Today, Arnie was doing the leading. Using the GM pickup, he was spreading a load of ear corn from the open fence gap between the two pastures on into the west pasture, making a kind of maize trail for the cattle to follow. At the same time Hook and Bobby in the Jeep were driving back and forth along the perimeter of the field, pushing the herd toward the distant gap. Occasionally, as a cow or calf straggled behind, Bobby would leap out and chase it back into the herd. Hook had to be careful to keep the Jeep on grass as he drove, for the day was bright and sunny, almost forty degrees, and in the bare spots the ground had turned soft as mush, no footing even for a four-wheel-drive vehicle. He was pleased at how fine the cattle looked, especially the calves. Whatever runts there had been in the beginning, last spring and summer, evidently had caught up by now, for there was not one of them that appeared to be under three hundred pounds. And the males looked best of all, that fortunate ten or fifteen percent he had judged good enough to sell eventually as breeding stock, and had thus escaped the castrater’s knife. Hook could think of no animal except possibly the big jungle cats that rivaled the beauty and majesty of a full-grown Black Angus bull, with its massive head and chest and the long cinched flanks under which its male sac swung as nobly as a bishop’s censer. Beautiful but dumb, Hook thought, watching as the animals moved obediently toward the fence gap and its carpet of corn.

Finally they all made it through and it was time for the men to pause a few minutes and celebrate the event with a smoke, time for Hook at least, since Bobby was not allowed to indulge yet, and Arnie was almost never without a cigarette, though he did not smoke them so much as just let them dangle from his lips and burn, which caused him to hold his head back and to keep his right eye squinted, giving him the look of a man who regarded the world with unflagging cynicism, which in fact was how he did regard it. Small and sinewy, he was the possessor of an amazing constitution; in twenty years Hook had never known the man to be sick, even with a cold. Now, after closing the fence gap he came over and scooted up onto the hood of the Jeep.

“Duck soup,” he said, wiping the sweat off his forehead.

“Not a hitch,” Hook agreed.

“You got one very mean little bull in there, though. You see him?”

“No.”

“Attacked the truck, he did. Tried to stove in the door.”

Hook grinned. “You talked him out of it?”

“Hell no. I kicked him. I figure you better kick ’em while you can.” For a time Arnie sat there wagging his head reflectively, and then suddenly tears were standing in his eyes. “It just ain’t the same anymore, goddamn it!” he said. “Nothin’ll be the same around here again! Ever!”