Erin Fisher - That Tiny Life

“Girl,” Milo says. “Cow. Come on.” Come down now. Please. The cow jumps. Its front legs pop over the short steel gate and land on the snow-covered pit like the animal thinks it can walk on water. Its front half sinks. The cow seems surprised, at least momentarily, then its head and entire front half disappear under the manure — its back legs remain hooked over the gate.

Axel runs first, then Kendra and Melanie. Axel pushes them back from the cow’s rear. “She’ll kick your legs.”

“You’re already down one,” Kendra says, but shifts her approach from the side. She puts her shoulder under the hip and tries to lift.

Melanie unlatches the gate, and the rail, supported only by the hinge, bends with a groan under the cow’s mass and lowers the animal further into the slurry.

Kendra starts swearing like she hasn’t cursed for days.

“Hoist her in.” Axel strains on the opposite side. “Hoist her in. So she can get her head up.”

He should run forward. The legs from the front of the hooves to the hocks scrape pinkly along the cement. The skin over the spine and barrel spasms. Around the abdomen the clean scrub of snow browns. He would run forward, but how can they lift a cow?

The cow has dipped into the slurry lagoon and died, hips hooked on the bent gate. Melanie rubs her hands. Her skin stuck to the frozen metal when she pulled the pin to let it open, and it stings a little. Is a bit red. Anywhere else along the pit, the cow would have been able to step her rear in the pit, get her head up, and they might have had time to help her out. Melanie squats next to the cow and rocks forward onto her toes. A chocolate line of shit clings to the animal’s hair. What a stupid way to die.

“Bird hit a cow.” Kendra flexes her jaw and chews on her cheek.

The pretty-boy, on his butt on the tarp, his black kilt flipped and showing off his skinny denim, raises the back of his wrist to his nose and turns away. How dare he.

“Should have stayed in the training yard.” Kendra talks without direction to the distance — the pasture, or the mountain trees subdued by snow — so it’s hard to tell who she’s addressing, or if she’s merely stating the obvious. Axel takes his shoulder out of the cow’s hip and uses its rump to help himself stand.

Melanie runs her fingertips over the cow’s short hide, following the swirling patterns around the hips and belly. Whorls like grass blown prostrate, or, in the late summer, where the cows have lain down in the shorn hayfields. Scratched the wrong way the hair bristles untidily.

“Rope?” Axel unbuttons his coat. Yellow-grey streaks the sternum of his T-shirt.

“Yeah.” Milo sounds out of breath.

“Sling,” Kendra corrects.

“Yeah.” Her father, now that she listens, sounds quiet. Not breathless — reserved. Maybe he’s babying a head-splitter. Is he off the hooch? Don’t tell her he’s attempting abstinence again.

“Rope could rip right through her.” Kendra tosses her toque to Cody and pulls her hair into an elastic on the top of her head.

Milo unzips his jacket, stretches his tube scarf, then zips the coat halfway up again. “In the garage.”

Axel cups his palm over the cow’s pelvic bone where the bird hit, spits, and heads to the barn for Milo.

Melanie shifts from a squat to her knees. How would a rope cut through the cow? Would it be like squeezing dough, with head and butt bulging and the waist becoming thinner and thinner, stretching out to a thread, then to nothing? That’s how the end of Axel’s leg looks like it was separated — she’s seen it. In summer when he relaxes on his veranda he sets his leg beside him under the bug zapper and sips ginger ale. Or would the cut be more like a roast on the chop-board, a clean anatomy lesson of muscle? She balances with a hand on the rail. She should feel sorrier for the cow. But screw that — what good has sorry ever done?

Axel walks back from the barn with both rope and sling. Kendra checks her hair, tugging the bun at the top of her head to make sure it’s fixed.

A car horn echoes off the mountain. Melanie stands and plants her hands on her hips, squinting over the lagoon and field into the cloud-dulled sun and the turn behind the trees. The school bus — her old one, complete with coloured toques on heads that gape out the windows — drives by on the highway headed to town. On their way to school.

The cow hangs tan-assed to the sky. Her udder bulges over the paint-stripped rail, the bag so squashed that Kendra — despite the way the teats dangle about like limp dicks — wouldn’t be shocked if it blew. One more thing to haul out of a ditch.

“A cow.” She unzips her vest and tosses it to Cody, who’s crawled off the tarp and stands twisting her toque beside the slurry. “How stupid can you be.”

Axel hands the rope to Milo, lifts the bird from the snow and slips a hood over its head. The bird can’t be totally blind. Hooded, it has poise — the talons pick over the leather glove, minute adjustments are made by the tapered tail; except for the breeze-ruffled breast feathers, the bird’s ceramic. Could it be depth perception that confuses the thing? How it beats one wing and over- or undershoots the lure? And, is there still hope to breed her? The issue could be an injury, environmental. And if not, well, bloodhounds have bloat, German shepherds dysplasia. White gyrfalcons with eye issues? The bird lifts a ropy leg, talons and toes fist under the belly feathers. Two hundred kph into a cow’s ass. The bird’s porcelain, but so’s a toilet. “Well?” she says.

Milo feeds the coiled rope through his hands and stares at her feet. Of course he won’t be the one doing the reach-around in the manure. Why’d she think he would? If she leaves the cow for him to deal with, Melanie will be the one to strip down and take the shit.

She pulls off her sweater and shirt, balls them and throws them to Cody, then adjusts the straps of her undershirt and bra. She holds out her hand. Milo passes her the rope. She fastens the end of the rope to the sling and lies on her front beside the cow. Her arm barely stretches under the heifer’s barrel. Can’t even reach a quarter under the belly without going face-first into cow-pie. She stands up and unbuttons her jeans with her clean hand. Cody hangs them over his shoulder. Kid’s pretty much a clothes rack anyway.

She sits on the edge and swings her legs in. She lowers herself to the waist. Crust, liquid, then solid ground. Or semi-solid sludge that sinks with her. She strings the rope under the heifer, bending down to reach, and when she stands again the warm muck hugs up to her pits. “Can you reach it round the other side?” She holds her breath. Barn-loads of mealy cow flops, hay, and runoff. Probably ammonia seeping out.

“Axel, can you reach it?” Her face is against the warm udder, its skin — softly scrolled with raised mammary veins — swells above her head, and beyond that the velveteen arc of hide slices an upright horizon along neutral clouds. The white’s bell jingles. “Axel.” Under her feet, nothing, but she can’t wiggle them sideways. She plants her palms on the ramp and thrusts at the elbows and shoulders. Too much suction.

“Get me out.” She tugs the rope. “Jesus. Axel.” Cody runs forward and grabs the sling and starts to reel her in. “Now. Please. Now.” Cody offers his hand and she grabs his sleeve and then the rail. She kicks off her boots and gets enough air to alleviate the vacuum and slide onto the ramp.

“What now?” Cody wipes his hands on the snow, then on the gate and on the snow again.

She lies back and bends her knees. What now. Last meet, when she camped in the desert, Sanders opened up about his methods. Half of them were fake, flirtatious — rheum, supposedly, could be cured by feeding a hawk meat soaked in the excrement of an unweaned boy. To stop a falcon’s shrieks, stuff a bat with hot pepper and hang it in the mews. She can’t recall any cure for poor sight. Blindness — sewing the eyelids, or hooding as the modern equivalent — is the solution for fright, and will keep a bird calm even packed in hay, ten per crate, as smugglers do. Where the hell did all the crazy come from? Off is off. And Axel himself is — well, he’s off.