Page 63 of The Cowboy and the Stray

I crouched outside, listening, tail thumping the dirt. I should have gone in and told her to get some sleep, that it was a long day tomorrow. Instead, I stayed put and let her play.

Maybe she could sense I was there, maybe she couldn’t. But she kept playing, and it was the saddest thing I’d ever heard.

That’s when it hit me, how much I missed when we were kids. I remembered one summer, maybe I was twelve and she was nine, when a couple of tourists set up a tent down by the low water crossing. Nobody called the sheriff or anything; it was just some lost family in a Winnebago. But for a week, we were scared they’d spot us. Every night, Sloane and I would sneak out, skirting the edge of the pasture, and just watch them. I don’t even think we knew why. Maybe we wanted to know what normal people looked like. Or maybe we were just waiting for them to leave so we could have our lives back.

The last night we were there, we followed them all the way to the old Miller Creek bridge. I told Sloane to stay back, but she followed anyway, always a step behind. The man started a campfire, and I remember the taste of it in my nose, wood and meat and cheap beer. We stayed upwind, but the little girl wandered off toward the brush. She stopped, cocked her head, and looked right at us.

I’d never been more scared in my life.

We bolted. Didn’t stop until we hit the barn, both of us panting, and for the first time, I realized we weren’t invincible. It only took one dumb kid and a flashlight, and everything we were could've been gone.

After that, I never let Sloane trail me again, no matter how much she begged.

She finished her song. I waited for her to put the violin away, but she just set it on the coffee table and hugged her knees, staring at the dark.

31. TESS

Nobody warned me about the noise bulls make when they know they’re about to lose their balls. You’d think it would be a mournful kind of bellow, like they were about to write a blues album about it. Turns out, it’s more like a chainsaw revving in reverse, with a lot more snot. There was a lot of snot.

Eli was first to finish eating. He’d inhaled three scrambled eggs and a leftover donut before anyone else could blink. Sloane was next, already in boots and a work shirt, phone tucked in her back pocket and hair tight in a braid. She didn’t eat. Just drank a mug of black coffee and vanished, probably to start the paperwork that came with every new project on the ranch.

That left Calder, hunched over his bowl of oatmeal. He caught me looking at him and lifted his chin in a way that said, “You ready?” without actually asking.

“Yeah,” I said, though my stomach was a pit of nerves.

“Put sunscreen on your ears,” he told me. “It’s gonna be a long day.”

I nodded. He was right.

The holding pen was just north of the main barn, close enough you could hear every sound, and the whole herd was pressed against the far fence, trying to get away from the crew with the cattle prods. Eli was already up on the fence rail, whooping and waving his hat around like a rodeo clown. I walked out slowly and tried not to look at the buckets lined up next to the chute. I knew what was in them. Well, not yet, but would be soon.

Gray was waiting by the gate, holding a notepad and a can of spray paint. “You get the feeling Calder’s just making us do this for fun?” he said.

“Isn’t this mandatory?” I said.

He shrugged. “Could always switch to goats. Less blood.”

Calder had set up a little workstation on the bed of the ranch pickup. There was a folding table with surgical gloves, some steel instruments, a big jug of disinfectant, and a cooler full of ice. The sight of the ice made me shiver, but I was sweating already. May in Texas didn’t mess around.

He sorted through the tools, lining everything up perfectly.

He tossed a box of gloves at me, and I caught it with one hand, even though he was balancing on the fence with both feet. “You ever done this before?” he asked.

“Castrated something? Not since my ex.”

Gray barked a laugh. Eli whooped. Calder didn’t even crack a smile, but he gave me a nod of respect that felt better than a compliment.

“First bull’s almost ready,” Gray said, watching as Buck maneuvered a snorting, stomping Hereford into the head gate. It took two grown men and a stick to get him pointed in the right direction. When the gate slammed shut, the whole pen shook. I didn’t know cows could look that angry.

“You’re up, Twitchy,” Eli said.

I froze. “Me? First one?”

“You’re the rookie,” Gray said. “Initiation.”

My hands started to sweat. The gloves wouldn’t go on right, and I had to peel one inside-out and start over. I glanced at Calder, hoping he’d tell me I could watch the first one, just to get the feel of it. But he was already looking past me, like he’d moved on to the next ten things on the list.

So I stepped up.