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“Where do you want them?”

I showed him the holding area we’d fenced west of the arena — four-strand wire on T-posts, reinforced at the corners, with a load-out gate wide enough for the trailer. He walked the perimeter, tested two posts by leaning on them, checked the gate latch.

“This’ll hold,” he said. Then: “Most of them.”

We unloaded.

The bulls came off the trailer in the order Ty had loaded them, which was the order of temperament — calmest first, rankest last. The first four were big Braford-crosses, red and white, heavy-shouldered, moving with the bored confidence of animals who’d been hauled to enough rodeos to treat the process as commute. They went into the holding pen without drama, each one stopping at the water trough on the way in.

The fifth was a gray Brahma-cross Ty called Hammer. Smaller than the first four, lighter through the chest, with a left horn that curved down instead of up. He came off the trailer sideways and stayed sideways, eyeing the pen, the fence, me, and the general concept of cooperation with equal suspicion.

“Hammer’s been off since Caldwell,” Ty said. “Ran a seventy-two in April, then dropped to a sixty-one at Caldwell. Can’t figure him.”

I leaned on the rail. Hammer stood in the pen with his head low, not eating, not drinking, not settling. The other bulls had found their spots and started grazing the sparse grass along the fence line. Hammer hadn’t moved from where he’d stopped.

“Footsore?” I asked.

“Checked. Sound.”

“Feed change?”

“Same mix he’s been on two years.”

I watched him. The way he stood — weight shifted slightly left, head carried lower than the others, the good horn angled toward the herd instead of away from it.

“He’s herd-sour,” I said.

Ty looked at me.

“He’s not hurt and he’s not sick,” I said. “He’s lonely. Brahmas are herd animals more than most. You’ve been hauling him alone in a partitioned trailer, penning him separate at the grounds. He’s dropping scores because he’s spending the whole ride thinking about where the other ones are.”

Ty’s jaw worked once. He looked at Hammer. Looked at the other bulls grazing together along the far fence.

“Hell,” he said.

“Put him in with the group. Let him travel next to another one. See what Caldwell’s score looks like when he’s not counting heads.”

Ty opened the gate between the pens. Hammer walked through without hesitation, crossed to the herd, and put his head down beside the biggest red Braford. Within a minute he was grazing.

Ty watched this with the expression of a man recalculating a season.

“Sixty-one to what?” he asked.

“Hard to say. But he won’t run worse for having a friend.”

Ty shut the gate. He pulled a notebook from his coat pocket — spiral-bound, water-stained, the kind that lived in a coat pocket for years — and wrote something in it. Then he looked at me again.

“Come look at the seventh.”

The seventh bull was a black-white-faced cross Ty called Sunday Ticket. He was the biggest animal on the trailer — wide through the hips, heavy in the shoulder, with a jump-out that Ty said had cleared the chute rail at Ogden last September. He stood in the pen like he owned the fencing.

“Two-second average buck-off,” Ty said. “Ran him at Miles City, Pocatello, Ogden. Same thing every time. Riders hang for two and a half, come down hard. Nobody’s made whistle on him this season.”

“Something wrong with that?”

“Nothing wrong. I’m asking if I should hold him for the feature or run him early.”

I watched Sunday Ticket. He moved along the fence, stopped, tested a post with his shoulder, moved on. The muscle rolled under his hide — dense, heavy, the kind of power that didn’t waste itself on display.