Mike is Cooper’s only uncle.

He’s Brent’s older brother. Forty-four. He farms the other half of the Olson ground, four miles north, with his wife, Deb, and their two boys. Logan is fifteen. Tyler is twelve.

Mike taught Cooper to drive a four-wheeler. Mike took him fishing at Johnson Lake every Fourth of July. Mike stood in the cemetery in May with his hand on Cooper’s shoulder while they lowered his brother into the ground.

That boy had already lost enough men for one year.

I wasn’t going to make him lose another one in a steer pen over nine hundred dollars.

I said no to the money and let the show ring answer for me.

“We’re keeping him,” I said. “Cooper’s showing him.”

Mike looked at me for a long time. Then at Cooper. Then at the money in his hand.

He folded the bills back up. He put them in the chest pocket of his work shirt. He snapped it shut.

He took his forearms off the top board. And he walked off. Back to his pickup in the yard. He didn’t say goodbye.

Cooper watched him go.

He stood in the pen with his hands at his sides until Mike’s pickup was all the way down the lane and out onto the county road. Until the dust settled.

Then he picked up Brent’s notebook off the fence post where he’d set it. A green spiral notebook from the Dollar General, with feed amounts and weights and dates written in Brent’s square handwriting.

He opened it to the evening’s page. He wrote down how much Moose ate. In his own handwriting, under his dad’s.

He didn’t say anything about his uncle. Not that night. Not for a long time.

Chapter Two: Moose

Brent and Cooper had picked that calf out at weaning, the October before.

We run about sixty cows on our half of the Olson place, outside Cedar Bend, Nebraska. Commercial cattle, mostly black. But Brent kept eight registered Hereford cows because his dad did, and his granddad did, and because he liked the way they looked standing in a green pasture.

Every October, when the calves came off the cows, Brent and Cooper would walk the weaning pen together. Looking for the one.

Last October, they found him.

A red-and-white bull calf, with a white face and a white blaze running up between his eyes. Big-boned. Long through the middle. Calm. Brent said he had the best disposition of any calf he’d ever raised.

“Look at him, Coop,” Brent said. They were leaning on the pen together, the two of them, same lean, same boots on the bottom board. “He’s not scared of anything. He’s just standing there taking it all in. Like a big old moose.”

Cooper laughed. “Moose.”

That was his name.

They fed him and walked him all winter.

Every morning at five-thirty, before Brent went out to do chores and before Cooper caught the school bus. Every evening at six, after supper. They’d mix his feed in the barn from Brent’s notebook. They’d brush him. They’d halter him and walk him up and down the lane in the dark with a flashlight.

In January it was eighteen below. They walked him anyway.

“Steer doesn’t know it’s cold,” Brent said. “He just knows if you show up.”

Brent kept everything in that green notebook.

The ration was on a co-op receipt, stapled to the inside cover. Pounds of corn, pounds of pellets, pounds of supplement. How much to feed at what weight. When to step up.

And every week, Moose’s weight. Brent ran him across the livestock scale at the co-op in town every Saturday morning. He wrote it down.

In April, at the bottom of the page, Brent wrote: Guess for fair: 1,340. Then he underlined it twice.

Then Brent’s heart quit at forty-one, in the middle of planting.

May the ninth. A Thursday. He was planting corn on the south quarter. Mike was supposed to be there, helping. Running the tender truck, keeping the planter full of seed.

He wasn’t. He’d gone to the sale barn in Kearney that morning to look at a pen of feeder calves.

Brent planted alone.

Mike was the one who found him.

He came back from Kearney at two in the afternoon. He drove out to the south quarter to check on the planting. The tractor was sitting in the middle of the field, idling, with the planter down.

Brent was slumped over the steering wheel.

Mike pulled him out of the cab. He did CPR in the dirt between the rows for twenty-two minutes until the ambulance came out from Cedar Bend. The paramedics told me he never stopped. They told me they had to pull him off.

It didn’t matter. The coroner said Brent was gone before he hit the steering wheel. An arrhythmia. A heart defect nobody ever knew he had.

Forty-one years old.