v

Melanie

The cow has dipped into the slurry lagoon and died, hips hooked on the bent gate. Melanie rubs her hands. Her skin stuck to the frozen metal when she pulled the pin to let it open, and it stings a little. Is a bit red. Anywhere else along the pit, the cow would have been able to step her rear in the pit, get her head up, and they might have had time to help her out. Melanie squats next to the cow and rocks forward onto her toes. A chocolate line of shit clings to the animal’s hair. What a stupid way to die.

“Bird hit a cow.” Kendra flexes her jaw and chews on her cheek.

The pretty-boy, on his butt on the tarp, his black kilt flipped and showing off his skinny denim, raises the back of his wrist to his nose and turns away. How dare he.

“Should have stayed in the training yard.” Kendra talks without direction to the distance — the pasture, or the mountain trees subdued by snow — so it’s hard to tell who she’s addressing, or if she’s merely stating the obvious. Axel takes his shoulder out of the cow’s hip and uses its rump to help himself stand.

Melanie runs her fingertips over the cow’s short hide, following the swirling patterns around the hips and belly. Whorls like grass blown prostrate, or, in the late summer, where the cows have lain down in the shorn hayfields. Scratched the wrong way the hair bristles untidily.

“Rope?” Axel unbuttons his coat. Yellow-grey streaks the sternum of his T-shirt.

“Yeah.” Milo sounds out of breath.

“Sling,” Kendra corrects.

“Yeah.” Her father, now that she listens, sounds quiet. Not breathless — reserved. Maybe he’s babying a head-splitter. Is he off the hooch? Don’t tell her he’s attempting abstinence again.

“Rope could rip right through her.” Kendra tosses her toque to Cody and pulls her hair into an elastic on the top of her head.

Milo unzips his jacket, stretches his tube scarf, then zips the coat halfway up again. “In the garage.”

Axel cups his palm over the cow’s pelvic bone where the bird hit, spits, and heads to the barn for Milo.

Melanie shifts from a squat to her knees. How would a rope cut through the cow? Would it be like squeezing dough, with head and butt bulging and the waist becoming thinner and thinner, stretching out to a thread, then to nothing? That’s how the end of Axel’s leg looks like it was separated — she’s seen it. In summer when he relaxes on his veranda he sets his leg beside him under the bug zapper and sips ginger ale. Or would the cut be more like a roast on the chop-board, a clean anatomy lesson of muscle? She balances with a hand on the rail. She should feel sorrier for the cow. But screw that — what good has sorry ever done?

Axel walks back from the barn with both rope and sling. Kendra checks her hair, tugging the bun at the top of her head to make sure it’s fixed.

A car horn echoes off the mountain. Melanie stands and plants her hands on her hips, squinting over the lagoon and field into the cloud-dulled sun and the turn behind the trees. The school bus — her old one, complete with coloured toques on heads that gape out the windows — drives by on the highway headed to town. On their way to school.

Kendra

The cow hangs tan-assed to the sky. Her udder bulges over the paint-stripped rail, the bag so squashed that Kendra — despite the way the teats dangle about like limp dicks — wouldn’t be shocked if it blew. One more thing to haul out of a ditch.

“A cow.” She unzips her vest and tosses it to Cody, who’s crawled off the tarp and stands twisting her toque beside the slurry. “How stupid can you be.”

Axel hands the rope to Milo, lifts the bird from the snow and slips a hood over its head. The bird can’t be totally blind. Hooded, it has poise — the talons pick over the leather glove, minute adjustments are made by the tapered tail; except for the breeze-ruffled breast feathers, the bird’s ceramic. Could it be depth perception that confuses the thing? How it beats one wing and over- or undershoots the lure? And, is there still hope to breed her? The issue could be an injury, environmental. And if not, well, bloodhounds have bloat, German shepherds dysplasia. White gyrfalcons with eye issues? The bird lifts a ropy leg, talons and toes fist under the belly feathers. Two hundred kph into a cow’s ass. The bird’s porcelain, but so’s a toilet. “Well?” she says.

Milo feeds the coiled rope through his hands and stares at her feet. Of course he won’t be the one doing the reach-around in the manure. Why’d she think he would? If she leaves the cow for him to deal with, Melanie will be the one to strip down and take the shit.

She pulls off her sweater and shirt, balls them and throws them to Cody, then adjusts the straps of her undershirt and bra. She holds out her hand. Milo passes her the rope. She fastens the end of the rope to the sling and lies on her front beside the cow. Her arm barely stretches under the heifer’s barrel. Can’t even reach a quarter under the belly without going face-first into cow-pie. She stands up and unbuttons her jeans with her clean hand. Cody hangs them over his shoulder. Kid’s pretty much a clothes rack anyway.

She sits on the edge and swings her legs in. She lowers herself to the waist. Crust, liquid, then solid ground. Or semi-solid sludge that sinks with her. She strings the rope under the heifer, bending down to reach, and when she stands again the warm muck hugs up to her pits. “Can you reach it round the other side?” She holds her breath. Barn-loads of mealy cow flops, hay, and runoff. Probably ammonia seeping out.

“Axel, can you reach it?” Her face is against the warm udder, its skin — softly scrolled with raised mammary veins — swells above her head, and beyond that the velveteen arc of hide slices an upright horizon along neutral clouds. The white’s bell jingles. “Axel.” Under her feet, nothing, but she can’t wiggle them sideways. She plants her palms on the ramp and thrusts at the elbows and shoulders. Too much suction.

“Get me out.” She tugs the rope. “Jesus. Axel.” Cody runs forward and grabs the sling and starts to reel her in. “Now. Please. Now.” Cody offers his hand and she grabs his sleeve and then the rail. She kicks off her boots and gets enough air to alleviate the vacuum and slide onto the ramp.

“What now?” Cody wipes his hands on the snow, then on the gate and on the snow again.

She lies back and bends her knees. What now. Last meet, when she camped in the desert, Sanders opened up about his methods. Half of them were fake, flirtatious — rheum, supposedly, could be cured by feeding a hawk meat soaked in the excrement of an unweaned boy. To stop a falcon’s shrieks, stuff a bat with hot pepper and hang it in the mews. She can’t recall any cure for poor sight. Blindness — sewing the eyelids, or hooding as the modern equivalent — is the solution for fright, and will keep a bird calm even packed in hay, ten per crate, as smugglers do. Where the hell did all the crazy come from? Off is off. And Axel himself is — well, he’s off.

What now? The cow is easier. “There’s a pump, no?”

“Yes.” Milo’s voice.

Clouds knead into each other over the entire sky. They’ve pulled up from the mountain and set off the trees with a uniform grey glow. It’s not possible to pinpoint the sun beyond. She rolls onto her side. Milo coils the rope. She should lecture him, say, Get your own damn cow out.

Axel loops the white’s jesses around a fence post. The falcon spreads its wings and clenches the wood. Melanie goes into the house and comes back with a pair of Milo’s boots.

“Fine.” Kendra stands and takes the boots. “All right. Go get the pump.”

Milo backs the tractor to the garage. Kendra and Milo latch the trailer and the pump. She and Melanie unroll the thick canvas hose over the pasture. The few cows in the field glance at them, then return to browsing the churn of dirt, tufted grass, and snow. Kendra signals to Axel and a rush of raw waste animates the hose. Half the morning passes before the shit level drops low enough that she can reach under the cow without getting sucked into the lagoon again. Axel shuts down the pump. Milo unlatches the trailer, loops the rope on the hitch, and drags the cow onto the ramp with the tractor. Melanie takes the creased blue tarp from the fence poles and covers the cow.

Cody

A rumble off the valley walls. The highway’s been quiet all day — all day he’s crouched next to the hooded bird and Kendra’s clothes on the fence, and his digits have iced over — so his first instinct is to think, idly, some sort of howl off the mountainside? His fingers are coated with what looks like coffee grounds, is probably poop, but there’s a chance it’s dirt because he wiped them down with grubby snow. He’s going with dirt. His toes, for sure, are white, the blood pushed out by cold and poor circulation. Can’t see them under his sneakers and socks, but can’t feel them either. First step is the waxy yellow-white, then blue, then gangrene — Explorer Green, his mom joked the first time he had to soak his feet in the tub. He should tell Kendra about his feet now that the cow’s on the ramp.

The sound builds — not a roar, at least not a live roar. A bus rounds the corner — orange, dirt sprayed up the wheel wells, the same bus that drove past earlier — coming into view from the direction of town. A school bus. Maybe his mom took pity and signed him up for school. What would she say to that — So you want school now, smart mouth? The bus turns down the driveway.

“Christ,” says Milo. “Christ.”

The bus brakes screech and kids spill off. He crosses the paddock and stands next to Kendra at the pump.

“Christ.” Milo kicks snow over the half-covered puke holes.

“Ready for that tour?” The teacher, last off the bus, rubs his hands together and stomps.

“The power.” Milo turns a half circle and runs his hands through his beard. “The power’s not working.”

“Can’t you milk by hand?” Cody asks Kendra.

She taps the pump with her boot. “If you know how.”

The kids sprawl over the drive and cluster into groups. A girl, from a clump of girls in fitted jackets, lifts the corner of the tarp and squeals and drops it.

“What’ve we got here?” The teacher squats next to the cow. His collar, un-ironed, sticks half under the ribbing of his sweater vest. His jeans rumple cigarette-style over his ankles and steel-toed boots.

“Drown. Hey.” Milo points at the bus driver, who’s lighting up beside the bus. “Hey, not here.”

The teacher twitches back the tarp. “How about an anatomy lesson?”

“No way.” Kendra swears audibly under her breath.

“What’s wrong?” Cody asks.

“What’s wrong,” she says. “What’s wrong.” She starts toward her clothes on the fence and stops. “Bring those with you when you come home.” She stomps, covered in manure, wearing her long johns and undershirt and a pair of Milo’s boots, over the field toward Axel’s. She jerks her arms as she goes, like she’s talking to herself, or berating someone, or conducting.

Axel takes Kendra’s clothes and looks at Cody over his shoulder. “Stay if you want,” he says. He unwinds his bird’s jesses and heads back home.

He should follow, but there’s kids laughing and milling around. A few of them point to the bird on Axel’s fist and he finds himself explaining. “That’s my uncle, sort of. A gyrfalcon. The rarest one.” No one listens. The teacher pulls the tarp from the cow and the cow hulks vulnerably on the bare ramp. Melanie stands next to the cow. She stands straight and her mouth is cracked open like she’s about to ask a question. He’ll ask her about it after he washes his hands.

Axel

“The rarest one,” his brother’s grandson brags behind him. A compliment that the boy is proud. Says maybe the boy will shape up. He turns, walking backwards while looking at the dairy. The cow tan beside the blue tarp. The raw waste from the sewage pumped over a good section of the field. All that shit on the snow. The boy in the kilt with his hair in his eyes, chatting to no one. The school kids around the boy ignore him. Pah. His arm sags. The white has never felt heavy before. A bird plays with gravity, mocks it. This lump of chalk — he jerks his arm upwards and the bird, hooded, dips a wing and collects its balance. No doubt now there’s a screw loose between mind and eye.

He opens the door to the bird yard and heads for the mewses. Screeches from the other gyrfalcons on their perches. There’s her stock — a white male with pale grey peppered over his back, and a female near perfect with only blue tarsus and nare, the ankle and nose. Each worth well over fifty thousand. But it’s not the money. All the birds here are related except the hawks. His charts fan from that first gyrfalcon, the bird he scooped from the nest and lost his leg for.

He opens the door to the white’s mews and sets her on her perch. Loosens the draw on the hood and slides it forward over her beak. She swivels her head round and plucks at the feathers on her shoulders. Across the drive at the hatchling barn, Kendra sits on the steps in her long johns, waiting for the power to kick on and heat water for a shower. He shuts the door to the mews. He’s losing something else, now.

Milo

He didn’t drink, but he didn’t fix the generator. Didn’t secure the gate. Allowed the cows to escape, and didn’t help haul the dead milker on the tarp. And now the class visit. He forgot.

The teacher has asked for knives — he carries Austin’s butcher set from the barn.

“Be my guest,” the teacher says. The man’s young, enthusiastic, oblivious to the pasture full of watery shit and Milo’s discomfort.

The knife case is a heavy-duty camo roll-up, and inside, the four-piece set: caping knife, curved boning knife, flexible straight boning knife, a skinning knife and sharpening steel. He nearly forgot about these knives and the farm goats Austin used to put down himself.

“Stand close in case she moves,” Austin would say, and make him shoot the animal. That’s as far as Milo went. It was Austin who’d squat — almost sit — on the back of the goat, tilt the head, and slice the throat to let it bleed. Slit the skin from throat to anus, string the animal from the “gallows tree” — a spruce at the edge of the pasture. It’s impressive that his old man managed the farm as long as he did.

Take the cow apart and she’ll be easier to dispose of. Milo — if he can’t do anything else, at least he’ll do this.