Wire Under the Snow
The phone rang at 2:14 a.m., and Dr. Josie Leland answered it before she was awake. She had been answering it that way for twelve years.
“Leland.”
“Doc. It’s Jonah Rusk.” A man’s voice, low and fast, wind roaring behind it. “Out at the old Tillman place. Agnes is down in the coulee and she’s caught in wire. I can’t get near her. Goliath is standing right over her.”
Josie was already sitting up. The apartment above the clinic was dark and cold, and her jeans hung on the chair where she always left them, ready.
“How long has she been down?”
“An hour, maybe more. She’s fighting it. Every time she fights, the wire goes deeper.”
“Is she bleeding?”
“I can see blood on the snow.” A pause. “Doc, I know it’s bison. I know you don’t owe us—”
“Turn on every light you have,” Josie said. “Keep the bull busy. Thirty minutes.”
She hung up, pulled on two pairs of socks, and was in the truck four minutes later with her braid half done and yesterday’s coffee cold in the cup holder.
Snow blew across the county road in long white ropes. Her headlights caught fence posts, a frozen mailbox, the eyes of a deer that thought about crossing and then thought better of it. Josie drove with both hands on the wheel and ran through the drugs in the vet box behind her. The dart gun. The reversal. Fencing pliers. Antiseptic spray. A bison cow was not a range cow. You did not walk up to one and ask her nicely to stand.
Most of the vets in the county would not touch bison at all. Josie did not blame them. A bison could clear a six-foot fence from a standstill and turn faster than a horse. One had knocked her flat in her first year, and she had walked with a limp for a month.
She went anyway. Somebody had to.
Twelve years ago she had come to Red Alder for one year. One year to pay down her loans, then back to a city with a real hospital and a real social life. She was still here. The town had a single traffic light, a diner, a feed store, and a clinic with her name on the door. Most nights it also had her phone ringing.
The Halfmoon Creek sign leaned in the drifts, still painted with old Ferris Tillman’s brand. Ferris had died last spring. Josie had heard the rest from Mabel at the diner, along with her eggs: the bank had sold the place with the herd still on it, and the buyers were two strangers from out of state and Jonah Rusk.
Jonah. The Tillman boy. Except he could not be a boy anymore. Nobody stayed a boy for twelve years.
Every yard light on the ranch was burning. A tractor sat at the edge of the pasture with its engine running and its lights aimed down into the coulee. Josie parked, grabbed her kit, and stepped down into knee-deep snow.
A man stood in front of her before both her boots were on the ground.
He was big. Not tall the way some men were tall, but built like a wall somebody had put up on purpose. A canvas coat, a gray-shot dark beard, and eyes that went over her once, fast, as if counting what she carried.
“You’re the vet.”
“I’m the vet.”
“Reid,” he said. That was all.
A second man came around the truck with a headlamp on his forehead and a steel thermos in one hand. Dark curls stuck out under his wool cap. Behind wire glasses, his eyes were kind and very awake.
“You must be Dr. Leland. I’m Felix.” He held out the thermos. “Coffee. Hot. That’s Reid. He’s friendlier than he looks.”
“No, I’m not,” said Reid.
Josie took the coffee because she had been raised by a woman who never refused food from strangers in winter. It was strong and sweet and burned all the way down. “Where is she?”
They took her to the rim of the coulee. Below, in the tractor lights, the snow was churned brown and red. A big bison cow lay on her side at the bottom, half sunk in a drift, one hind leg wrapped in rusted barbed wire that disappeared into the snow. Old fence. Ferris must have left it there when he moved the line twenty years ago, and the snow had hidden it.
On the far side of the coulee, a rider on a buckskin horse was holding the rest of the herd back. Dark shapes shifted behind him, breath steaming, horns catching the light.
At the top of the slope, ten feet from the cow, stood the bull.
He was enormous. Two thousand pounds of shaggy brown shoulder and short black horns. He swung his head toward Josie and blew a long white breath through his nose.
“Goliath,” Felix said. “He’s very attached to her.”
“I can see that.”
Josie knelt in the snow and opened the dart case. She judged the cow’s weight by eye, drew up the dose, and loaded the dart. Her hands were steady. Her hands were always steady. It was the rest of her that sometimes shook later, in the truck, alone.
“You’re not going down there on foot,” Reid said. “Not with him up here.”
“Then keep him up here.”
Reid looked at her for a long second. Then he turned and walked to the tractor without another word. He climbed into the cab, swung the machine around, and rolled it slowly forward until it stood between the bull and the path down the slope. The engine growled. Goliath pawed the snow and shook his huge head, but he came no closer.
The rider brought his horse along the far rim, whistling low, two notes, over and over. The herd shifted away from the sound. Even the bull’s ears turned toward it.
Josie raised the dart gun, waited for the cow to lie still between struggles, and fired. The dart hit high on the hip. Agnes jerked, bellowed, and fought the wire for another minute while the drug went in. Then her great head sank into the snow.
“Felix, I need that light,” Josie said. “Stay above me on the slope. If I say move, you move.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She went down sideways, digging her heels in. The snow was deeper than it looked. Halfway down she heard boots behind her and turned to find Reid following, fencing pliers in his gloved hand.
“I told you to keep the bull busy.”
“Jonah has him.” He did not even look at her. “You can’t cut wire and hold a leg at the same time.”
He was right. She hated that he was right.
They worked fast. Reid held the leg while Josie found the end of the wire and began cutting. The barbs had gone deep, through the thick winter hair and into the skin above the hock. Each piece came out with a small dark welling of blood. Agnes breathed in long, heavy groans. Up on the rim, the tractor engine roared every time Goliath took a step.
“Talk to me about the bull,” Josie said without looking up.
“He’s thinking about it,” Reid said. “He’s not doing it.”
“Tell me when he starts doing it.”
“You’ll know.”
The last coil came free. Josie flushed the cuts, sprayed them purple with antiseptic, and gave a long-acting shot into the hip. She checked the other legs by feel. Nothing broken. Nothing she could find.
“Okay,” she said. “Up the slope. When I give her the reversal, she’ll be on her feet in two minutes and she will not be grateful.”
Reid went first. Josie gave the reversal, threw the empty syringe into her kit, and scrambled after him.
Her boot slid on a buried rock. For one sick second she was falling backward toward the cow.
A hand closed on the collar of her coat. Reid hauled her up the bank the way she had seen men lift calves out of a ditch, all at once, without effort. Her feet found the rim. His hand stayed on her collar a moment longer than it needed to.
Then he let go.
Below them, Agnes lifted her head. She rolled up onto her chest, swayed, and stood. She shook herself like a wet dog, threw the humans on the rim a long look that Josie felt in her teeth, and walked off across the coulee toward the herd. On the far side, the rider whistled his two notes. Goliath snorted at the tractor one last time and followed his cow into the dark.
Somebody on the far rim let out a whoop.
The Tillman house had been built from logs a hundred years ago and added to by every generation since. Inside the back door, four iron hooks hung in a row. Three coats went on them: Reid’s canvas one, Felix’s blue parka, and a sheepskin jacket that belonged to the rider, who came in last, stamping snow from his boots and pulling off his hat.
He was lean and wind-burned, with wheat-colored hair that needed cutting and very blue eyes. When he grinned, one front tooth showed a small chip. A thin white scar ran through his left eyebrow.
Josie knew that scar.
“Doc,” Jonah Rusk said. “You came.”
“You called.”
“I almost didn’t. Reid said you’d say no.”
“I said she might,” Reid said from the stove. “Not would.”
Felix pulled out a chair at the long kitchen table and pointed at it until Josie sat. Then he took her right hand and turned it palm up under the lamp. She had not noticed the blood. A barb had opened a short line across the heel of her hand.
“That’s nothing,” she said.
“That’s rusty wire.” Felix was already opening a first-aid kit on the table. It was a good kit. A very good kit. “When was your last tetanus shot?”
“I’m a doctor.”
“You’re a doctor for cows. I was a trauma nurse in Seattle for eleven years.” He cleaned the cut with quick, gentle hands. “I’ve stitched worse in a hallway with the lights out. Tetanus?”
“Two years ago.”
“Good. Hold still.” He said it the way a nurse would say it to anybody, light and easy. Josie felt it in her stomach anyway.
Across the table, Jonah touched the scar in his eyebrow. “You glued this shut,” he said. “In Ferris’s kitchen. I was twenty-one. A yearling bull put me into the chute gate, and the hospital was ninety miles away in a snowstorm.”
Josie stared at him. Yes. A skinny kid with blood running into one eye, trying very hard not to cry in front of his boss. She had cleaned the cut, closed it with the tissue glue she used on dogs, and told him to stop bleeding on her boots.
“That was you,” she said.
“That was me.”
“You were a child.”
“I was twenty-one.” His grin widened. “You told me I’d have a scar and girls would like it.”
“Did they?”
“Never asked one.” He held her eyes a moment too long. “I was waiting on somebody else’s opinion.”
The kitchen went very quiet. Felix taped gauze over her palm. Reid set a bowl in front of her: thick soup, beans and pasta and vegetables, steam rising off it.
“Minestrone,” Felix said. “My grandmother’s. When did you last eat?”
Josie opened her mouth. Closed it. She had to think.
“I had a granola bar,” she said. “At a calving. Yesterday.”
Felix looked at Reid. Reid looked at Josie. Nobody said anything, which was somehow worse than if they had.
She ate. It was the best thing she had tasted in a month.
When the bowl was empty, Reid sat down across from her, folded his big hands on the table, and spoke as if every word cost money. The back of his left hand was scarred, a smooth, shiny patch that ran up under his cuff.
“We need a herd vet. The bank wants papers on every animal by March first. Blood tests. Pregnancy checks. Health certificates. Ferris stopped keeping records three years ago. No papers, no loan. No loan, no ranch.”
“Doug Malley,” Josie said. She knew the banker. Everybody knew Doug.
“Doug Malley,” Felix agreed. “He used the word synergy twice.”
“Seventy-one head,” Jonah said. “And nobody else in the county will get in a chute with them.”
Josie looked down at the empty bowl. “I work seven days a week.”
“Then what’s one more day?” said Felix.
“That,” Josie said, “is exactly what I tell myself about everything.”
She meant to say no. She had the word ready. But the stove was warm, and her hand had stopped stinging, and the coffee had worn off all at once. She leaned back in the chair. She would close her eyes for one second. Just one.
She woke to gray light and the smell of fresh coffee.
A heavy quilt lay over her shoulders. Her boots stood by the stove, stuffed with newspaper to dry. Somebody had taken off her wet socks and put warm ones on her feet. Somebody had moved her chair closer to the fire.
Three men stood at the far end of the kitchen, arguing in very low voices.
“She drives herself,” Reid said.
“She’s asleep, Reid,” said Jonah.
“So one of us drives her truck and one of us follows.”
“She’s awake now,” Felix said, without turning around.
Josie sat up. Her face went hot. She had slept in a stranger’s chair, in a stranger’s kitchen, with three strangers watching over her like a sick calf.
“What time is it?”
“Six-forty,” Felix said. “Nobody called. I made sure your phone was on.”
Four hours. She had slept four hours straight. She could not remember the last time.
Reid took her coat from the back of a chair and held it open for her. Not hung on a hook. Held. She noticed that the fourth hook by the door was still empty. Nobody had used it all night.
She put her arms into the coat. His knuckles brushed her shoulders, and then he stepped back.
“Sundays,” Josie heard herself say. “I can give you Sundays.”
Reid frowned. “You don’t take Sundays.”
“How would you know?”
“Mabel,” said all three of them at once.
Jonah grinned his chipped grin. “That’s what makes it a gift, Doc.”
She drove home with the sun coming up pink over Halfmoon Creek. Four miles down the county road, she realized she was smiling, and she had no idea which of the three of them had put the warm socks on her feet.
An Exit Everywhere She Stands
Reid Kittredge counted heads. It was a habit from nineteen years on fire crews, and Montana had not cured him of it.
Three in the kitchen at breakfast. Seventy-one in the pasture at first light. One white truck coming up the lane at seven sharp on Sunday morning, the third Sunday in a row, its vet box rattling over the frozen ruts.
Four, then. For one day a week, he counted four.
He had not asked for that. He was not sure he wanted it. Wanting things had cost him before.
Josie Leland climbed out of the truck in insulated coveralls with her braid tucked down the back. A pair of reading glasses hung on a cord around her neck. She pretended they were not hers. Felix had already offered to tighten the arms for her, and she had told him they belonged to a client.
“Morning,” she called. “Is the coffee ready, or do I have to do something heroic first?”
“Coffee’s at the chute,” Reid said.
“You’re a good man, Kittredge.”
He was not. But he had built the chute, and he did not mind hearing her say it while she looked at it.
Ferris Tillman’s old working pens had been made of rotten planks and wishful thinking. Reid had torn them out in November. He had poured footings in the cold, welded steel, and hung solid walls so the bison could not see daylight through the gaps and try to climb toward it. The alley curved, because a curved alley kept an animal moving. The squeeze at the end was new and heavy and had cost more than his truck.
It was good work. He knew it was good work.
It still did not stop her.
On the first Sunday, she had climbed the side of the crowding tub to free a jammed sorting gate while a cow stood eight feet below her, blowing. On the second Sunday, she had stepped into the alley behind a yearling to get it moving. Both times Reid had said her name, sharp, and both times she had looked at him like he was a fly at a picnic.
“I’ve done this for twelve years,” she had told him.
“Seventy-one head,” he had said. “You only have to be wrong once.”
She had not answered that. But she had looked at him for a long moment afterward, as if he had said something in a language she half remembered.
They ran yearlings that morning. Jonah brought them in from the north pasture on Pilot, the buckskin moving easily through the snow, Jonah whistling his two low notes. The bison came in a dark, shaggy river, breath smoking. Felix sat at a folding table by the chute with the herd book open, a pencil behind his ear, and a thermos at his elbow. He wrote down every tag number Josie called out, every blood tube, every weight, in his neat nurse’s handwriting.
Josie worked at the head of the squeeze. She drew blood from under the tail with quick, sure hands. She checked eyes and teeth and hooves. When a heifer threw her head against the bars, Josie stepped back, waited, and stepped in again without a word.
Reid ran the gates. Open, close, push. He watched the animals. He watched her more.
She talked while she worked. She talked to the bison, to Felix, to herself. “Hello, gorgeous. Nineteen-oh-four, Felix. Healthy. Look at you, you’re furious, that’s fine. I’d be furious too.” She laughed when a yearling bull sneezed on her glasses. She did not laugh when Felix asked whether she had eaten breakfast.
“I had coffee,” she said.
“That is a liquid.”
“It’s a food group.”
At eleven, the slide gate in the alley jammed. Ice had built up in the track. Reid reached for the bar to knock it loose, but Josie was closer, and Josie did not wait. She swung over the panel and dropped into the alley.
“Josie.”
“Thirty seconds.”
She kicked the ice from the track. The gate slid. And behind her, the young bull they had just sorted into the next pen turned.
Reid saw it happen the way he had seen fire jump a ridge once, slow and fast at the same time. The bull dropped his head. His back legs bunched. He came at the gap in the sort gate that nobody had latched yet.
Reid did not remember crossing the distance. He remembered the cold steel of the top rail under one hand and the thick fabric of her coveralls in the other. He lifted her straight up and over the panel. They went down together into the snow on the far side, hard, Reid underneath, Josie on top of him.
The bull hit the gate where she had been standing. The whole alley rang like a bell.
For a moment neither of them moved.
Her face was inches above his. Snow in her hair. Her glasses gone somewhere. Her breath came short and fast against his mouth, and he could feel her heartbeat through four layers of clothing, or maybe it was his own.
“You don’t go in the alley,” he said. His voice did not sound like his.
“It’s my job.”
“Your job is to come home.”
She went very still. Her eyes, this close, were gray with gold around the center, like creek water over stones. They dropped to his mouth. His hands were on her waist. He did not remember putting them there.
“Everybody alive?” Jonah shouted from the gate.
Josie rolled off him. She stood, brushed the snow from her coveralls, and found her glasses in a drift. Her hands, Reid noticed, were not quite steady. It was the first time he had seen them shake.
“Everybody’s alive,” she called back. Then she walked to the head of the chute and went back to work.
Felix made lunch in the kitchen: thick sandwiches of roast pork and sharp cheese, a pot of soup, an apple cake still warm from the oven. Josie ate two sandwiches without being told and laughed at a story Jonah told about a bison who had learned to open the hay barn with her horns. She teased Felix about his reading glasses, which were better than hers. She did not look at Reid.
He did not look at her either. Not much. Only enough to see that she was holding her left shoulder a little stiffly where she had landed on it.
After lunch she went back to the pens. Reid went to the machine shed.
He had a cutting torch and a grinder and a plan. He had been carrying the plan around since the first Sunday. Now he could not carry it anymore.
By four o’clock, the light outside the shed had gone gold and thin. The bison were back in the pasture, and the blood tubes were packed in Josie’s cooler. Reid had a new steel frame clamped to the workbench and sparks on his sleeves when the side door opened and she came in, pulling off her gloves.
“Felix says you’re sulking.”
“I’m working.”
“He says that’s how you sulk.”
Reid shut off the grinder. The shed went quiet except for the tick of the woodstove in the corner. He set down the tool and made himself turn around.
“I shouldn’t have put my hands on you,” he said. “This morning. I’m sorry.”
Josie leaned against the doorframe. “You pulled me out of the way of a bull.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“There wasn’t time to ask.” She tipped her head. “You can put your hands on me, Reid. That part I didn’t mind.”
The words hung in the warm air between them. Reid felt them land somewhere low in his chest and stay there.
He cleared his throat and pointed at the frame on the bench, because it was easier than looking at her face. “That’s a man-gate. A gap in the panel. Wide enough for a person, too narrow for a bison. I’m cutting one into the tub. One in the alley. One beside the squeeze, and one by the sorting pen.” He heard himself talking too much and could not stop. “Every place you stand, you’ll have a way out. You won’t have to climb. You won’t have to wait for me.”
Josie did not say anything.
He made himself look at her. She was staring at the frame on the bench as if it were something rare. Then she looked at him, and her eyes were wet.
“Nobody has ever built me anything,” she said.
“It’s a gap in a fence.”
“It’s not.” She crossed the shed and stopped in front of him. Close. She looked down at his left hand, at the old burn that ran from his knuckles up under his sleeve. “Can I?”
He nodded.
She touched the scar with two fingers, lightly, the way she touched an animal she did not know yet.
“Idaho,” he said. He had not meant to say it. “Eleven years ago. The wind turned. We had twenty minutes to get the crew off the ridge, and we had nineteen. I got everybody out but one. Lou Abeyta. He was my best friend.” He breathed. “Felix was my nurse in the burn unit in Seattle. That’s how we met. He talked to me every night for six weeks, whether I answered or not.”
“So you count heads.”
“So I count heads.”
Josie’s fingers moved from his hand to his wrist. He felt every inch of it.
“Reid,” she said quietly. “Can I kiss you?”
There was a lot he could have said. That he was forty-three and had not kissed anyone in three years. That she was the bravest, most reckless person he had ever met, and he was afraid of her. That he had wanted to since she had stood in the snow with a dart gun and told him to keep the bull up there.
“Yes,” he said.
She rose on her toes. He bent his head. Her mouth was cold from outside and then warm, very warm, and soft, and certain. She kissed him slowly at first, as if asking a question with every second of it. Reid answered. He put one hand on her back and the other at the nape of her neck, under the braid, and she made a small sound against his lips that went straight through him.
The kiss changed. It grew deeper and hungrier. She pushed him back against the workbench, and he let her. Her hands went inside his open coat and spread across his chest. His went down to her waist and pulled her in until there was no space left between them at all. She tasted like Felix’s coffee and apple cake. He thought, very clearly, I am in trouble, and then he stopped thinking.
Behind them, the big shed door rolled open on its track with a long iron groan.
Josie jerked back. Reid turned.
Felix stood in the doorway with two mugs of coffee in his hands. Jonah leaned on the frame behind him, his hat pushed back, the gold evening light falling across his face. He was not grinning.
Nobody said anything for a long moment.
Josie stepped away from Reid. He watched her shoulders come up, the way they did before a heavy pull. She looked from Felix to Jonah, and he saw her get ready for anger. For a fight. For the look a man gave another man when he had taken something that wasn’t his.
“Well,” Felix said at last, very gently. “That answers that.”
“About time one of us told her,” said Jonah.
Josie stared at him. “Told me what?”
Felix set the two mugs carefully on the nearest barrel. He looked at Reid. Reid looked back and nodded once. They had talked about this. All three of them, at the kitchen table, late, more than once. He had not thought it would come like this, with his heart still pounding and her taste still on his mouth.
“Come up to the house, Doc,” Felix said. “We need to talk. All four of us.”
