Keys, truck, flashlight.
I call the sheriff’s non-emergency line while I drive the fence line with my high beams on.
I find the cuts—clean, even, the work of someone who knows how wire fencing works and exactly where to sever it for maximum drift.
Four sections. A quarter mile of open fence.
The cattle are scattered along the county road.
Most of them are grazing the shoulder, confused and docile.
I get out and start pushing them back through on foot, which is stupid and dangerous in the dark on a road where people drive too fast, but I don’t have a horse and I don’t have help and Earl’s cattle are on a highway.
I find one down at the curve.
Hereford cow. One of Earl’s best.
She made it to the center of the road before a truck hit her.
The driver is on the shoulder, shaking, his front end destroyed.
He’s not hurt. The cow is.
She’s down on the asphalt, breathing in wet, labored heaves, her back legs at an angle that tells me everything I need to know.
I call Grace.
Then I call the sheriff again, this time the emergency line.
Then I sit on the road beside a dying cow in the dark and put my hand on her neck and wait for help that’s twenty minutes away.
The driver keeps saying, “I didn’t see her. I didn’t see her.”
I know. You can’t see them in the dark.
You can’t see anything on these roads at night until it’s too late.
You’re driving and it’s dark and the road is empty and then suddenly it isn’t, and by the time your headlights find what’s in front of you, there’s no time to stop.
A dark road. Something in the path you didn’t see. Impact.
I press my hand against the cow’s neck and feel the life leaving her body in slow, shuddering increments, and I think about Rose on a highway in the rain and I can’t breathe.
Grace arrives first.
She’s not supposed to be out here—six months pregnant, middle of the night, on a highway—but she comes because that’s who she is.
She takes one look at the cow and her face tells me what I already know.
She gets her kit.
Does what she can, which isn’t much.
The cow dies under our hands at 10:32 PM on a random week night, on a road she never should have been on.
The sheriff comes. Takes a report. Looks at the fence cuts and says, “We’ll investigate,” in the tone of a man who already knows nothing will come of it.
Grace drives home.
