"Stop," Clay said. He did not shout it. "Stand still. Right where you are."
Tanner had already started to run up the bank. He stopped like he had hit a wall.
"Clay, they're headed for the road."
"I know where they're headed. You chase them, they'll get there quicker."
Clay looked at the cows on the bank. They were scattered, heads high, ears turned toward the noise. But they had not gone far. They were milling. A cow that is still deciding can be talked out of it.
"Jess," he said. "Get Granny across. Don't hurry her. Rattle that bucket like it's any other evening."
Jess waded the last of the ford with Granny and the front half behind her. On the far side, she turned and shook the bucket. The rattle carried up the creek bottom, plain and ordinary.
Some of the cows on the bank swung their heads toward it.
Clay turned Dutch away from the herd and rode up and around them in a wide, slow circle. The old horse knew the job better than any of them. He walked, he did not trot, and he kept his distance until Clay was between the cows and the highway.
The log truck came down the hill with its jake brake rattling. The driver saw the cattle by the shoulder and slowed hard.
Right behind it came a clean, shiny pickup that Clay knew.
Grady Pruitt pulled onto the shoulder and climbed out in his good boots. "Clay. I came to see how you were getting on. It's past nine. Noon's noon."
"Grady," Clay said, "I need your truck."
"My truck?"
"Pull it across the north lane with your flashers on. That log truck's stopped south. If you block north, we've got a gate across Route 9 for five minutes. That's all I need."
Grady looked at his truck. Then at the cows. Then down the road at the log truck driver, who was leaning on his horn and his window both.
Clay could see him working it. His closing. His bank. His shiny paint and the mud on the shoulder. He had grown up poor in this county, and Clay knew a man like that never stops counting what he has to lose.
"Let's be reasonable," Grady said slowly. "How long?"
"Five minutes."
Grady got in the truck. He backed it into the north lane, crossways, and turned on the flashers. Then he got out, stood in the ditch in his good boots, and spread his arms like he was herding chickens.
"Not like that," Clay said. "Just stand. Let them see you. They'll go around."
Grady stood.
It took six minutes, not five.
Jess came back across the ford with Granny and the front of the herd. She walked them up the bank and straight past the scattered cows, shaking the bucket. One by one, the strays turned and fell in behind their friends. Cows will follow a cow they trust a lot sooner than they'll follow a man.
Clay held Dutch on the highway side, a little behind their shoulders, where his pressure kept them moving forward. When one hesitated, he waited. When she moved, he relaxed.
Granny crossed Route 9 at a walk, between the stopped log truck and Grady's shiny pickup. Thirty-nine cows walked behind her, in no hurry at all.
The log truck driver stopped honking somewhere around cow number twenty. By cow number thirty, he had his phone up, taking a video.
They went up Clay's lane and through his back gate into the hollow pasture, well away from the front field where Ten Spot stood watching with deep interest. Tanner swung the gate shut and chained it. Jess counted out loud as the last ones went through.
"Forty," she said, and sat down on an overturned feed tub like her knees had quit.
It was ten-fifteen.
Luke called Jess's phone a minute later from the farmhouse, where he had been waiting by the phone all morning with his boot up on a kitchen chair. Jess put him on speaker so Clay could hear.
"Forty?" Luke said.
"All forty," Jess said.
There was a long quiet on the line. "Mr. Hollister," Luke said finally, "I owe you a steak dinner."
"You owe Granny a bucket of cubes," Clay said. "But I'll take the steak too."
Grady came up the lane on foot an hour later. His good boots were caked to the ankle. There was a long smear of mud up the side of his truck, where a cow had brushed it on her way past.
He stood at the fence and watched the herd spread out on the grass.
"Jess," he said. "The bottom thirty acres behind my lots are floodplain. County won't let me build a thing on them. I'm going to need somebody to keep it grazed so the weeds don't take over." He looked at his boots. "Dollar a year. If you want it."
Jess stared at him. "Why?"
Grady shrugged. "My granddad kept a few cows when I was little. I used to carry his feed bucket." He turned to go, then turned back. "Don't tell anybody I said that. I've got a campaign coming."
Clay watched him walk back down the lane.
"Well, I'll be," he said quietly.
That evening, Clay sat on his own fence by his own water tank with Marlene's coffee in a thermos and Dutch dozing at the rail.
The Miller cows came down out of the hollow in their own time. Clay watched them come.
Granny drank first, the way she always had. Thirty-nine cows stood back in the dusk and waited for the old girl to lift her head.
