Okay, score one for the psychic in me. “Sherman?” I asked with trepidation.
“Yep. Can you come?”
“I don’t have my gear.” Burt’s farm wasn’t that far from Chris’s, but my SUV with all my stuff was on the other side of Beausejour.
“It’s just you I need.”
“Be right there.” I hung up and handed the tongs to Sam, who passed them on to Garrett.
“I’ll ride with, if that’s okay.”
“What about your steak?”
“It’ll wait.” She glanced at Garrett, who was staring at the tongs with distaste. I guessed it didn’t match his designer wear. “Pull mine in another minute, would you?” Sam smiled, showing teeth.
Garrett narrowed his eyes at her as though he was about to protest her joining me, but he made the wise choice and turned back to the steaks instead.
Sam craned her neck to look up at me. “So who’s Sherman?”
20
Sherman, named for the tank, was a purebred Simmental bull and the pride, if not exactly the joy, of Burt Kulchinsky’s beef farm. He’d paid top dollar for Sherman as a calf and the animal had rewarded him by growing into an enormous mountain of muscle, liberally laced with testosterone.
Most people and animals, faced with almost three thousand pounds of annoyed bull, would withdraw and live to fight another day. But Sherman had picked a fight with a cultivator, jumping onto it in an attempt to visit his harem on the other side of a well-built fence.
“If the goddamned animal had just held it together until next week, I was planning on putting him in with them anyway,” groused Burt, surveying the remains of his steel cattle chute. Sam and I stood beside him and her eyebrows went up as she peered at the mass of twisted metal. Sherman: one—chute: zero.
The chute had been designed to hold an animal, allowing people to safely work around large livestock not accustomed to human contact. Lacking a means of pinning the enormous beast left us with limited options. We moved past the wreckage to the pen beyond, where Darlene leaned on the fence, trading stares with the bull in question.
Most Simmental in the province were combinations of red or black with white, but Sherman hearkened back to his European ancestors with his gold-and-white coloring. Now a mature bull, he rippled with thick, heavy muscle. His skirmish with the cultivator had left his head and chest bloody, and a serious, deep gash across his face, involving the eyelid for sure, but hopefully not the eye.
“I got a partial dose of tranq into him, before all hell broke loose,” Darlene said, turning to me. Mire splattered her coveralls, her face, and her hair adding to her general air of harassment.
“Sam, meet Darlene. Darlene, Sam.”
Darlene wiped a hand across her brow as she gave Sam a brusque nod. She waved her tranquilizer-on-a-stick, which she kept in reserve for such situations. “I need to get at least one more dose into him.”
With trepidation, I perused the thick, gooey mix of mud and manure between the bull and us. His powerful legs had the definite advantage in that mess. Normally, we’d put the sedative into the vein beneath the tail, but we wouldn’t be getting anywhere near his back end now that the chute lay in crumpled pieces. An intramuscular injection was our only hope. This made things a lot more unpredictable in terms of how much to give and how long it would work. More dangerous for him—and us.
As we were going to have to go that route anyway, a dart gun would have been a blessing. Our clinic didn’t work with wild animals, so we didn’t have one. The shot on a stick would have to do. Sherman, however, was on to us. He stood at the end of the pen, far enough away from the boards on either side to make any attempts to stick him impossible.
I moved along the fence. “I’ll scare him toward you. If I can keep him focused on me, he may forget about you and the stick.”
“You’re going to do what?”
“Scare him,” I repeated.
Darlene shook her head. “Burt’s been waving cattle prods and whatever else. Sherman doesn’t bat an eye.”
“Just get ready,” I said, aware that Sam had shuffled over to shadow my movements, away from Darlene and Burt. Our twin predatory stalk got Sherman’s attention—his heavy head swung to follow our progress. Even though he was polled, which meant he didn’t have horns, everything about that craggy skull was pure, brute strength. I surveyed the sheer solid mass of him. Definitely not an animal to mess with. He’d come right through that fence in a millisecond, if it occurred to him to do so.
When I reached the section closest to him, I put my head through the planks, and he cocked his to fix me with his good eye. I stared at him and summoned the wulf.
Instead, I got a wave of nausea that almost overwhelmed me. Surprised, I blinked and tried again, focused on my anger, tapped deep. And found it. The colors around me changed. Details became sharper, and the putrid odor of years of urine and manure tramped into the mud were overlaid with the heavy musky scent of the bull.
The small round eye widened and the nostrils flared. Behind me, I detected the softest of growls, as Sam added her wulf to the mix.
Sherman snorted and bolted toward the other end of the pen, where he wheeled around to face Sam and me, presenting a lovely, broad rump to Darlene and the stick.
Too far away to see what we’d been up to, my colleague had watched the entire thing with a slightly confused expression. But she came to life the moment the bull swung away from her and poked the stick through the fence to jab the needle into his substantial hindquarter. He jumped
