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An especially easy weaning this time, A
And then, as Dallas led her toward the herd, she saw the reason for the u
“Oh, no,” she groaned to Dallas. “There must be a fence down.”
This was not going to improve her husband’s disposition.
It was going to mean another day’s worth of hard, hot work, plus the extra physical and emotional strain on the cattle, plus the expense of the hired hands. She thought of Billy Crosby at that moment and said with a
Dallas ’s ears suddenly perked forward, attracting her attention.
When A
Dallas lifted his feet, one after the other, as if he were nervous.
She had to nudge him hard to get him to move toward the lump.
It was a cow, but it had a “wrong” look to it. Cows spent a lot of their lives lying down, but not stretched out on their sides as this one was, with her legs straight out and her head pressed sideways against the ground.
It lay as no living cow ever would.
She must have simply keeled over and died there on the spot, A
A shudder went through the big horse.
A
Dallas stepped backward. A
Not that she blamed him for wanting to move. The smell was terrible in the heat, because the cow had emptied its bowels and bladder, and there was drying blood…
“Blood?” A
This was a pasture of pregnant cows that had just been weaned from their latest calves. Had this one miscarried and bled to death?
Why else would there be-
A gush of blood was pooled all around the fallen cow, as if every drop in her had poured out. The ground beneath her was so dry and hard that very little of the blood had soaked in; it remained a viscous, jellylike mass rapidly turning crusty and attracting flies, which also buzzed around the cow’s orifices.
“Oh, no,” A
The blood had not come from the rear of the animal, as it would in a miscarriage, but from the front. It had all poured out of the head, and from a smiling gash across her throat. Coyotes were the only predators, and she knew they didn’t normally go after cattle this size. Even the calves were big for coyote prey. Maybe the drought was altering the natural order of things.
Or maybe the cow died first and then the coyote-
But why wasn’t any of the carcass torn away or consumed?
There weren’t any bulls here; what would scare away a coyote?
None of it was making sense to A
And then she realized with a shock which cow this was.
It was the cow that had caused all the ruckus yesterday, the old breeder that Billy Crosby had kicked in his rage.
A
“I’m sorry, old dear,” she murmured to it even as she held her breath to keep from breathing in the foul odors of its passing.
Speaking of its offspring, where was its “weaned” calf?
A
A
Instead, she pulled herself back onto Dallas without the aid of any bucket or stump and rode home to give her husband the bad news.
UNLIKE HIS WIFE, Hugh Senior didn’t hesitate to walk into the blood, or to touch the brutal wound, which was how he came to the conclusion that no coyote had killed her.
“A
“Oh, Hugh! Oh, no! Are you sure?”
He didn’t even bother to answer, and so she knew it must be obvious. What he did say was, “And we know just who would have done that to this particular cow, don’t we?”
Tears came to A
Her pity wasn’t only for the poor cow, but also for Billy Crosby, and she thought, Oh, Billy, what have you done?
She thought of the times she’d sat down with the boy and tried to talk to him about high school diplomas and jobs and being a husband and a father. She felt sickened by the blood, and the smell, and sickened for him. Her stomach heaved and she bent over the dirt and grass, though nothing came up. It was then that she noticed the cause of the burnt vegetation smell she had noticed earlier.
“Hugh!” she called, holding her hand over her mouth. She took her hand down and pointed. “He started a fire here.”
Hugh stalked over and then walked around, examining the ground and coming to an analysis: “He tried to set a fire to burn her body… which means he didn’t care if he burned the whole ranch down, and all the animals and us with it.” He stood up straight, and was framed in front of the distant, dramatic clouds like a photograph of a rancher in his element. “I wonder why his fire didn’t catch.”
“Because her blood put it out before it could, that’s why.”
A
“This is a horrible thing to do, horrible! How dare he, Hugh, how dare he?”
“Because that’s the kind of person Billy is, A
A FEW MINUTES LATER, on their ride home, her anger weakened.
“Hugh, maybe it wasn’t Billy.” She offered up her one last benefit of the doubt to him. “It could have been anybody. Some crazy person driving by. A trespasser, an illegal hunter.”
Her husband threw her a disbelieving look.
“And this stranger just happens to find that pasture and kill that particular cow out of all of our cattle. You can’t be serious, A