The Missouri Review

This winter in southwestern Colorado we had snow and cold for months. Three-degree mornings in February, March, even into spring. We don't like the cows calving in icy air onto frozen ground, the calf wet while the cow's rough tongue licks it clean, which removes the slick of amniotic sac but leaves the calf still damp as it staggers up into the wind to get its first drink. The extremities sometimes get frostbitten, but you can't tell if a calf's ears have frozen until suddenly the tips or tops have disappeared. [End Page 131] Today it's still February and we're feeding in a blizzard, number 345 the first cow to the trailer with the three-quarter-ton hay bales on it. She's one of the biggest Angus cows, tall and wide and gentle, and the hairs of her black coat curl with moisture in the sideways-blowing snow. Ken feeds off the back of the trailer while I drive in a big circle, the pickup in granny gear and four-wheel-drive low, the slowest a manual transmission can go, the window open so I can hear if Ken yells for me to stop. Hay duff blows in and sticks to snowflakes melting on my cheek. I swab at the exposed skin with a gloved hand and peer through the white blur to avoid hitting cattle or running over greasewood and puncturing a tire.

When Ken finishes, we walk among big black bumps of cows. Mother and son, sixty-eight and thirty-eight, our chins tucked into our collars, caps pulled down over our ears, we look at broad bellies and bags and vulvas. Number 346's belly is huge, her bag full, her vulva elongated and swollen and loose; 587 and 6112 also.

"They're close," I say. Back in the truck, Ken driving now, heater on high, I write in the small notebook: 346, 587, and 6112 springing (when the cows' sides get so big their bellies bounce as they walk, but not like they're full of water; this is the calf moving toward the birth canal, which means they may be one to three days from calving).

The cows start drifting with the storm, white snow blanketing their backs as they move away from the hay, shelter the more important need right now, for all of us. The best shelter in Nichols Wash, this 1,425-acre pasture of few trees, is the wash itself, with its banks and brush and ribs of last year's willows, and as a force the cows head toward it.

"I'll look through them again tomorrow," I tell Ken.

Yet tomorrow turns out to be as cold and miserable as the preceding day. When I get to the cows, 346 is missing, which probably means she calved. Snow drifts thickly, shrinking my world—I can't see much beyond the hood of the pickup. The two muddy roads in this pasture too wet to drive, I'd have to search afoot up and down the banks and around the bends of the meandering wash and then march across, fence to fence in any direction, peering through snow, and still I'd likely not find cow or calf.

"Tomorrow," I say again, to myself this time.