Chapter 11: The Herd

Wyatt's POV

The sale barn outside Brandon had eighty-one black heifers in its pens.

None of them had been watered in three weeks.

I had known that since the second day.

A barn full of cattle makes a noise you can hear for two miles.

I had lain awake in the loft listening to it come across the fields.

On the twenty-first morning I couldn't stand it anymore.

"We take them home," I said to Tor, at breakfast. "They're beef, and they're dying. We drive them."

"Drive them where, son? Down a county road with every one of those things listening?"

"Not every one. Maybe nine," I said.

"Nine is plenty."

"Then I'll need a decoy."

Jonas put down his spoon.

"I can be a decoy," he said.

"No," said Tor.

"I'm the best at sound. I heard that medic before anybody."

"No," Tor said.

"Grandpa."

Signe set her coffee down.

"He can run the horn," she said. "From a vehicle. Nobody on foot."

Tor looked at her for a long time.

He nodded once, hard, like a man signing something.

By eight we were four miles out, with the sky the yellow of old paper.

Signe drove Tor's side-by-side with the cargo bed rattling.

I sat beside her with the bolt gun from my truck's toolbox across my knees.

Jonas followed on the little red four-wheeler Tor had bought him for his tenth birthday.

He wore earmuffs, and a boat horn was strapped to the rack.

It was the first morning since the dock that she'd seemed light.

I watched the corner of her mouth.

She had slept in my arms for a week, and I had still not learned all the things she hid.

I had learned to read the quiet in her.

I had also learned she knew the roads better than the county did.

She could turn a corner before the corner arrived.

"The snow's early," she said, looking at the sky.

"It's October."

"It's the sixth. It should hold off till the fourteenth," she said.

"Says who?"

She didn't answer.

That wasn't new. I let it ride.

The sale barn stood at the end of a long gravel drive, a gray tin building with a row of outdoor pens.

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