“The trick will be finding someone willing to help with an arson investigation with Lucas Shoemacher at the middle of it.He’s a powerful man in this town, and his family isn’t likely to say anything incriminating,” Cooper replied heavily.
He pulled up to the bunkhouse and sat with the engine idling.“I'll figure it out.Keep this between us for now.”
“Of course.”
Gray ended the call.
He went inside and opened the folder of photographs.Pulling out a magnifying glass and a bright lamp, he went to work.
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 borenoresemblance to its jet-black Angus mother or the red-bodied, white-faced coloring of its supposed Hereford sire.
The calf wasenormous.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.”
