The First Storm

The steer was blown up like a drum on his left side, and he stood in the corner of Earl Pettibone’s corral with his neck stretched out and his tongue showing.

“He got in the alfalfa,” Earl said. “Gate chain was off. I swear I hooked it.”

“How long ago?”

“I found him at noon. Could’ve been in there since daylight.”

Dr. Nora Pruett set her bucket down on the frozen ground and looked at the steer for a moment before she went near him. He was a black baldy yearling, seven hundred pounds or so, and he was breathing in short grunts. The skin behind his last rib on the left stood up higher than his backbone. She flicked it with a finger and it rang.

“Can you get him in the chute, or do I work him here?”

“He’ll go. He’s gentle. He’s a pet, is the trouble.” Earl was seventy-one and built like a fence post, and he moved the steer down the alley with a hand on its hip and a steady stream of insults. The head catch clanged shut.

Nora slid the steel speculum into the steer’s mouth and fed the stomach tube down through it, a hand’s width at a time, blowing once to make sure she was in the right pipe. She felt the tube pass into the rumen. A little gas came back, sour and green, and then foam.

“Frothy,” she said. “It won’t just belch out. Hand me that jug, would you? The blue one.”

Earl handed it over. “What’s that?”

“Anti-foaming agent. It breaks the bubbles down so the gas can come up.” She fitted the funnel to the tube and poured. “Then he’s going to burp in your face for an hour, and you’re going to be glad about it.”

“I’ve been burped on by better.”

She laughed. It took four minutes for the drench to work. She kept one hand flat on the steer’s side the whole time, and she felt the tightness begin to give under her palm before the first long rush of gas came up the tube. The steer’s eyes stopped rolling. His flank went down by slow inches.

“There he goes,” Earl said. “Look at that. Doc Teague would’ve stuck him.”

“I’d have stuck him too, if he’d been down. He wasn’t.” She drew the tube and rinsed it in the bucket. “Walk him around for twenty minutes. Grass hay only for three days, and no water for an hour. And Earl, buy a snap for that gate.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She had owned the practice for twelve weeks, since the first of September, and Earl had called her five times in those twelve weeks. She suspected one or two of the calls had been to see what she was made of. She didn’t mind. A new vet in a valley like this got looked over like a horse at a sale, and Earl’s place sat right beside Highway 93 where every truck going by could see whose rig was parked in the yard.

She was carrying the bucket back to her F-250 when the smell reached her.

It came on the wind from the pen beside the loafing shed, where a dozen fall-calving cows stood at a round bale. It was sweet and sharp, like nail polish remover or pears gone over. Nora stopped at the gate. The cows were twenty feet off and none of them was doing anything but eating, except a thin red cow at the back who stood with her head low, away from the hay.

“When did that red one calve?”

Earl came up beside her. “Three weeks ago. Maybe a little better. Why?”

“Is she eating?”

“She picks at it. She’s milking heavy. I figured she was just pulled down.” He looked at the cow and then at Nora. “You haven’t even been in there.”

“She’s got ketosis. She’s burning her own fat to make milk and it’s poisoning her.” Nora was already opening the vet box for a bottle of dextrose and an IV set. “I’ll check her urine to be sure, but I’m sure.”

“From here.”

“I can smell it on her breath.”

Earl sniffed the air. He was a polite man and he gave it a real try. “I smell cow,” he said.

They ran the red cow in. Nora caught a stream of urine on a test strip and held it up for him, and the pad turned dark purple while he watched. She put the needle in the jugular and ran the dextrose in slowly with the bottle held over her head, and after that she drenched the cow with propylene glycol and left the rest of the jug on a post.

“Half a pint of that, twice a day, four days. If she isn’t cleaning up her hay by Friday, call me.”

“Forty-one years Doc Teague came out here,” Earl said, “and he never could do that. He had to get the strip out and wait on it like anybody.”

“Doc had forty-one years on me in everything else.” Nora shrugged and coiled the IV line. “I’ve just got a good nose.”

She had been saying those words in that easy voice since she was about six years old. People liked it better than the truth. The truth was that she could have told him which of his cows was coming into heat and that he had fried onions for breakfast, and that kind of thing made people look at her sideways. She had learned to hand out one small trick at a time and smile.

Earl was still looking at her, but it was a friendly look. “Well, it’s a good one to have. What do I owe you?”

She wrote it up on the tailgate. “Two hundred and forty.”

“I’ll settle up at the end of the month, the way I did with Doc. That all right?”

It was not really all right, with the bank waiting on her, but it was how things were done here. “That’s fine.”

“You got somewhere to be Thursday? For Thanksgiving?”

“My kitchen. I’ve got a can of chili with my name on it.”

“That’s a sad thing to hear from a young woman.”

“What have you got?”

“A turkey breast and a football game,” Earl admitted, and grinned. Then he looked west, where the Bitterroot Range had been standing clear at noon. The peaks were gone now. A grey wall had come down over them, flat and even from one end of the valley to the other. “You’d best get up your creek, Doc. They’re saying two feet out of this one, and they generally say low.”

“I’m going. Walk that steer.”

“I’m walking him.”
***
Her mailbox was one of five on a plank where Mulvaney Creek Road left the highway. She pulled the mail without looking at it and turned east up the creek.

The first two and a half miles had belonged to families named Hendry and Sills until last year. Now a new log gate stood at the old Hendry place, with a row of small dark evergreens planted along both sides of the entrance, clipped square. The sign said COPPERLINE in iron letters. Nobody was ever there when she drove by.

At mile three and a half the road passed through the middle of the Mulvaney outfit. It was the biggest ranch on the creek by a long way, with a white house, a long shed with a stovepipe, corrals and a calving lot, and black cattle spread across the bench above. A tall fair-haired woman on a tractor lifted two fingers off the wheel as Nora went by. Nora lifted two back. That was all the business she had done with the Mulvaneys in twelve weeks. They had three or four hundred cows and they had not called her once, and she had started to wonder who they did call.

Her own forty acres sat at mile six, where the county stopped plowing. She had a farmhouse with two bedrooms and a wood stove, a barn, and the old bunkhouse thirty yards from the kitchen door that Doc Teague had made into a clinic. The creek ran through the corner of the place under a plank headgate. She had no cell signal and no neighbor above her, only timber and then mountain.

She loved it more than she had expected to. She had not said so to anyone, because she was still afraid of jinxing it.

Bolus met her on the porch. He was a grey barn cat the size of a small dog, and he had come with the place the way the stove had.

“You’re supposed to be mousing,” she told him. He walked ahead of her into the kitchen as if he paid the taxes.

She stoked the stove and sorted the mail at the table. There was a drug-company flyer, the power bill, and a heavy cream envelope with a Bozeman postmark that she knew before she opened it, because she had gotten one just like it in October.

Dear Dr. Pruett. Copperline Land Company renews its offer to purchase your property on Mulvaney Creek Road, comprising forty acres more or less with all appurtenant water rights, for the sum of $1,100,000. We would welcome the opportunity to discuss—

She read the number twice, as she had the first time. She had paid $385,000 for the land, the buildings, the practice and the truck, and she had thought that was a fair price for a place this far up a dead-end road. Somebody wanted to give her nearly three times that for it. She could not make that add up, and she did not like money she could not add up.

She set the letter down and opened the laptop while she still had power. The bank balance was $1,940. The loan payment was $2,480, and it came out on the first of December, which was a week from today. She was $540 short, with twice that owed to her by people like Earl who paid when the month ran out.

“I’ll get there,” she said to the cat. “I’ve got a week, and somebody’s horse will colic. Somebody’s horse always colics.”

Bolus washed a foot.

She got up to put the kettle on, and her eyes went, as they did a dozen times a day, to the nail beside the kitchen door. A rodeo buckle hung there by its bent loop. It was silver gone dull, with a bucking horse and rider raised on the front and lettering around the rim: CODY STAMPEDE, SADDLE BRONC, 1995. Her father had won it the summer before he died. He was killed on the interstate in March of 1996, and Nora was born in August. Her mother had kept the buckle in a drawer for eighteen years and given it to her the day she left for college. It was the only thing of his Nora owned. It had hung by the door of every place she had ever rented, and in every one of those places it had been the first thing up and the first thing down.

The other thing she moved from house to house sat on the floor of the spare room upstairs, a single box of books with the tape still on it. She had never unpacked that box anywhere. If she kept one box sealed, she was always partly ready to go.

She folded Copperline’s letter back into its envelope and put it in the drawer with the first one. She did not throw it away, and she noticed that she didn’t.
***
The snow started at dusk. There was no wind at first. She was carrying stove wood across the porch a little before five when the light went blue and the first flakes came straight down, big and slow, and within ten minutes she could not see the barn. Somewhere above all that cloud a full moon was rising over the Sapphire Mountains. She knew it only because the feed-store calendar by the phone said so.

She filled the wood box and both kettles. She went out to the clinic and checked the vaccine refrigerator, which held about two thousand dollars of product she could not afford to lose, and she laid a fire in the clinic stove so it would be ready. By seven the wind had come up and the snow was going past the kitchen window sideways. She ate a grilled cheese sandwich standing at the counter and did her books.

At nine the lights went out.

The refrigerator hum stopped, and the house was suddenly loud with wind. Nora sat still for a second with her pen in her hand.

“All right,” she said. “That’s what the generator is for.”

She put on her coat, her boots and her headlamp and waded thirty yards to the clinic through snow already over her ankles. The generator lived in the lean-to on the back wall. It was an old red Honda that Doc had sworn started on the second pull every time. She pulled it eleven times. It coughed once, on the fourth, and after that it did nothing.

She checked the switch, the choke and the fuel valve. The tank was a quarter full of gas that smelled stale even to an ordinary nose. There was a fresh can in the barn, and a can of starting fluid on the shelf above it.

The barn was fifty yards off across the yard, and she found it by walking toward where it ought to be. Bolus should have been at the door by now, complaining about the weather. He wasn’t there.

The big sliding door had dragged on its track since September. It never quite closed, and she had been meaning to fix it. Tonight the gap was more than a foot wide, and snow had blown in a long white tongue across the dirt floor.

She smelled blood before she touched the door.

It was fresh, and there was a great deal of it. She stood with her glove on the cold iron handle and breathed in through her nose, slowly, sorting it the way she sorted everything. It was not cow or horse or deer. Under the blood there was wet fur, and under the fur there was something else she had no name for.

A sensible woman would have gone back to the house. Nora knew that. But it was her barn, and something was bleeding in it.

She put her shoulder to the door and shoved it another foot along the track. The headlamp showed her the grain bin, the stacked hay and the gas can on its shelf. From the top of the stack two green eyes shone back at her. Bolus was up there, flat to the bales, with every hair on end, staring down toward the calving pen.

“Bolus,” she whispered. “What is it?”

She turned her head, and the light went with it.

The calving pen was twelve feet square, bedded deep in clean straw she had put down in October for no better reason than that an empty pen looked wrong to her. The straw was not clean now. A dark trail ran in under the bottom rail and across the pen, and it ended in the far corner.

A wolf lay there. He was dark grey and so big that for a second she could not get a sense of his size. He lay on his side with his head up. His eyes caught the beam and held it, and he did not move at all. He watched her.
***