Pete grinned. “Did you know that’s what ranchers name calves that shouldn’t have made it?”
Makayla shook her head in the negative.
“Hope it is,” Pete declared.
Normally, Dillon would have left as soon as he determined that cow and calf had both come through the delivery healthy, but today he asked Pete under his breath, “Mind if we stick around till Hope stands and sucks?”
“Kid’s first birthing?” the farmer muttered back with a glance at Makayla, who’d come into the paddock and standing beside Tessa, petting the cow and telling her how brave she’d been.
“How’d you guess?” Dillon responded wryly.
He and the farmer exchanged grins.
Pete murmured, “Never gets old.”
Dillon grinned. “Same. Best part of my job by far.”
All four of the humans retreated outside the paddock and hung on the fence as the calf figured out how to manage four legs and discovered gravity. Makayla moaned every time the calf almost made it to its feet and then collapsed.
When it finally managed a splayed, wobbly, sawhorse pose, both Makayla and Tessa cried. Silently, he passed each of them a tissue he pulled from his bag. As they mopped at their tears, Hope took her first wobbly steps and promptly toppled over.
“Oh, no!” Makayla exclaimed under her breath. “Shouldn’t someone go in and help her?”
“Nope. She’ll figure it out. Give her another minute or two.”
Sure enough, the little calf struggled to her feet a little more easily the second time, and wobbled toward her mother, who stood patiently beside her.
“Your heifer’s gonna be a good mother,” Dillon commented to Pete. “She’s standing right where her baby needs her to be to nurse.”
Pete nodded with a smile.
The calf took another tottering step and ran face first into her mama’s side.
“Watch this, Makayla,” Dillon said quietly. “Hope will start looking for food, son. It’s an instinct all mammals have.”
On cue, the calf started nosing around her mother’s side. The cow took an obliging step forward, placing the calf next to her swollen udder. As Hope bumped her nose around, the cow reached back and gave Hope’s rump a shove with her nose.
“Why’d the mama do that?” Makayla murmured.
Dillon answered, “Her udder’s so full it’s sore. She’s in a hurry for her baby to drink and make her more comfortable.”
Indeed, as Hope found her way to a teat and took her first, tentative sucks, the cow sighed aloud in relief, making all the humans grin.
Before long, Hope had the hang of it and stood beside her mother, moving from teat to teat, slurping until she had a cute milk mustache on her pink nose. The calf plopped to the ground, her legs folded under her and tucked her nose between her knees.
“Time for us to leave them alone so they can take a well-deserved nap,” Dillon announced quietly.
Tessa and Makayla thanked the farmer profusely for letting them witness the birth, and the farmer was nearly as profuse in his thanks to Dillon for saving cow and calf. Pete pulled him aside for a short, private conversation about payment that left both men grinning and nodding.
Dillon, Tessa, and Makayla headed for the truck, exhausted but happy.
As they headed for home, Makayla asked him, “Why do farmers name their calves they almost lost Hope?”
“Because they need a reminder sometimes to always have hope.”
Thursday morning she sat on the porch drinking coffee and noted that overnight the willows along the lakeshore had turned bright chartreuse, and red-winged blackbirds had started claiming territories in the cattails at the edge of the water with arguments bordering on belligerent. She wasn’t sure when she’d started noticing birds but it was nice.
Coffee on the porch had become her routine. One morning she’d taken her mug outside because Hamlet was throwing a tantrum over his breakfast not including scrambled eggs, and the next morning she’d done it again because the light on the pasture had been pretty. Now she did it every morning before she went upstairs and got ready to go to the store.
