"There's a great place to go hiking about twenty miles outside of Washington. It's a dry creek where you can follow the dinosaur tracks for three miles, on the trail of a T-Rex that was hunting on a muddy day. Seeing dinosaur tracks is kind of cool. Putting your hand in one is even cooler."
Bron studied the gray hoodoos, and tried to imagine what it had looked like here seventy million years ago. He somehow felt old today, as if he were part of this land. Maybe it was the attack yesterday, but he felt wise and sad.
Mike loved his land, it was obvious. The very eastern tip of his property climbed up into the hills, into a forest of brooding pines where the shadows made it feel like dusk.
They had just started driving up a wooded hill when Mike let out a curse. High above them, on a rocky bluff, a calf lay in bloody ruin.
Mike turned off the ignition. "Let's check that out," he said, voice shaking. Mike loved his land, but he loved the cattle even more.
They climbed the steep hill for two hundred feet, circling a chimney of ash-gray stone. When they reached the top, they could see the calf clearly, its belly split.
Mike didn't get close. He stopped fifty feet away. "Looks like something got to it, a cougar maybe," he said in a soft voice. "If it was a cougar, it will usually find a little perch close by. It will want to keep an eye on its kill."
Bron looked uphill in the shadows of the pines, but couldn't see much. He spotted a few fallen trees, but nothing crouched on top of them.
"I heard coyotes last night," Bron said, "when I was running."
"Coyotes won't kill anything this big," Mike replied. He squinted at the carcass. "Let's take a seat right here."
He squatted on the ground like an Indian, and Bron sat next to him. A kid at school had once explained that there was a correct way to sit on the ground without hurting your legs. The samurai had called it "sitting seiza," or "the one true way of sitting." Bron liked the idea that something as simple as sitting required a certain type of mastery, as if, by learning to do small things well, our lives could be vastly improved. So he sat seiza, with his knees together and pointed forward, his toes pointing back, and his heels propping up his butt. It required so much dexterity that most people would never attempt it.
Mike glanced at his pose, nodded approvingly.
They still hadn't approached the dead animal. Bron could see that its belly had been split cleanly open, so that its guts were spilling out. The stroke looked almost surgical. A few flies circled, green gems in the morning sun. He could smell blood and stomach acids.
"What are we doing?" Bron asked.
"Sometimes," Mike said, "you have to look at something for a long time before you can really see it. Don't speak. Just look."
So Bron simply studied the calf. It was a big calf, he decided. The legs were thick, the fur clean and sleek. There were no teeth marks on the throat that he could detect, the way that he'd expect a cougar to take such a big animal.
He couldn't see where the grass around it had been beaten, as one might find if there had been a struggle. Instead, dry stalks stood up all around.
Bron studied the ground looking for a track. On television there was always a patch of clear ground where some freshly turned earth gave away the identity of a predator, but this wasn't television. The ground was rocky, and few plants rose from it.
"It wasn't dragged up here," Bron surmised after fifteen minutes. "It's almost like it walked up here."
"Or flew," Mike said.
It was such a strange comment, Bron glanced up at him.
"My grandfather used to say, 'When we imagine that we know how the world works, it closes our mind to wondrous truths."
"So," Bron clarified, "you think that cows can fly?"
Mike smiled, almost a laugh, as if Bron had just been suckered in by a joke.
"No. I think someone killed it," Mike said. "Sometimes kids will shoot up an animal just for fan. Or maybe a bow-hunter shot it, then cut his arrow out. It doesn't look like an animal kill."
Bron couldn't imagine a person doing something like this for sport.
"What about a skinwalker?" Bron suggested.
Mike shrugged, as if that was a possibility. But now that Bron was thinking about creepy humans, he couldn't help but think of others.
Could it be that old man, Bron wondered, the one who chased us? Is this some kind of a sick warning?
Mike sat for another twenty minutes, shoulders sagging, face dejected.
Bron realized something. "You loved that calf. He was a nice one."
"You got that right."
They were spending a lot of time just looking. "How much is a calf like that worth?" Bron asked.
"Hard to say," Mike admitted. "Some people, they'd have turned him into a steer and put him in a feeder lot. Let him grow a little, and he'd be worth maybe $800. They're the kind of ranchers who slaughter ten thousand head a year, and they don't see what kind of calf they're looking at. It's all just meat to them.
"But when I look at a calf, I look at it as a breeder. That calf had a pedigree that goes back four hundred years. I was raising him to be a prize bull. I don't raise my animals for meat. I don't want to kill ten thousand a year. I just want one calf, one calf, that's perfect."
"So he was worth like what, a million dollars?"
"Probably," Mike said. "The right calf, with good breeding fees, can bring in three or four million dollars over its lifetime. Maybe more."
The air went out of Bron's lungs. He hadn't imagined that he was looking at millions of dollars of dead meat.
"I'm so sorry, Mike," Bron said. "I had no idea."
Mike shrugged. "It's all just speculation. That calf might not have turned out. It happens to ranchers. Calves die."
They'd been sitting now for forty minutes, and suddenly Mike turned and peered at Bron, stared at him thoughtfully for a minute.
Down in the valley below, Bron heard a calf moo plaintively.
"Okay," Mike said. "I'm ready to go."
"Leave?" Bron asked. "Don't you want to search the ground for clues or something? Or should we call the police?"
Mike shrugged. "I don't see any clues, but I think I learned what I was supposed to."
"What's that?" Bron asked.
Mike fought to explain. "When other people look at calves, they just see meat. When I look at them, I see potential. Some ranchers, you can put a prize baby bull in front of them, and they think steaks. But I make my living by seeing a calf for what it will become...."
Bron nodded.
"Olivia, on the other hand, sees kids the same way. She spots human potential.
"When school starts, she's in heaven, checking out the new students. She'll come home on Wednesday after the auditions are over, and I'll ask her, 'Did you find any new stars?' And she knows, man, she just knows."
"So you two are a lot alike?" Bron asked.
"I guess so," Mike said. "Except I'm a giant, and she's more like a pixie." He laughed, then gave Bron an appraising look. "She likes you. She says you're a keeper, and she's desperate to have you. She wants to adopt. So I'm thinking, I'm going to trust her on this. Is that all right with you?"
Bron had never had two people who wanted to adopt him before, at least not that he could remember. On the one occasion that it had happened, social services had immediately taken him from the home. After all these years, he couldn't believe that this would happen, and he couldn't really even hope that it would happen. He didn't feel ready for this.
"I guess," Bron replied.
Mike said, "The way I see it, the calf I prized the most just died up here last night, on this altar. God took it away from me, and gave me something else in return."