Mare’s tail clouds lace the sky
The sun is barely up.
“Got another one started” he says,
As he fills his coffee cup.
She looks out the window,
The morning glitters frosty and cold.
“I wouldn’t want to be out in
that giving birth, you know!”
“I put her under the shed, he says,
It’s fairly dry inside.”
“I hope we don’t have to pull it,” she says.
He shrugs and breathes a sigh.
They drink their coffee in the quiet pre-dawn air,
Each thinking about the day.
She has the heifers to watch.
He has to drive down south and put out hay.
A little one stumbles sleepily to the kitchen.
The other hollers from his crib.
“The kids are up,” she softly murmurs.
“I’ll go check the heifer,” he said.
She gets the kids dressed in their warm winter things.
Pulls on her boots and ties her hood strings.
Out in bitter wind she and the children shuffl e.
They head to the shed to see if there’s trouble.
He greets her at the gate with eyebrows raised.
“Well she’s had it by herself, it’s a bull and dandy.”
She says, “I’m amazed.”
He says, “Got another one starting.”
She says, “Good start to the day.”
Lisa Hight lives on a cattle ranch south of Tucumcari. “It is always a thrill for me to see the baby calves born in the early spring,” she writes. “Always there are a few of our young cows whose instinct to calve out by themselves is not as strong as a veteran cow, and I seem to get a midwife mindset going, and nothing can deter me from the side of a laboring heifer.”
