As I drove the ranch road, I could see a mob of dogs coming out to meet us, mostly border collie and blue heeler mixes. I slowed my truck, trying not to run over any of them, and carefully rolled toward the house. Finally parked, I looked back at Dog, who seemed anxious to get out. “I don’t think so.”

I pulled the handle and stepped onto the gravel as Vic and the escapee did the same on the other side. The dogs barked and snapped but gave room when a loud whistle emanated from the back of the house; they disappeared without a sound. A woman appeared behind the screen door, only to disappear again.

“Looks like we’re not welcome.” I placed a hand on the young man’s shoulder as we approached the porch. “Maybe it’s the company we’re traveling with.”

A moment later, an impressive and shirtless Randy appeared at the door, pushing it open and stepping onto the redwood planks in his bare feet; he leaned a shoulder against the facing, the door open. “Pévevóona’o, Sheriff.”

“’Morning, Randy. Did we get you up?”

He yawned. “Calving.”

The tough cookie shrugged off my hand and traveled under his uncle’s arm into the house as Randy ducked his head below his armpit and called after him. “You run away again?” He turned back to look at us, shaking his head. “Kid runs away once after every meal.”

“A little late in the season, isn’t it?”

“Oh, hell no, he does it all year long.”

We pulled up at the steps. “I meant calving.”

He gestured toward the sun. “Spring. I never could figure out why these ranchers around here would want to birth calves in knee-deep snow in February.”

I nodded. “My father did.”

“I bet you ran away a lot, too.” He gestured back to the house. “We’re out of donuts, but you want some coffee?”

 • • •

We sat on the front porch swing and nursed the mugs that Randy’s sister, Eva, had brought out to us as she hummed a song under her breath; it was a familiar tune, but I couldn’t place it. Randy regaled my undersheriff with tales of the romantic ranching life. “As calving days get closer, I move them into the smaller pastures just so I can keep an eye on them. I go out on horseback and ride among them in the morning and usually at night, too.”

“Old school?”

He glanced at me, but it was pretty obvious he preferred looking at Vic. “Dad never allowed four-wheelers on the place.” He raised a hand, imitating the thumb action of an ATV accelerator. “This ain’t the cowboy way . . .” His hands dropped. “’Course, if it’s a spring blizzard or something, I’ll be out there all night, or at the least every two hours or so.”

Vic shook her head. “When do you sleep?”

“Usually in the saddle.” Randy laughed and gestured to a white-blazed bay standing by a gate. “One time on Bambino over there, I woke up covered with about three inches of snow and we were standing right here at the porch. I swear, if he could’ve, he would’ve climbed up the steps and taken me in the house and put me to bed.” He glanced around at the bucolic beauty of the Bighorn foothills. “When Dad was sober, I think that was the thing he loved the best, the animal husbandry of it.” He paused. “You just don’t hear that word so much anymore, and it means a lot, you know?” His eyes went back to Vic. “Anyway, they get nervous and agitated when they’re about to give birth and start looking for a secluded place to drop their calves. They walk and walk with their tails spinning like windmills until they find that place, and then when they do—boom.”

My undersheriff sipped her coffee. “Just like that, huh?”

I laughed. “Oh no, not always.”

Randy smiled and leaned back in his chair, tipping the runners to the rear. “The cows can have problems sometimes; if you see one calving and the pads of the calf are up, then it’s backwards and you have to go in there and pull it.”

Randy was enjoying the look on Vic’s face as his sister joined us in a rocking chair a little ways off, still humming, and it was only now that I recognized the tune as “Dry Bones.”

“I bring them into the calving shed, lay them down, and then pull the calves, sometimes by hand, sometimes with the calving chains. Sometimes they’re coming forward and have a leg back; you’ll see that because they’ll have the shoulder pushed out. There are all kinds of things that can go wrong, but mostly they don’t and things go pretty smoothly.” His eyes went toward the building where we’d seen his uncle. “Enic is in there with one of them if you’d like to watch.”

“Umm . . . no thanks.” She glanced around. “How many cows do you have?”

Randy looked uncomfortable, glanced at me, and then smiled as he sipped his coffee some more.

I nudged Vic with my elbow. “You don’t ever ask that.”

“What?”

“The size of a man’s herd or the size of his spread—it’s against the code of the West.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s like asking a man how much money he has in his wallet or his bank account; it’s just not done.”

“Oh.” She glanced at Randy. “Sorry.”

He lowered his mug. “That’s okay.” He lip-pointed, just as his nephew had, toward a corral where his horse was tied off. Inside the pen were a couple of calves milling about, crying out now and again. “See those? They’re bums; their mothers don’t want ’em and the bulls don’t make good fathers.”

Vic’s eyes lingered on the little ones. “What’ll happen to them?”

“They’re worth a lot of money, so we’ll bottle-feed ’em till they can start eating solid food.” He leaned back and looked at his sister. “Or Eva will.” He shook his head. “It’s Taylor’s job, but he can’t seem to ignore the siren song of the open road. He wanted to get a job in town, and I thought that might slow him down a little . . .” He rested his dark eyes on me. “Where did you find him?”

“Up on Crook Road, about three miles from here.”

“He goes and just wanders the hills sometimes; I don’t know what the hell he’s doing out there—maybe he’s got a woman.” Randy looked at the broiling thunderheads and inky blackness that stretched the sky toward the mountains like the boy’s black eye and then glanced at Eva. “Hey, could we get some more coffee?” He watched as she disappeared back into the house without a word. “I’m not kidding, he runs away all the damn time; does it about every other day, but it’s gotten worse since his grandfather died.” He rested the mug on the arm of the chair and ran a forefinger over his upper lip. “They were a lot alike; he used to go fishing and hunting with the old man for days. Hell, my parents practically raised him. Eva never got married—never said who the father was.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Been here your whole life?”

He leaned back in his chair again and smiled a sad smile. “I graduated from Bozeman and took a job as a conservationist but figured out before long that I just wasn’t cut out for the academic life. Got married, got divorced—no kids.” He looked at the rolling hillsides. “Dad getting older and Eva having her problems, I just decided to come back.”

We said nothing.

“So . . .” He settled in for the real conversation. “What can you tell me about my father?”

I leaned forward. “Randy, I was hoping we could include your sister in the conversation.”

He nodded and called over his shoulder, “Eva!”

There was a moment in which I suppose she was attempting to make it appear as if she hadn’t been listening at the screen door. “Yes.” She pushed the door open a bit and looked at the porch floor with the coffeepot in her hands.

“So, I’m assuming you’re the one who packed his lunch?” I smiled just to let her know this wasn’t an episode of Perry Mason, as I held out my mug. “The handwriting on the bag was somewhat female.”

She studied me as she approached and poured me another. “What are you saying?”

“The preliminary examination seems to indicate that there might have been some mistakes made with his medications, but we haven’t been able to reach his physician to confirm what all he was taking. I thought maybe you might know if there was medication in the sack, since you fixed his lunch.”