Mrs. Walkili and her daughter had their faces pressed against the upstairs window. They hollered and waved when they saw me. I reckoned they’d piled some furniture down in the front hall because the door was pretty near butted in but still the cows hadn’t been able to make a breach. It was a lonely feeling I had watching them wave and knowing I only had eighteen rounds left and all that cattle between us.
To give them some comfort, I shot the bigger of the two bulls. Caught him right in the spine, between the shoulders, which is the only way to bring down the big ones. I’d hoped he’d go berserk, bucking and causing a general panic in the females and maybe loosening up the ranks, but he didn’t. He just suffered standing as long as he could then went to his knees.
“Think we can plow through?” Travis asked, looking up at me. He had five yards worth of gauze pressed to his arm. I could tell he hoped the answer was no.
I was about to shake my head when a scream came from off behind me and for the first time I thought to look around. Ten ranches were strung along Little Piney, all about the same size except for the Sankey place down at the end which was a thousand acres at least, with a barn big enough for airplanes. Cows were up to no good in every pasture. Lined up and bloodthirsty, pawing and butting. The scream had come from across the way where Cole Suggs was treed up a box elder on the bank of the creek, all wrapped around the highest flimsy branch. Barely seventeen, he was an up-and-comer on the roping circuit. The frayed remains of his lariat hung useless from his belt. A large brown heifer was ramming the trunk with her forehead. She had it rocking pretty good.
I shot her, but it just seemed to make her mad, and I’ll not soon forget what she and her compatriots did to that boy when he fell from the branches. I pumped most of my remaining rounds into the melee and then it got too hard to watch and we hauled back to town for reinforcements. Travis was on the radio the whole way, putting out a general state of emergency and urging open warfare.
Folks in Banner are fairly well armed as a general rule. By nightfall, we’d slaughtered nearly twenty thousand head, matched up with fourteen human casualties. Not so bad as it could have been, but still plenty to grieve over for a small town like ours, and the way some had gone was truly heinous. Chet Sankey in particular must’ve done something to personally offend his cattle, for they chewed him up like a bale of hay.
A group of us who’d been at it all day gathered in the back room of the station, blood-soaked and tired. It was a comfortable room that the Banner Women’s Club had set up for us, with couches, a fireplace, and a coffee machine. We’d passed good hours there in the evening catching up on talk and playing cards, but that night it was worse than the morgue. I got the coffee going and we listened to the distant crack of gunfire as those still out hunted down stragglers.
Gary Hooper broke the silence, wondering if we might salvage some of the meat.
Wesley Silcox, the oldest among us and a fifth generation cowboy besides, shook his head. “It was sour before it hit the ground. Just like you don’t shoot a buck in the rut.”
Maxim Loskutoff was raised in western Montana. His stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Witness, Narrative, and The Chicago Tribune. He has worked as a carpenter, field organizer, and bookseller, among many other things.