Snow Blind-J Collins 4 (10 page)

The damn rope didn’t yank me back. No, I skidded to a stop on my face. A razor-sharp ridge of ice sliced my cheek and peeled the scarf from my mouth.

My teeth dug into my lips, even as my lips dug into the crusted snow.

I laid there breathing hard. Freezing. I thought about burrowing into the drift like an Iditarod sled dog and napping until the storm blew over. I thought about my Viking ancestors hunkering down in warm furs inside snowbanks. Piece of cake. If I went to sleep, I’d probably just wake up refreshed. Alert. Ready to climb Everest. I closed my eyes. The wind crooned a special lullaby just for me.

S s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s s - s l e e p ,
ssssssssssssssssssssssssss-sleep.

I was tired. My leg cramped up and I jumped at the sharp pain. My mouth smacked into the snow; I licked my lips and tasted blood. Yuck. Where else was I bleeding? Did blood turn purplish-black when 92

it solidified in such extreme cold? Or did it stay bright red? Maybe it crystallized. Mmm. Like the red sugar sprinkles my mom used to decorate Christmas cookies.

That’d be pretty. Blood on snow. Vivid red on such pristine white. I remembered candy canes and velvet ribbons draped on a flocked evergreen tree. Red ink swirls on crisp white paper cards. Mounds of canned whipped cream sprayed on Cherries Jubilee.

The white knuckle of my father’s fist becoming bloodied after he’d hit me.

My body spasmed and I jerked awake.

Jesus, Julie, focus.

As I lay there, tired, cold, half-pissed-off/half-delirious and splayed in a grotesque distortion of a snow angel, my melancholy morphed into fear. I could die out here. Hell. Maybe I was halfway there.

My thoughts floated to a sad story about a kid a few years older than me in school. His parents had been trapped in a stalled car, after an accident out in the middle of nowhere, during an ice storm. Knowing they were going to freeze to death, the mother wrote a good-bye letter to her son. The morbid rumor circu-lating afterward claimed the letter was gibberish and that the final word trailed off at the end into one long line of nothing. Like she’d slowly dragged the pen across the center of the paper as she’d frozen to death and died.

Cheery thought. Maybe you should think about that
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde made-for-TV movie you watched
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as a kid, where in the end the woman froze to death on the
ship and her
beautiful blue
eyes were wide open and completely iced over.

The image still haunted me.

Wasn’t delirium a fugue state right before death?

Last time I’d been in a dreamy pre-death state, my dead brother had shoved me back toward the land of the living before he disappeared into the great unknown.

Come on, Ben, I could use some wise Lakota words
about now.

I heard nothing but the roar of the wind and a faint . . .
Mooooooooo.

What the fuck?

I listened.

Mooooooooo.

I had to be hallucinating.

Mooooooooo.

I lifted my head and heard it again.

Not one moo, but a collection of moos. A chorus of moos. High and low notes ringing out dissonance across the prairie amphitheater.

Great. I was dying in a fucking cow pasture, being serenaded by a phantom bovine choir.

PETA would have a field day with this.

Field
day?
Jesus. I was in a field. That was goddamn funny.

I started to laugh. I laughed until the frigid air lined the inside of my lungs and my stomach hurt. I thought I might laugh until I cried. Or until I died.

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But I wanted neither to die with tears on my cheeks, nor to live with the telltale tracks etched into my skin like a brand of shame.

In order to survive I had to move my ass.

Somehow I managed to lift my stiff body to my hands and knees. I sat up and rested on my heels. Flying daggers of ice slashed my face when I stood. I clenched my teeth and shook off the stinging pain.

With my shoulders hunched against the wind, I shuffled through the powder, using the rope as a guide back to my truck and inside the blessed warmth of the cab.

Once I’d thawed some, I realized I’d lost my sunglasses. I also realized I was seeing better without them. Maybe since I wasn’t so damn snow blind I could see the fence line. Too late to give up. I was already out here. It’d be stupid to go back.

I rubbed a foggy spot at the bottom of the windshield and saw a flash of red. I blinked, afraid it’d been another illusion.

Nope. A red streamer fluttered in the wind. I rammed the truck in gear and gunned it about twenty feet. Sure enough. My dad had fastened a long strip of red plasticlike lumberyards used to a twelve-foot two-by-four I knew it marked the turnoff to the cattle shelter.

I cranked the wheel a hard right, hit the gas, and plowed through a snowdrift. By the time the windshield wipers slapped away the snow, I saw the ass end of my dad’s Dodge and narrowly avoided smacking 95

into the open tailgate.

My adrenaline kicked in when I noticed the driver’s door was open and a dark shape was half-buried in the snow by the front tire.

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Stages leading to hypothermia:

Frostnip
: characterized by skin pain and numb-ness, exposed body parts become blanched (white).

Frostbite
: redness, swelling, formation of blisters or water blisters (blebs) followed by gangrene of tissue and underlying fat, resulting in black, leathery dead skin, requiring amputation.

Clinical stages of hypothermia:

Excitatory
: rapid breathing, increased activity as victim shivers, attempting to warm up, as blood vessels constrict to conserve heat. Heart rate drops as the amount of blood ejected by the heart is reduced.

Fatigue and confusion set in.

Adynamic
: victim is without movement; breathing slows as the respiratory center reflects total metabolic slowdown. Confusion gives way to delirium. Reflexes disappear, including loss of muscular power and coordination. Skin becomes cold as blood is shunted into deeper tissues.

Paralytic
: as the core temperature drops, the victim becomes comatose and neurological centers cease to function. Cold exposure produces excessive urination (diuresis), causing dehydration and cardiovascular complications. The heart quivers uselessly without pumping blood.

Death.

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I shut my truck off but made sure I left the keys in the ignition before I climbed out. The shape wasn’t big enough to be Dad. I slammed his pickup door shut on my way past and stared down at the dead calf.

The tiny black animal was already frozen stiff.

My gaze zoomed to the rickety wooden structure in front of me. Not like a barn, not really even a building. The cattle shelter was a temporary break from the elements. It was twenty feet long and eight feet high. Three sides were enclosed, although an inch gap showed between the boards, like in a corn bin. In the far right corner, a couple of sheets of plywood had been tacked up, turning it into a makeshift stall.

Maybe it was wishful thinking, but it seemed the wind had died down. I crept along the back side of the 98

structure. Too late for me to worry about not spooking the cows so I yelled through the slats, “Dad? You okay?”

No answer except the continual bellow of animals.

I repeated the process every five feet. Not even a blizzard could mask the rank odor of manure and animal flesh. I rounded the last corner, not knowing what I’d find.

Twenty or so head were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder, head-to-butt, butt-to-head. I pressed myself close to the wall, hoping I could make the entire length without a hoof connecting with some part of my body.

“Dad?”

Crack
. A powerful kick connected with the siding and glanced off my knee. Oh, shit.
Oh, fuck. That
hurt.
Stupid cows made a game of it and I was nailed a half-dozen more times before I made it to the stall.

One momma with afterbirth hanging out of her rear end bellowed mournfully, over and over, calling for her dead calf. Casualties were high in the cattle business during blizzards.

I peered over the edge and saw him. His head rested on the back wall. Eyes closed, mouth slack. He could be dead; he could be asleep. Loudly, I said, “Dad.”

He jumped and rubbed his eyes like I was an apparition. “Julie?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“What the devil are you doin’ out here?”

Saving your sorry ass.

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“Trish sent me. She hadn’t heard from you and she was worried.”

“So she guilted you into comin’ after me? In a blizzard?”

“No. Brittney did.” I counted to ten. Why was I surprised he wasn’t happy to see me? Did I really expect he’d throw his arms open in welcome? Right.

And then the cows would sprout wings and fly us to the moon.

“How long have you been out here?”

He harrumphed. “Since first light. I knew we was in for a bunch of snow. I’d dropped off extra hay when I noticed a few of my two-year-old heifers were gone. Tracked them here to find them laboring. Stupid hired man dropped cake out here. What a worthless SOB.”

The word
cake
threw me and I had to think for a second. Cake was pelletlike food ranchers sometimes used in the winter for feed in addition to hay. “Where is your hired man?”

Dad didn’t answer; instead, he offhandedly said,

“First-time mommas, you never know how it’ll go. I stuck around. Ended up losin’ the first calf.”

“I saw it out by your truck.” I slapped a flank, and the back end of the cow blocking me in moved, but the snap of the tail nearly caught me in the face. “By the way, your truck door was open. Hope you hadn’t left it that way on purpose, because I shut it.”

“Battery dead?”

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“Didn’t appear to be.”

“The wind musta blown it open.”

A laboring heifer lay on either side of him.

“How’d you find me? Use some of them PI skills?”

“No. I followed the fence line, saw the flag, and
voilà
, here I am.”

“Surprised you remembered how to get here.”

“Yeah? Can’t say I’m surprised that you forgot I helped you with calving for two years before Trish entered the picture.” Not that he’d given me a choice and I sure as shit had tried to block it out.

He didn’t have a smart remark for that. We listened to the ceaseless sounds of the wind.

“Are these the last two in labor?”

“For now. I don’t have a good feelin’ about either of ’em. This one keeps wantin’ to stand up. This one is flopped down like she’s already given up on the birth. If I try to get ’em to move, they go into further distress. Ain’t neither one of ’em particularly docile.

If I leave ’em unattended, I’d likely lose two cow/calf pairs, rather than just two calves.”

“How long you planning to stay out here?”

“Long as it takes. Got the calf puller ready to go for that one.” He pointed to the heifer lying down, breathing hard. “I was jus’ takin’ a break.”

God. I hated to help pull a calf. It was a last resort, hence the use of extraction tools, and potentially dangerous to the calf. Plus, it was just a gross, nasty process.

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Even though we were somewhat sheltered, we were still outside and it was still damn cold. I stamped my feet and leaned inside the stall. “Wish I woulda thought to bring coffee.”

He grunted and tipped his head back, closing his eyes.

I had nothing better to do so I studied him. I don’t know what I expected to find. More gray hair threaded within the black strands? Deeper wrinkles by his disapproving eyes and frowning mouth? Or a softness in his sleeping hours, which was absent when he was awake?

There wasn’t a soft thing about him.

I should leave while I still could.

“It ain’t polite to stare. And I know for a fact your mama taught you better than that, girlie.”

Before I could snap off a response, the heifer shifted and tried to stand.

“Whoa, whoa there, little gal,” he said, shifting to his knees. “Let’s take it slow.”

The heifer began to thrash and make horrid noises.

“What the hell is wrong with her?”

“Her water bag broke more’n hour ago. She’s panicked and in pain ’cause that calf ain’t moved. Might be hung up on the pelvis. What do you recall about pullin’ a calf?”

“Besides all the liquidy shit?”

“Guess you remember enough.” He pointed to the bag in the corner. “Toss it over.”

I dragged the big canvas bag behind him.

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Dad ripped off his right leather work glove and ran his bare hand down the heifer’s heaving side. Then he squirted antibacterial gel on his arm from his hand past his elbow. At least I wouldn’t be sticking my hand up where no one’s hand belonged.

I noticed he’d already attached the breech spanner of the calf puller below the heifer’s puffed-out vulva, and secured it around the backbone to keep the tail in place.

He slid his hand inside the birth canal. Made a squishy sound as he gently moved it around. “Front hooves are pointin’ the right way, but I can feel the calf ’s nose and the tongue started to swell.”

I knelt along the cow’s spine. She was too focused on expelling the calf to be skittish at my strange and tentative touch. Dad’s and my hands were a foot apart on her belly and I could feel the hard clench of the ex-ternal muscles as the internal muscles worked hard to disgorge the calf.

He and the cow both grunted as he rooted around, attaching the chain ends to the calf ’s legs. “Let’s work the SOB out a little at time, alternating pullin’ on these blasted chains.”

“Do you need me down there to pull one while you pull the other?”

“No. Too risky, ’specially since you ain’t done this for a while. Need you to open her up.”

Eww. I didn’t argue; I didn’t ask questions. There were a million places I’d rather be than in the middle of a blizzard, in zero degree cold, with my father, 103