William Bankier - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 103, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 625 & 626, March 1994

He chased after several likely looking specimens that proved to be oversized Spotted Loco that hadn’t yet begun to bloom. Suddenly a wall of rushes appeared a few hundred yards to the north, and beyond them gleamed a drainage pool. Here by the fence there was no standing water, but the ground was saturated by seepage. Soon he was sinking in up to his ankles with every step and sweating like a hog in the sticky air; still, this was exactly where a calf might have wandered into the preserve, attracted by the pond itself and the luxuriant foliage around it, so he slogged on, checking for broken barbed wire on his left and locoweed on his right.

He saw both simultaneously. A section of newly strung wire testified to an old break, and about twenty feet north of it a stand of locoweed started his heart beating faster.

These were definitely different from anything else he had looked at: branches almost twice as long, flowers-to-be clumped in a dense flower-spike rather than a loose raceme. Now if he could just find a dried pod from last year... ah! Here!

He took out his Swiss Army knife and delicately sliced through the brittle balloon. It was completely hollow — one-celled, with no evidence of a septum. Sheep’s Loco, he was almost positive!

In fact, all the locoweed in the muck edging the pool seemed to be Sheep’s Loco. Evidently it had found a niche for itself here; the Spotted Loco seemed to prefer the higher, drier areas. But had Patterson’s calves grazed here? Well, those round impressions in the mud looked like the hoofprints of cattle. And several branches of the locoweed appeared to have been gnawed and stripped by leathery bovine tongues. Hell, it was good enough for him.

He snipped a few leaflets and a flower-spike, out of long habit taking no more than was necessary for definite ID. Then, realizing that he should get a bioassay to test for selenium, he broke off a long branch. It had a pungent, bitter odor.

His field calls ended in the southeast part of the county, and on his way home he detoured towards Dwayne Patterson’s land. He cut west through the oilfields, holding his breath against the sulfurous fumes, and then headed north on the McMinnville road, which formed the eastern boundary of the Lazy D.

About a quarter of a mile along the road, he saw a patch of locoweed along the shoulder and pulled off. Beyond the barbed wire a few crow-black cattle watched him fixedly as he examined the stuff briefly. He was pretty expert by now, and it was clearly Spotted Loco. Which was not to say there was no Sheep’s Loco anywhere on Patterson’s land, but he thought he could make a strong argument for the calves having browsed up by the drainage pools — in other words, he could save Eddie Froelich’s ass.

He looked up at the sound of a motor, and in a moment a blue Ford 250 pickup stopped about twenty yards away and Dwayne Patterson stepped out. Sam stood, dusted his hands on his jeans, and called a greeting.

“Howdy. Just checking out your indigenous flora.”

Patterson approached with his rolling cowboy gait and stopped beside him, staring down at the locoweed. “So this is what them poor little beasts ate, huh?”

“Close. It was a different species, though. There’s a type of locoweed over at the nature preserve that’s bigger and has flowers in sort of a — a ball, instead of strung out along a branch like this, and pods that aren’t speckled...” He trailed off. Patterson’s eyes had begun to glaze over in a familiar way. “Ever see anything like that on your land?” he finished hopelessly.

Patterson replied, inevitably, that hell, they all looked alike to him. “Fixed a break in my fence along the north boundary, though,” he remarked, then added, “I guess you got to know this plant stuff for your work.”

“Well, up to a point. It’s kind of a hobby, too.”

“Hobby,” Patterson repeated thoughtfully, by mere inflection suggesting that a hobby was a sinful extravagance when there were calves to be fed and fences to be mended and work to be done eighteen hours a day, six days a week. And on the Sabbath we rested and thanked Him for our meager and joyless lives; Sam could hear his father’s voice, harsh, weary, but insistent, like a rasp on hard wood...

He was lost in reverie for a few seconds. When he looked up, Patterson was grinning, and for a wild instant Sam imagined that Dwayne not only saw the painful memory he had evoked but had in fact deliberately conjured it up, like a redneck — who was that guy — Mephistopheles, and was enjoying it.

But when Patterson began to talk, the jovial Good Ol’ Boy was back.

“Guess you prob’ly know that locoweed’s mighty peculiar stuff,” he said. “Most stock’ll stay away from it, but I’ve known some animals to develop a taste for it. Dumb critters’ll seek it out even though it’s poisoning them.”

Sam gave a distracted reply. Suddenly eager to be free of Patterson’s company, he mumbled something about the office and made his escape.

Driving towards the Station, he reflected on that moment of revulsion. Not the kind of thing he usually experienced. He liked Patterson well enough, though as a lover of native flora he did harbor a mild prejudice against grazing and thus against cattlemen in general...

Well, it was deeper than that: he felt queasy about the whole enterprise of cattle ranching. There was a certain brutal pragmatism to rearing stock, a willingness to do anything necessary to maximize profit, that made him uneasy; he believed there had to be rules, even if you were raising an animal for food. But what were they? And what did it do to a person to treat sentient beings as a crop?

He had never been able to answer these questions, and at some level distrusted people like Dwayne who appeared to have done so — or more likely had never considered them.

All of which was hypocritical as hell. He enjoyed a burger as much as the next man, as long as he didn’t think too much about it. As a matter of fact, he himself had raised a calf once, for 4-H — though he clearly had not been cut out for it. For despite his stem resolve to maintain a professional distance, and his father’s admonitions that it wasn’t a pet but an investment that was destined for the feedlot in Poplar as soon as the county fair was over — he had ended up loving it anyway.

But Christ, how could you not love a fuzzy baby animal with big brown eyes that you had fed and brushed and nursed and talked to for a year? What had his parents been thinking of? Wanted to make a man out of him, he supposed; well, now he was a man, and he would never forget that trip to Poplar, and he would never encourage his kids to take on a similar project. Not that he had much opportunity to encourage them to do anything.

He arrived at the office at six o’clock and was finishing up the day’s paperwork when the phone rang. A female voice spoke.

“I’m trying to reach Sam Cooper.”

“You got him,” he said airily — and then froze. He knew that voice, its compelling huskiness, its imperiousness...

“Hello, Sam. This is Glenda Cannon.”

“Hello, Glenda. What can I do for you?” he replied after a pause, forcing himself to utter the cordial formula when what he wanted to say was, What do you want now?

But after all, they were a little old for him to do her chemistry homework for her. The time when he had run errands, tuned up her car, served as a marginally respectable and neuter escort between real boyfriends, and otherwise allowed himself — no, begged — to be thoroughly exploited, was long past. Long past.

“Sam,” she was saying, “I need your help.”

Resignedly he propped his feet on his desk and answered, deliberately obtuse. “I don’t handle horses, Glenda. Let me transfer you to our livestock expert—”