7:40 on a Saturday

The shot came from the fence corner at 7:40 on a Saturday morning.

I was in the kitchen with my hands in a bowl of pancake batter. The radio was on. KMA out of Shenandoah, the farm report, a man reading off the price of corn in a flat voice. Kinley was still upstairs asleep. It was the first Saturday in weeks she didn’t have to be up for anything.

Then the shot.

One crack, flat and hard across the pasture. It rattled the window over the sink.

You hear gunshots in the country. That’s normal. Somebody after a coyote. Somebody sighting in a deer rifle for November.

But not that close. Not from the fence corner. Not on a Saturday morning in October with the cattle out.

I set the bowl down. I didn’t wipe my hands. I went out the back door in my slippers and my barn coat and ran.

Domino was down against the wire.

On our side.

He was lying on his side in the brown grass at the northwest corner of our pasture, where our fence meets Vern’s. His legs were stretched out stiff. His big black-and-white head was pressed up against the bottom strand of barbed wire, like he’d fallen into it.

There was blood in the grass. A lot of it.

His eyes were open.

Our daughter Kinley raised him from a bottle calf.

He was born in a snowstorm in February two years ago, on the Petersen place three miles south. His mother died having him. Old Ray Petersen called me on the mail route and asked if Kinley wanted a calf to raise. She was nine.

Dale brought him home in the back seat of the pickup wrapped in a horse blanket. He was so small. Black and white, with one white patch over his left eye and three more on his side. Kinley took one look at him and said, “Domino