“I fell asleep,” she said.

“Yes, you did.”

“Wasn’t I heavy?”

“Yes, you were.”

“Dad?”

“Yes, honey.”

She told him that she was sorry about what she had said earlier and that if he felt he had to go back to California, then that was what she wanted too, whatever he wanted. He kissed her gratefully, and then they both got up, he on legs that felt like boards. Putting his arm around her, he walked her to her bedroom and tucked her in, and then went to his own room, where the luminous dials of his Big Ben clock put the time at a few minutes after four in the morning. It would soon be dawn.

In the afternoon, with Arnie and Bobby, Hook began moving the herd between the two pastures on the other side of the blacktop road. It was a job they had to do throughout the year, rotating the cattle between these two fields and the main pasture every few weeks—in the warm months to permit the grazed grass to recover, and in the winter simply to distribute the animals’ manure as widely as possible. Hook had automated their winter feeding system to the point where one man could handle it in a pinch. Silage from the big Harvestore silos was combined with protein supplement and power-loaded into low, wheeled feed-bunks he had designed and built himself, a train of them, which he or Arnie would then tow by tractor out into the pasture, along with a “car” or two of haybales to give the animals dry roughage to protect them against bloat. Thus in winter as well as summer all the cattle except the bulls and feeders were kept out in the field, which greatly minimized the amount of work that went into their care and feeding. But at the same time it made them wilder and less tractable than feedlot cattle, so that even as simple a thing as moving them from one pasture to another could become a delicate operation. There were almost three hundred head in the main herd, slightly over half of them cows and the rest calves, and you had to be firm enough to keep them moving ahead, yet not so firm you caused a cow to turn on you or made it stampede the rest of the herd.

The main problem, of course, was simply the stupidity of the bovine animal. Just as generation after generation of Andalusian bulls were never acute enough to see that their enemy was not the bright muleta but the man holding it, so an Aberdeen Angus cow could stand for hours at a barbed wire fence staring at the greener grass on the other side and never think to wander along that fence in search of an opening. They had to be led.