bare branches: pale gravel, the odd slick of ice where the drainage ditch had overflowed and frozen, the reflective markers at the bend catching the flat gray light.
I stood at the rise each time and looked at the road in both directions and saw nothing…
no shapes on the shoulder, no evidence. That absence should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.
The back pain sharpened somewhere around midday and by mid-afternoon it had stopped being a dull ache and become something specific and pulsing that lived in the sacrum and sent a line of pressure up the right side of my spine with each step.
During that time, I’d been back to the ranch and changed my socks and boots, warming my feet to get the feeling back in them.
I stopped twice to press both hands hard into the small of my back and breathe through my nose until the pulse softened enough to continue.
My head had started pounding, made worse by every step I took.
But I kept moving, because stopping felt like making a decision I wasn’t ready to make.
The light began to fail in the way winter light fails: not gradually but suddenly, the sky going from flat gray to something closer to slate, the shapes of the treeline losing their definition.
The ranch house lights brightened in the distance, a single yellow square visible through the gap in the poplars by the creek crossing.
I looked at it for a moment from the top of the rise.
My legs had moved past tired and into something else, a deep, structural heaviness, each step something I had to decide to take rather than simply take.
By now, I’d found seven, and still missing three. But I knew it was time. I’d hardly eaten, drank minimal amounts and felt frozen to my core. It was time to call it a day and head back to the warmth of the fire, or perhaps a nice hot bath.
Peanut agreed, as she did a long, deliberate roll under my palm, there and then gone, and something in my chest broke open on a breath that was not quite a word and not quite a cry, just a sound, shapeless and brief, swallowed almost before it existed. I pressed my hand harder against the movement.
I looked at my ranch. The yellow light in the window, small and steady in the failing dark.
Then took one last look at the road, before I turned and walked back towards the promise of warmth.
But then, I heard it: carried on the wind from the direction of the county road, faint but unmistakable, the specific sound of horses and men shouting, getting louder, and with them the soft mooing of cattle.