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In middle school, I would accompany my father to the farm he maintained an hour south of our home. With cowboy boots slung into the back of the truck, I’d hop in the cab with soft puffy eyes that returned to sleep on the commute. Sports commentary would blare through the radio until the hardware store a mile down the road when it fell silent to my sleeping ears. The rock back on the incline of the parking space woke me upon our arrival. Gravel crunched beneath my house shoes, and I lugged my boots to the office. 

We’d take rounds of the cattle, calculate their feed percentages, and slap cold engine’s hoods to scare the cats from inside them. I’d watch him load himself into the bobcat and scoop a full bucket of donuts from the piles of fermented bakery goods that were thrown into the mixing truck. My air-ride passenger seat jostled vigorously with eat additional hundred pounds. We’d process cattle and poke their butts with eight foot paddles to direction the heavy animals down the shoots. He pierced them with vaccinations while I opened and closed gates. I’d be introduced to his favorites when he called them from outside the pen; they’d come running to meet their forehead with his hand. Sometimes the medical cart would join us for castration or, on one occasion, a nasty eye infection dissection. 

On a morning like all the others, where the cattle breathe hot fog into the dawn air, he sectioned off a single steer to the pen near the office. Maybe it simply limped over from the adjacent sick pen, but the creature stood tall all morning, alone. I wondered why we let it feel that way there. Or if it felt anything but its evident pain. After lunch which was probably my cut baked potato sprinkled with cheese and slathered in a line of ranch, he grabbed the shotgun. We walked around the lot, observing the status of the troughs, and circled to the double walled aisle facing the lone cow. Our tracks planted twenty five yards away it seemed. The shotgun slung off his arm and butted up to his armpit. The animal fell with a memorable 1,200 pound thud immediately resounding louder than the bullet’s release. I blinked; he stepped into the pen to call time of death. We fed the cattle once more, suctioned our feet from our boots, and turned on generic rock radio for the ride home.