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Stages leading to hypothermia:
Frostnip: characterized by skin pain and numbness, 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-toshoulder, 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 halfdozen 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 external 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
covered in cow shit, with my hand spreading open a cow’s birth canal. I lifted the flaps of skin, pretending it was nothing more than her gums. “What now?”
He said, “Hold tight. Rest when she rests. Pull up when she strains. Here we go.” His arm slipped out. Dad muttered under his breath. Once his hands were out of the warm, wet birth canal, and he touched the icy cold chain on the ground to start pulling, his hands froze to the metal and ripped the skin clean away. He didn’t let it deter him. He was a tough old bastard, I’d give him that much.
My arms shook from the effort of holding open the vulva. Sweat poured down my temples but I was still cold.
“Don’t let go.”
“I’m not.”
“Come on.” He was pulling straight back, cranking the winch, taking up the slack. “You’re about done, little gal. Work with it, not against it.”
Dad wasn’t talking to me, but the heifer.
“Almost there.” He grunted. “There’s the head.”
He switched angles to a downward arc when the shoulders and the rib cage emerged. The calf slid out in a liquid ooze that stunk to high heaven. I held my breath and let go of the folds. Dad immediately tickled inside the sodden calf ’s nose with a piece of straw to help it get its first breath. It worked. I’d breathe, too, if someone was jamming something up my nostril.
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The momma made no move to get up and lick her baby clean.
“This ain’t good. Come on, girl, get up.”
Finally after a few minutes, he picked up the calf and placed it on an old blanket to drag it up to the momma’s head. The heifer let out a soft moo and the thick tongue lapped at the yuck coating the shivering baby. Then stopped.
We watched. Waiting for something. Anything. The heifer strained and twitched hard and paid no attention whatsoever to her calf.
My breath was coming in short pants and a gust of frigid wind reminded me where I was. This was another danger to ranchers: exertion resulting in a false sense of warmth and constant exposure to cold made them complacent, resulting in frostbitten fingers, toes, ears, noses, and sometimes death. Spent, I crawled forward. The move startled the heifer and she kicked me in the stomach, knocking me back. The blow nicked the bottom of my ribs, sending a white-hot stab of agony through me. “Fuck!”
“Watch your mouth,” Dad warned.
The cow violently convulsed again. Her head smacked into the stall wall, her big tongue lolled to the side, and she went still.
We both watched the form for signs of life.
When nothing happened, Dad yelled, “Dammit!”
I turned to look at him. His face held that angry look of temper that’d warned me to run. Even if I’d 105
wanted to run I had nowhere to go.
He scooped up the calf and took it to the dead cow’s teat, while the calfless heifer on the other side of the partition bawled.
Dad rummaged around in the bag, cursing, and disappeared outside.
With nothing else to do, I followed him.
More snow whapped me in the face and I hunkered deeper into my pilfered winter wear. Dad dropped to his knees beside the dead calf and rolled it over so the belly faced up. He inserted a long, curved knife below the neck and sliced the skin straight down the center. He sawed the hide from the fat, cutting the skin away. Then he flipped the carcass over and tugged, peeling the hide from the body like the skin from a grape. Even part of the head ripped off, and he snapped the spine clean.
I clenched my teeth to keep the bile down. I knew Dad hunted and dressed the game. I knew he butchered his own cattle. But the harsh fact remained: he’d skinned the animal in under three minutes. At least he hadn’t gutted it. No blood and entrails discolored the snow as he dragged the carcass to the back of his truck to dispose of it elsewhere to keep predators away from the herd.
When he turned around, covered in blood, mucus, and an oily substance that glistened like Crisco, holding a chunk of leather in its purest form, and a bloody knife, I retched.
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Dad didn’t care. He snapped, “Get yourself together, girlie; we ain’t done,” as he passed by me. And I was too damn cold and numb to do anything but obey. Inside the shelter he draped the calfskin over the newborn live calf and took the bleating, shivering little thing to the calfless mother. She sniffed it. Repeatedly. Her mournful sound changed, and the calf dove beneath her belly and began to suckle. But she wasn’t convinced. She pushed it away and sniffed it again.
“Will she just accept that calf as her own?”
“Chances are still better’n fifty-fifty she’ll reject it. Nothing we can do. Nature will win out every time.”
Did that hold true for all animals? Even humans?
True natures can never be masked?
I shivered. It’d be dark soon. I couldn’t stop him from staying out here all night, but that didn’t mean I had to bunk with him.
Almost the second I plotted my escape, the other heifer became restless and stood. She didn’t care about the dead heifer beside her. Even to my fairly untrained eye, with a fluid bag dangling between her legs, she looked ready to pop.
Dad crouched down to check her. Then he glanced up at me. “Same drill as before. You ready?”
“I guess.”
The process wasn’t much smoother. The heifer wouldn’t lie down. We put her head in a “catch” and I found myself on the business end of a hoof more than 107
once before we hobbled her. The birth was stinkier and messier, too. The amnio sac was filled with liquid and calf shit and burst open when the hooves emerged. Dad was covered in way more gunk than I was and he didn’t seem to notice. Might make me a wuss but I couldn’t wait to crawl into a hot shower.
Chink clunk. Dad haphazardly tossed the birthing instruments in the bag. He must’ve sensed my intention to speak because he cut me off before I even opened my mouth.
“How much gas you got in that rig?”
“About a half tank. Why?”
“It’s gonna be slow goin’ getting back to the house.”
“I’m following you?”
“Unless you wanna ride with me.” At my look of horror he gave me a mean smile. “Didn’t think so. Let’s go ’fore it gets worse.”
“You’re just leaving them?”
“Ain’t nuthin’ more I can do here. They’ve got food and shelter.”
The cold stole my breath the moment I was
completely exposed to the elements. In the last two hours, while I’d been a heifer midwife, the snow began to accumulate on the ground. Where before it’d only been up to my ankles, now I trudged through shindeep powdery fluff. The wind had died down, but that was a catch-22; rather than blowing the snow to Wyoming, it piled it up.
Dad yelled, “Keep your headlights on. Stay close. If 108
you need to stop or if you get stuck, lay on your horn.”
The drive back was worse than the drive in. In some places the snow was two or three feet deep. Darkness fell. My world boiled down to the red taillights ahead of me and the constant slap of the wipers. Every once in a while, big chunks of snow would fly from the hood and splat on the windshield, blinding me. I panicked e
very time, worried when the wipers cleared the snow I’d see nothing in front of me but inky blackness.
Dad cut a hard right and his bright headlights swept the side of the barn. Finally. It’d taken us an hour to travel a mile. But my relief was short-lived when I saw the size of the snowdrifts blocking access to the driveway and the county road beyond it. There was no way I was going home tonight.
I’d convinced myself things couldn’t get worse. As usual, famous last words. Once we’d trudged into the house, we discovered the electricity was off. Then neither the generator nor the backup would kick on. Vaguely I remembered hearing someone say my dad didn’t keep his equipment in top-notch condition, but I didn’t ask questions. At least we still had the woodstove in the living room as a source of heat. 109
Dad tracked down a couple of flashlights and I lit the way as he shoveled a path to the woodpile. We hauled the split logs and stacked them on the porch. I tripped with an armload full of firewood, and a chunk of wood sliced me under the chin, slammed into my rib cage, and bounced off my shin.
My toes and face were cold, yet everywhere else I sweated like a pig. After I filled the wood box, I returned to my truck. Keeping the window cracked, I lit a cigarette and flipped open my cell phone to call Martinez. Completely dead. Not good. No one besides Trish and Brittney knew where I was. I’d worry about dealing with Martinez later, since I had a more pressing problem to deal with right now: being stuck alone with my father.
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Dad stoked the fire. Following his lead, I’d taken off the coveralls and the rest of my borrowed outerwear in the small entryway. Sweat plastered my clothes to my body and I wanted a shower something fierce. But no electricity meant no hot water. Yippee. A cold sponge bath.
My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t eaten all damn day. I suspected Dad hadn’t either. I was too tired to pull any of that feminist a-man’s-capable-of-making-his-own-meal crap. He’d started the fire; I could rustle up dinner.
I rummaged in Trish’s kitchen, finding roast beef, ham, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, spicy German mustard, everything to make hearty sandwiches. I added a slice of homemade apple pie, and a side of canned peaches. By the time I brought Dad a plate, he’d fallen 111
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