The Last Cows

horses inside the corral fence, looking over a pen full of heifers that had been weaned a couple of months earlier.“That’s the best piece of advice I can give you about the cattle business.” “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “Love a cow?” He got first pick, then I got a turn. But only one. My introduction to owning and raising my own herd of cattle would begin with one cow. We weren’t married yet. “Why not?” I asked. “You never know when you’re gonna have to sell them,” he said, and yawned. “If it’s a dry year, or she doesn’t get bred or she loses a calf, or the market goes way up and you just can’t pass up the opportunity, she goes to town.” Meaning the sales yard, the slaughterhouse, the meatpacking plant, the supermarket. “Oh.” I eyeballed the heifers. They were mostly Brahma crosses, blacks and reds, and some Santa Gertrudis, white markings like spilled milk on their redrock-colored faces, legs, and bellies. I tried to remember everything Keith had taught me—straight back, good angle from hip bone to croup, not too high-headed, no whites of the eyes. My horse shifted beneath me. “Choose carefully,” Keith reminded me as he squinted at the herd from under the brim of his hat. A near-black heifer stood in the middle, her ears nearly as long as her face, her legs long, too, like a colt’s or a deer’s. A sheen of red outlined her neck, chest, and belly, and ran down the insides of her legs. She had the Brahma hump of fat above her withers—the red there, too, and along her backbone—and dewlaps at her throat. I kept my eye on her.