Daisies in the Canyon(46)

“Yes, it scared me, and it’s days like this I want to pack my bags and head back to Arkansas,” she said.

Bonnie started for her room. “I guess these dogs will get to show us how good they are. Thank God I know how to mend a barbed-wire fence. I’ll get the things from the tack room and we’ll herd cattle with the truck and the dogs.”

“And Rusty’s four-wheelers,” Abby said.

“He didn’t say we couldn’t use them. Keys are on the rack,” Bonnie said.

“I have no idea how to drive a four-wheeler,” Shiloh said.

“Then you can drive the truck,” Abby told her. “We can get this done in a couple of hours and still have the afternoon to rest.”




The dogs did a fine job of herding the cows back through the broken fence, but then the cattle decided to veer off seven ways to Sunday. Shiloh kept the biggest part of the herd moving across the pasture toward the fence a mile away with the help of Martha on one side and the other two dogs on the other.

Bonnie rode one of the four-wheelers on the west side of the main herd, cussing loud enough to blister the hides of any heifers that strayed.

Abby manned her post on the east side and the area behind the truck with enough swearing to earn her a thumbs-up from Bonnie a couple of times. Using the torn-up ground as a guide to drive them toward where she hoped they’d find the broken fence, Shiloh drove with the window down, screaming at the cows as loud as both her sisters.

They were making progress until the truck got stuck in the mud about halfway across the pasture. Shiloh turned off the engine, motioned toward her sisters to keep moving, and started herding cows on foot.

“Where in the hell is a burst of thunder when we need it?” Abby yelled over her shoulder at her sister.

Shiloh, bless her heart, looked miserable with her hair hanging in her face. Abby was glad she couldn’t see herself, because she probably looked even worse.

As if answering her prayers, lightning sliced through the rain, hit a mesquite tree dead-on and set it on fire. The blaze didn’t last long, but the crack of the hit echoed through the canyon like a kid yelling down into a deep well. Then the thunder rolled right over their heads. The lead bull rolled his eyes and doubled his speed, the cows following right behind him. At the fence line, he tried to turn and go back the other way, but Martha nipped his heels and made him keep going.

“Good dog,” Abby said.

That’s when the front tire of the four-wheeler hit a gopher hole. The engine stalled out and Abby went flying over the handlebars to land in a nice mushy pile of cow shit. Instinctively, she tried to get rid of it by wiping her hand on the leg of her pants but all that did was smear it. Shiloh ran over to make sure she was all right, only to slip in the mud and go sliding a good five feet on her belly before coming to rest at the four-wheeler’s back tire. When Abby extended her clean hand to help her up, she took it, but the ground was so greasy that Abby lost her footing again. One minute she was looking at her sister, trying her damnedest to keep from laughing; the next she was staring up at gray skies with rain beating down on her face and a black cow the size of a barn running toward them.

At the last minute, Martha got between them and the cow and steered her off in the opposite direction. Abby’s heart pounded so hard she could feel it in her ears. Her pulse throbbed behind her eyes and the cows were breaking from the herd faster than Bonnie could take care of it on her own.

“Help me get this damn thing pushed out of the hole and you can ride on the back with me. You’re not doing a bit of good out there on foot anyway,” Abby said.

“If y’all are through horsin’ around, I could use some help,” Bonnie yelled.

Abby couldn’t believe her eyes when Shiloh flipped her off.

Lightning took out another mesquite tree and the rain came down even harder. It slowed the herd down, but kept them together better than before. The dogs were able to keep the rest of them headed toward Cooper’s fence and the four-wheelers on each side deterred any straying.

They marched right through the busted fence and huddled up not far into the Lucky Seven property like a bunch of football players on Friday night. Bonnie pulled out a roll of barbed wire, a pair of cutters, and a stretcher from the saddlebag on the back of the four-wheeler and headed for the fence.

She barked orders and Abby and Shiloh followed them without arguing. “Y’all keep the cows from coming back through or any of ours from going over into Cooper’s pasture while I get the first strand up. Then y’all can help me with the last two strands.”

Abby was sure glad that Bonnie knew something about everything because she didn’t know jack shit about how to fix a barbed-wire fence. She could probably blow one up, but putting one back together was a whole different ball game.

At the end of the repair job, Abby had a barbed-wire scratch on her wrist, her camo jacket was torn, and she was standing ankle-deep in water. Bonnie had a scratch across her cheek where the barbed wire had popped back and bit her and Abby’s loaned jacket had a long slit down one arm. Shiloh’s jeans had a tear in the thigh with a red bloodstain outlining it and the tennis shoes she wore were completely covered in cold water.

“If we don’t have pneumonia or gangrene tomorrow morning, it will be a miracle . . . oh, no! No! No! No!” Abby stomped, sending a splash all the way to Bonnie’s eyes.