He slowed the pickup as he came along the north fence. The cows were out on the far side of the pasture, black dots against the tan grass, the calves already weaned and shipped. He thought, without wanting to, of branding day in late May. They had gathered this pasture with the Kesslers and pushed the pairs into the old Ferris corrals, and Wade had stood at the gate counting, the way his father had stood at the same kind of gate and counted, and the count had been off. Six cows bagged up tight with milk and bawling, with no calves at their sides. Six calves gone. Not dead; there were no carcasses, no birds circling, no coyote sign. Just gone, the way calves had been going all over central Montana that spring—a dozen from a place near Winnett, twenty from a Hutterite colony up by Denton—slicks taken before they ever felt a branding iron, untraceable once they were across a county line.
He had called it in that afternoon. Claire's cousin Tom Danner was a deputy with the Fergus County Sheriff's Office, and Tom had driven out and walked the fence with him and found where a section of wire on the north side had been let down and put back up by somebody who knew how, and where a stock trailer had been backed in off the county road. Tom had taken the report and shaken his head and said they'd probably never see those calves again.
And Wade had gone to the Stockgrowers meeting in Lewistown in June and stood up in the back of the room at the Yogo Inn and said what he thought. He remembered it with a slight heat in his face now, the way you remember a thing you meant entirely at the time. He had said that his father had been hit by rustlers in 1987, forty head in one night, and that it had nearly finished the Hollister place, and that it had put something in his father that never came back out. He had said that he'd put up five thousand dollars of his own money on top of the association's reward. And he had said that when they caught whoever it was, he wanted them sent to Deer Lodge, and he didn't care how old they were or what their story was, because everybody had a story and his calves still didn't come back. People had clapped. Claire had been sitting in the third row. She had not clapped. He remembered that now, too; he had noticed at the time and not thought anything of it.
He drove on down off the bench to the creek and home.
* * *
June got off the school bus at three-forty at the end of the lane, as she did every day, and Wade was waiting for her in the pickup instead of Claire, as he almost never was. She climbed in with her backpack and her lunchbox and her hair coming out of its braids, and she looked at him sideways and said, "Are you and Mommy fighting?"
"We're working something out."
"Is it about Danny?"