Nine on the Bench

The cows lay where they had dropped, and the snow around them was smooth.

Nora noticed that before anything else. She stood at the edge of the feed ground with her bucket in one hand and her knife roll in the other, and she counted nine black shapes scattered along the road fence in the grey light. A cow that died hard left a mess behind her. She paddled, threw her head, and scraped a fan in the snow with her legs. These had gone down and stayed down. Two had their legs folded under them as if they had lain down to chew. One had hay still sticking out of her mouth.

“I came up with the first load at seven,” Immy said. Her face was white under the windburn. “They were like this. The rest were all bunched at the far end, and they wouldn’t come to the wagon.”

“Did you feed?”

“No. I went for Mom and I called you.”

“Good. Don’t, yet.” Nora looked across the Bench. The rest of the herd stood in a dark mass three hundred yards off, near the roofless cabin, breathing steam. “Nobody goes near those cows until I say. Nobody shouts and nobody starts an engine by them.”

Maeve Mulvaney stood by the nearest carcass with her hands in her coat pockets. She had not said anything since Nora drove through the gate. Two older men from headquarters waited at the tractor, and they did not say anything either.

The thermometer on Nora’s dash had read eight below zero. The wind had blown down the creek all night, from her house toward the highway, and it had dropped at dawn. In the still air every smell stood separate.

She knelt by the first cow and put her bare hand on the flank. It was cold on the surface and warm underneath. The eye was clear. There was no foam at the nose and no blood anywhere.

“She’s been dead three or four hours,” she said. “Rhys, what did these cows get yesterday?”

He had ridden down with her from the house and had not left her side. “Grass hay off the lower stack, the same as every day since November. There’s no grain up here and no salt but the white blocks.”

“What about water?”

“The creek hole. They’ve all been on it.”

She went through the list aloud, because it helped her and because Maeve was owed the reasoning. “It’s December, so it isn’t lightning. If the hay or the water was bad, I’d have dead cows all over this bench, and I’ve got nine in a line. They’d have fought with lead, and they’d have blown up with bloat. These didn’t know it was coming. Their hearts stopped between one mouthful and the next.”

She bent to the cow’s mouth and breathed in.

There was hay and cud and the sweet, ordinary smell of a cow’s breath gone cold. Under those was something green and sharp that did not belong on an open bench in winter. It smelled like the inside of a florist’s cooler, or a Christmas tree lot.

“Is there an evergreen anywhere on this feed ground? A windbreak, or a brush pile?”

“There’s nothing closer than the timber,” Rhys said. “That’s half a mile.”

“I smell resin on her.”

She got up and went to the next cow and the next. The smell was on every one. She came back to the first, which lay on her right side with the left flank up, and unrolled her knives.

“I’m going to open her,” she said to Maeve. “I’ll open three. The lab will want more than one animal, and so do I.”

“Do what you need.”

She took her gloves off, because she could not feel through them. She made the cut behind the last rib, long and deep, and laid the flank open. Steam poured up into the cold. The rumen bulged in the opening, grey and tight, and she put the knife through its wall and drew it down a foot and a half.

The green smell came out of it so strongly that she turned her head.

She reached in to the elbow. The rumen was warm and her hand was numb, and the difference hurt. She brought out a double handful and spread it on the snow.

It was mostly hay, chewed and wet. All through it were needles. They were flat and dark green and about an inch long, soft, with a pale underside. Many were still on their twigs. Among them were little soft red cups, each no bigger than a pea, with a dark seed showing in the open end.

Nora looked at them for a moment. She had seen this once before, in a pathology lab in her third year, in a jar.

“It’s yew,” she said.

“Yew,” Maeve repeated.

“Garden yew. Hedge yew. A cow will eat it like candy, and a pound of it will kill her. It stops the heart. It can do it in two hours or it can take a day, and there isn’t a mark on her afterward.” She picked a twig out of the mess and held it up. The thick end had been cut off clean, at a slant. “It didn’t blow in here, either. Look at the stem. These were cut with shears. Somebody clipped a hedge, and what you’re looking at is the trimmings.”

Nobody spoke. Immy made a small sound and put her glove over her mouth.

“Is there anything I can give the rest?” Maeve asked.

“No. I wish there were. There’s no antidote, and I couldn’t get a tube down four hundred cows if there was one.” Nora wiped her hands on the snow. They had gone red and stiff. “What I can do is keep any more of it out of them and keep them quiet. A cow with yew in her can drop dead from being hurried across a pen. So here’s how it goes. Rhys moves that herd to the bottom end of the Bench, at a walk, his way. He’s the only one who does it. Immy feeds them there, by hand off the wagon, with the tractor shut off. The rest of us go over this ground on foot and pick up every green thing on it.”

She looked at Rhys. He was already looking at the herd.

“I can do that,” he said. “Give me half an hour. I want to see the fence first.”
***
He found the place sixty yards east of the gate, and he stopped her with a hand before she walked on it.

“Stand here and look,” he said. “Then tell me what you’d say.”

The county road ran along the bottom of the Bench, and the fence stood ten feet above it on the bank. Two tire tracks left the plowed road and came backward up through the borrow ditch to the wire. The snow between them was trodden flat.

“He backed in,” Nora said. “The tailgate was to the fence.”

“With his lights off, I’d guess. Immy would have seen lights from the house road.” Rhys crouched. “That’s a three-quarter-ton, single rear wheels, and the tread’s nearly new. And it’s one man. See there? It’s the same boot every time, a lug sole, about a twelve. He walked from the tailgate to the wire and back. I make it fourteen trips.”

She saw them once he had said it. A beaten path ran from the tracks to the fence. On the pasture side the snow was dimpled and littered with green for forty feet along the wire, where something had been thrown over by the forkful and the cows had come to it.

“The wind was straight down the creek last night,” she said. “I didn’t hear a thing. I hear the plow on the highway from my bed, and I didn’t hear this.”

“I didn’t either. He picked his night.”

Rhys bent to the top wire. He did not touch it. A few threads of brown canvas were caught on a barb where a man had leaned to pitch. He put his face close and breathed in, and she saw his jaw set.

Nora stepped up beside him and did the same.

The cold metal smell was there, the one they all had. On top of it lay something rank and musky, like a fox den. She had smelled it five days ago in the powder snow outside her barn door, and her cat had not come down for breakfast.

“That’s the one from my barn,” she said quietly.

“That’s Pascoe.”

“You’d swear to it?”

“To anybody who could smell it.” He straightened. “Which is nobody a judge would listen to.”

She went back to the truck for her phone. It had no signal, but it took pictures. She laid her pocket rule beside the clearest boot print and photographed it, and the tire tread, and the threads on the wire, and the green litter in the snow. Then she got her forceps and a paper envelope and took the threads off the barb.

“What are those for?” Rhys asked.

“I don’t know yet. I’d rather have them and not need them.”

He nodded, and walked off across the Bench toward the cattle.

She watched him go for a moment because she could not help it. He went wide of the herd and came in from the uphill side with his hands at his sides. He stopped a long way out. A few heads came up. He stood there until they went down again, and took ten steps, and stopped. In a quarter of an hour the whole dark mass had begun to drift away from him, downhill, a few cows at a time. They moved as slowly as cattle going to water on a hot day. He walked behind them like a man out for a stroll. He did not raise an arm.

None of them went down.

Nora opened two more cows. The second and third were the same as the first, full of flat needles and red berries, with nothing else wrong in them. She took rumen contents from all three in screw-top jars. She took a piece of heart and liver from each and the fluid from one eye, and bagged them, and wrote on every label with a pencil because her pen had frozen. She filled each jar only half full, and put the other half in a second jar.

“Two sets,” she told Maeve. “One goes to the state veterinary laboratory in Bozeman. They’ll name the plant by eye and then run it for the poison, and that’ll be on their letterhead with my name on the form. The other set goes in my clinic freezer with today’s date on it. If anybody ever asks, there’s a second sample that never left my hands.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“A feed company in Wyoming tried to tell a client of mine that his steers died of pneumonia. I learned to keep my own jars.”

Maeve looked at the row of them standing in the snow. “Immy can have the cooler at the courier’s counter in Hamilton by noon.”

“Then it’s in Bozeman tomorrow.”

They walked the fence line after that, Nora and Maeve and the two men, bent over, with feed sacks. The cows had cleaned up most of it. What was left had been trampled into the snow, and it had to be picked out with fingers. Nora worked without gloves until she could not close her hands. She put them inside her coat against her ribs and held them there until they hurt, and then she took them out and went on. They filled a sack and a half. She tied both, labeled them, and put them in her truck.

“What’s a bred cow worth to you this winter?” she asked. “One of these. Five years old, carrying a calf.”

“Thirty-five hundred,” Maeve said. “I couldn’t replace her for less.”

Nora did the sum, and did it again the other way. “That’s thirty-one thousand five hundred dollars.”

“I know what it is.” Maeve’s voice was even. “His offer came yesterday morning, by courier. Nineteen million two hundred thousand, on that good cream paper. And this came last night.” She tied off her sack. “He’d rather buy than break. He told you so in your clinic. I expect he thinks this is still buying.”
***
Earl Pettibone’s truck came up the road a little before eleven. It slowed at the sight of the tractor and stopped at the gate.

Nora walked down to meet him, so that he would stay where he was. Earl was not to know anything, and he was the sort who would climb a fence to look at trouble.

“I was on my way up to your place,” he said through the window. He held out a folded check. “Two hundred and forty. The end of the month got by me. That red cow’s eating like a horse, and I wanted to tell you so.” His eyes went past her to the Bench. “Lord, Doc. What happened here?”

“They lost nine last night.”

“Nine. What to?”

She saw no reason to lie about the part a human vet could know. “Yew. Somebody’s hedge clippings got in with them. It doesn’t take much.”

Earl sat back in his seat. He was quiet for a second, and then he frowned.

“Yew. That’s those flat-needled bushes, with the red berries on.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, there’s only the one bunch of that on this creek that I know of.” He pointed with his thumb, back down the road. “That club entrance of theirs, at Hendry’s old gate. Copperline. Fellow who put the sign up told me it’s to be a fishing club. A nursery truck out of Missoula came through in the spring, and the driver stopped at my place to ask the way. He had two hundred of them on board. He told me so. Two hundred yews, and every one in a burlap ball. I said it seemed like a lot of bush for a gate.”

Nora kept her face still. She had driven past them twice a day for three months.

“They’re clipped square,” she said.

“They had a crew up in October to do it. Three men with power shears, two days. They hauled off a stock trailer full of trimmings. I figured it went to the dump.” Earl looked at the dead cows again, and at Maeve coming down the bank. His face had gone troubled. He was not a stupid man. “It’d be a strange thing for it to end up here. That’s two and a half miles.”

“It would be strange,” Nora said.

“Morning, Maeve. I’m sorry for your trouble.”

“Morning, Earl. Thank you.”

He looked from one of them to the other. Then he put the truck in gear. “I’ll say what I said to anybody who asks me. I hook my gates, mostly, and I mind my business. But I can count to two hundred.”

He turned around in the gateway and went back down the creek.

Maeve watched him go. “That’s a good neighbor.”

“It’s also nothing,” Nora said. She was angry, and she kept her voice low. “I’ve been running it through my head as if I were the county attorney. A land company planted a hedge and had it trimmed. Anybody in Montana can buy a yew. Nobody saw where the trailer went. I’ve got a tire track, a size twelve boot and three threads of brown canvas, and half the men in this valley own all three. The one thing that puts a name on it is a smell on a wire.”

“I’ll call the sheriff and the brand inspector, for the record. A deputy will come out and write it down.”

“He should. I want it written down. I just don’t want you thinking it’ll go anywhere.”

“I stopped thinking that in 1985,” Maeve said, and went to help Immy load the cooler.
***
The pit lay in a gravel fold at the back of the Bench, where the ranch had buried its dead stock for longer than Maeve had been alive. The backhoe had opened a fresh trench there in October, before the ground froze. It was a quarter mile from the fence.

They dragged the nine cows to it one at a time.

Rhys drove the tractor. Nora hooked the chains. She had said she would, and nobody had argued, and after the first cow it became the way the job was done. She looped the chain around both hind legs above the hocks and stood clear and lifted a hand. He took up the slack so gently that the chain never snapped. Then she walked behind the carcass across the snow to the pit, unhooked, and rode back on the drawbar.

At noon she drove up to her clinic and looked at Owen’s toes, which were warm and pink, and told him what had happened. He lay very still with his ears flat while she talked. She put the jars in the freezer and wrote the date on the door in grease pencil. She was back on the Bench in forty minutes.

She watched the herd every time she crossed the ground. They stood at the lower end, eating what Immy had forked off by hand. Twice in the afternoon she walked down to within fifty yards of them and stood and listened. She could not pick one heart out of that many, but she could hear the sound of them all together, slow and even, like rain on a roof. No cow stood off by herself. Nobody was down.

“If any more were going to go, they’d have gone by now,” she told Rhys at about three. “I think nine’s the count.”

“I think so too. I’ve been watching the same ones you have.”

“The baldy with the torn ear.”

“She was right at the fence this morning. She’s chewing her cud.” He looked down at her from the tractor seat. He had been favoring his right side since the middle of the afternoon, and he had not mentioned it. “You’ve been barehanded half the day. Let me see them.”

“They’re fine.”

“Let me see them, Nora.”

She held them up. They were chapped raw across the knuckles and split at two fingertips. He looked at them and at her, and he took his own gloves off and handed them down. They were lined with fleece and warm from his hands. They were also four sizes too big.

“I can’t hook a chain in these.”

“You can ride in them. Take them off to hook.”

She put them on. She did not say thank you, because her throat had gone tight, which was ridiculous over a pair of gloves.

The light started to go a little after four. The seventh cow went into the pit, and the eighth. The two older men shoveled lime from the back of a pickup, and the dust hung white in the cold. The trench would be covered with planks and wire until the backhoe could close it, so that nothing could dig down to those rumens. Nora had asked for that and Maeve had said it would be done.

The ninth was the first cow she had opened. Nora hooked her and walked behind her across the trampled snow in the dusk. She was tired all the way down. Her back hurt from bending, and her knees hurt from kneeling on frozen ground, and she smelled of rumen to the shoulder. Under the tiredness she was still angry. It had not cooled all day.

A man had stood at that wire in the dark and pitched poison over it with a fork, fourteen trips, to cows who had walked up to him because a truck at the fence meant feed. They had trusted the truck. She kept coming back to that.

Rhys shut the tractor off at the pit. In the quiet she could hear the creek under its ice, a long way below. He climbed down, stiffly, and they walked back together to her truck at the gate.

She dropped the tailgate and began to coil the spare chain into the bed. He took the other end and fed it to her across the tailgate.

“The lab will have them tomorrow,” she said. “If they’re quick, I’ll have a call by Thursday and a report by the week after. I want it on paper. I can’t prove who did it. I can prove what was done, and I’m going to, down to the milligram. I want a state pathologist’s signature on what killed our cows.”

The chain stopped coming.

She looked up. He was standing on the other side of the tailgate with the last loop of it in his bare hands. The dusk had taken most of the color out of everything, and his face was hard to see under his hat. She could see that he was looking at her. He went on looking. It lasted a good deal longer than a look between two tired people at a truck ought to last.

She knew what she had said. She had heard it leave her mouth.

They were not her cows. She had a signed letter that said what they were to her, at four thousand dollars a month, on sixty days’ notice. Three days ago in her clinic she had told this man she was not selling, not for now, and she had watched him take it without a flinch.

He did not flinch now either. He did not smile or make anything of it. He said nothing at all. He handed her the end of the chain, and his fingers were cold where they touched hers through the fleece of his own gloves.

Nora laid the last loop in the truck bed. She found, standing there in the dark with her heart going hard, that she had no wish to take the word back.
***