It’s Christmas Eve, and it’s cold. Really cold. Angry, nasty, tear-inducing, bite-through-your-coveralls, snot-freezing cold. The old Dodge bounces across the frozen tundra of the upper pasture and makes a valiant effort to push some warm air through the heater vents. “Well, I don’t envy old Santa his sleigh ride tonight,” the cowman at the wheel wryly says to the red heeler in the passenger seat, who answers with a panting, tongue-hanging-out smile.
Early this morning, the wind started, driving the friendly storm clouds away and turning what had been the picturesque cover of a Nat King Cole record into a dry, polar hurricane. The wind has since died down, but the outside temperature has hovered right around 10 below for the last several hours. Now, as the sun sets (far too early for the cowman’s liking), there is nothing in the sky to obscure the zillion stars as they emerge.
The impetus for his venture into the glacial conditions tonight is 317, a yellow Charolais cross whose origins he can’t recall. She’s been a stalwart of his fall-calving herd for a dozen years – an uber-productive relic of a bygone generation, a veritable Tom Brady of bovine motherhood. But this year at preg check time, the hammer finally came down: 317 was pregnant, but just barely; she would be calving much later than her compatriots. She probably wouldn’t have gotten bred at all if not for his neighbor Jim’s fence-jumping 2-year-old bull of somewhat ambiguous pedigree. Against his better judgment as a businessman, the cowman let sentimentality prevail and allowed 317 to retain her place in the herd.
As the pickup’s headlights fall on that old, dependable yellow hide, he successfully resists the temptation to mutter a curse or two. (It is, after all, Christmas Eve, and he needs to maintain his cheery disposition for the big family dinner set to start in a half-hour.) He knew he should’ve brought her down to the calving shed yesterday. But there’s no time for should’ves just now. Instead, he offers a quick and urgent prayer, his whispered words drifting away in a cloud of mist and rising, he hopes, to heaven.
The calf can’t be more than 5 minutes old. The old cow appears to have just risen to her feet and begun licking it off. The cowman is thankful he arrived when he did, though he knows even this fortuitous timing may be too late. He grabs an old grain sack from the floorboards and jumps out of the pickup; 317 doesn’t even flinch as he rushes up and starts rubbing the calf dry. The wide-eyed baby’s hide is a tiny wall of hairy icicles, every shallow breath punctuated by a violent shiver.
All around, the night is silent, calm and bright. But all the cowman can hear is his own frantic breathing, the steady hum of the idling Dodge and 317’s footsteps as she nervously paces back and forth. Muttering softly and reassuringly to the old girl, he lifts her baby up and, as gently as he can manage, lays it across the seat of the pickup. There is little argument from the heeler, who seems to know exactly how dire the situation is and starts licking the calf around the ears. The cowman then takes off his own heavy coat, wraps it around the calf and cranks up the heat as he squeezes into the last remaining space in the cab of the pickup.
As he fishes his phone from his pocket to inform his wife of the predicament, he glances up and sees a pair of headlights heading toward him from the direction of the gate, gleaming like the Christmas star itself. A minute later, his daughter’s cute little Kia Sportage pulls up, and out pile said daughter, her husband, two overenthusiastic grandkids and the cowman’s angel wife. Not a soul among them is dressed for an evening of snow and straw and manure and afterbirth, but they don’t seem to care.
“Hey, babe,” the cowman’s wife says to him as she puts a hand on 317’s shoulder and nudges her just far enough to open the door of the pickup. “Need a hand?”
An hour later, the baby – a butter-yellow bull calf with one front leg as white as snow up to his shoulder – is up and sucking, safe indoors with a fresh bed of straw under his spindly legs. It had taken some doing, but with the help of a couple good horses and a few quietly sung carols, they had been able to coax 317, tired and distraught, down to the calving shed without exposing the calf to any more of the gale outside.
The cowman can’t help but think, as he drinks in the sight of his bedraggled family and this yellow pair of cattle, that maybe they’re a little bit like the Holy Family: It was a long shot, and they were scared and alone, but they did what they had to do for each other, with a little help and support along the way. He’s not sure if in this analogy he’s a shepherd, a wise man, an angel or a member of the Holy Family itself. Maybe it’s not a one-to-one comparison, but he feels there’s something there. In any event, even with dinner getting cold over at the house, there’s a whole lot to consider holy about his family right now. He can’t think of a merrier Christmas than that.
