Rescue
The cow had been trapped for a day at least, Dad said. He could tell that sort of thing just by looking. We found her, my parents and I, on a snow-slick county road, ranchland for miles and not a trace of cell service.
“Oh my god,” I said, shivering in my city-grade fleece at the thought of spending even an hour stranded in this austere cold.
“Hey now,” Dad scolded, “taking the Lord’s name in vain ain’t going to help her any.”
I apologized, forgetting it’s gosh back home.
Mom apologized too, but because she worried that I wasn’t having a good time. “No wonder he never wants to come back home,” she said to Dad, but obviously directed at me.
“Mom,” I said. “It’s not like that,” even though it sort of was.
We’d come to hike along the Yampa River, named for a carrot-like root the native Ute harvested before they were driven out to make room for the cattle. The plant is one of few that can survive the high desert winters of northwest Colorado, where the cold cracks windshields. Years have passed since I’ve seen those white flowers, spring’s brief reward, since I only fly in from the city for Christmas.
Dad noticed my shivering and handed me his coat. “Don’t go telling me you forgot what a real winter feels like,” he said, now in just a T-shirt adorned on the arm with two rifles crossed like an X. “Alright,” he said, kneeling to get a closer look at the situation. “Let’s see what kind of mess we got here.”
The cow’s back legs splayed out behind her, dangling between the metal bars of a cattle guard meant to keep herds in their appointed pastures. She was stuck at the cow equivalent of an ankle, the skin at the bulbous joint raw and bleeding. Her hide was brown and stained with sweat, steam rising off her body. Dirt peppered the snow from a struggle she’d since given up. She leaned, exhausted, against the barbed wire fence, tufts of hair stuck in the barbs, fluttering in the wind.
“What do we do?” I stammered, rusty in the emergency cattle department.
“How about I head toward town until I can call the sheriff?” suggested Mom.
“That’s an hour’s drive at least. This old girl’s liable to get herself in even more of a bind by then,” Dad said. “Besides, what’s the sheriff got in his truck that I don’t?” He turned to me and said, “There’s a rope in the back. Grab it. You’re young and tough, we’ll have her out in no time.” He squeezed my arm, feeling for muscle and giving an honest effort to hide his disappointment. “Hustle up now.”
The command came in that half-coach, half-boss tone from when I was a kid and served after school and weekends as his unpaid employee: Dig a hole; cut that board; grab the socket wrench—that’s an Allen wrench. I said a socket wrench. His face flushed when I got the wrenches wrong, which I did up to the day I left for college. He was trying to teach me how to be a man, he’d say, training my hands to know hard labor and calluses. All that work just for me to go and study poetry. His eyes still betray disbelief that such a severe landscape could produce a creature as tender as his son—though tender might not be the word he’d choose.
When I returned with the rope, I noticed Mom staring not at the cow but at me. She mouthed, Are you okay? and I nodded, both of us careful not to let Dad see. Out loud, she said, “I think it’s one of Maneotis’s heifers,” gesturing to the brand burned into the animal’s rump.
“Looks it,” said Dad, threading the rope around the cow’s legs like they do in rodeos. The animal made no move to stop him but watched our movements with wide, inky eyes. I made the mistake of looking into them, wondering at the depths of her pain. I should have known better. It’s funny what I’ve forgotten since I left home, and how, the longer I stay, the lessons return like facts from old textbooks.
The earliest government surveys of this land remarked how it could support only stunted sagebrush and alkaline soil—a place unfit for all but the bleakest of life. Even the Ute didn’t settle year-round. To live here is to accept that the going will not be easy, and you will suffer unimaginable pain, and for some reason people take pride in this. They walk around carrying their suffering like badges of honor.
“Alright,” Dad said. “On the count of three, we got to pull on this rope, and hard. We get those legs lifted, then your Mom will yank the head. Ready?”
No was not an option. We took our positions. Dad twisted the rope around his hands, and I followed suit. On the count of three, I strained until the rope burned like a hot kettle in my palms. If my hands had ever known calluses, desk work had smoothed them soft. My arms trembled. I let up a little. The rope slipped.
“Don’t quit on me now. We nearly got her!” Dad barked.
A harsh place, and yet, when the snow does at last melt, spring brings flowers. They don’t last long, sometimes just a day, like tiny stars that take the right darkness and a long stretch of staring to see. Only when I left home did I, upon returning, notice them. I remember that visit, my first, after I swore that I’d never come back. I’d left the house for some space, which there is no shortage of, and sat on the dry grass. In front of me a cluster of yampa swayed in the breeze, bunched like a bouquet. Next to them, a cactus with a single purple blossom sprouting from its thorny crown. I leaned over to smell it and caught the scent, subtle but unmistakable, of skunk. I had to laugh. Even beauty had its defenses.
With what strength remained, I gripped the rope. Dad looked at me with furious determination.
“It’s time to buck up,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”
I took a deep breath. The air stung my lungs. When I exhaled, it summoned a brief ghost eager to be air again. Once again, we pulled.
“That’s it!” Dad said. “Just a little more. C’mon, now, harder, harder.”
The cow gave a sudden jolt that, paired with our efforts, flung her legs free. Mom pulled the animal’s bulky head like a quarterback taking the snap, and for a brief moment I thought of the story I’d tell my boyfriend about this day, the city-loving boyfriend who doesn’t know a steer from a heifer.
I almost wondered out loud, forgetting it’s friend back home.
The dirt roads here go on for hundreds of miles, lined on both sides with barbed wire. Talk of Mathew Shepard, left for dead on such a fence not far from here, traveled less as an elegy than a warning. What did I do to survive such a place? What I had to do. Even the plants here must protect themselves. The sagebrush, with bitterness; the cacti, with spears. The yampa, with a thin stem and delicate flowers, survives through roots that bunker away nutrients until the ice melts and spring arrives with her motherly embrace.
I don’t think that hiding is a cowardly way to survive. For hours, I practiced in front of my bedroom mirror, rehearsing what my father had taught me, had tried to instill not out of cruelty but out of that specific urgency with which parents teach us the ways of the world so that if the world knocks us down, we stand right back up. At night, I did exercises, taken from the Arthritis Foundation, to prevent my wrists from going that homosexual kind of limp. I exiled the tenor from my voice, as well as the sibilant s that gave other boys like me away. This is how a man sounds, I told myself. This is how he gets strong.
With a heavy sigh, the cow collapsed in the snow. She stayed there, not moving, not blinking, the rise and fall from her breathing the only proof she was still alive.
“We did it!” The voice was shrill, effeminate, mine. I raised a hand to my mouth like I could take it back and try again, tougher this time.
Dad shot me a look but said nothing. Just cleared his throat and nodded.
“Is she okay?” Mom asked.
“Let’s give her a minute,” Dad said, tugging his chin, wincing.
I decided that in the story I would tell my boyfriend about this day, I won’t shiver in the cold. I won’t even need my father’s coat. I’ll be the one giving orders, not taking them. When I get to the part about the deputy arriving a little while later and assessing the situation, I won’t mention the cow’s leg being broken, how he said there was nothing to be done, then took a pistol from his holster without so much as an apology. I won’t look away, I won’t look away, at the snow as white as blossoms.
Derek Maiolo (@derek.maiolo) received his MFA from Chatham University, where he was the 2021-2023 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow. A journalist and conservationist, his work appears or is forthcoming in High Country News, The Denver Post, The Indiana Review, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a memoir about growing up gay in coal country.