some watchful Somerleds, they'd stopped her from lying down in the muddy water and eventually drowning herself and her offspring. With three men to each side of her and a sling under her belly, she'd been forced to calve standing up, with Buchanan and Jamison standing at the ready, like a couple of big league catchers.
Jamison got the nose end. Buchanan bravely wrapped his arms around the middle. Together they got Junior up out of the ditch and laid him on the grass where Buchanan took over. Jamison considerately walked away from the crowd before he puked.
The unhappy mother was exhausted and the men panicked when she started going down. The men holding the wide sling couldn't prevent it, nor could the men at her sides; her legs simply gave out.
A lone man grimaced as he held her head above the water line, but by the complaints of the cow, it didn't look as if she would put up with that for long. Behind him, others frantically scooped water and dumped it above, but the water just kept coming.
Jamison had an idea.
“Hold her up. Give me just a minute!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran toward a pile of rubble at the edge of the field, about fifty yards from the chaos. He'd hauled something odd to that pile an hour before, and he'd only remembered it because it had been so out of place there, in the middle of a green field.
It was heavy and he probably looked pretty dumb waddling back with his knees bent and that thing on his head.
Shawn grinned at him and came to assist. Together they plunged the hood of a Volkswagen Bug into the ditch just ahead of the cow like a giant blue dam, embedding it in the soft mud beneath the water.
At first, he didn't think it had worked, but after the six large men crawled out from around the cow's middle, the water level dropped quickly and the man holding the animal's head lowered it to the ground.
Its eyes closed.
After the water had trickled away, four men jumped back in the ditch and started digging around the cow's feet, but to Jamison it appeared they were only rearranging the mud.
The animal's side barely rose and fell.
“She's not bleeding, that I can tell.” Buchanan squatted behind her and patted her side. “All right, Flossie. It's all right now.”
Jamison wondered if cows could understand such things, if coming from a Somerled, of course.
Still, her eyes remained closed. She paused a second between breaths. Jamison did the same.
Behind the wall of men standing along the bank came Junior’s pitiful wail.
The wall turned to see the calf squirming around on the grass, complaining like a spoiled and pissed off brat.
The men scattered as a determined, muddy cow pulled herself up out of the ditch—with very little help from behind—and came to stand over her calf.
“Morris? We're going to need a lot of gravel to line this ditch.” Buchanan frowned at the deep valley of mud. “I guess she's not Dutch.”
“Done.” A short man walked toward the barn.
“Jamison?”
Jamison started. “Yes, sir?”
“Your grandfather would be proud. Quick thinking.”
“Inspired,” someone shouted, and the rest of them laughed.
“Sir?”
“What?”
“What did you mean, she's not Dutch?”
Buchanan smiled. “In Holland, cows won't cross water, so they don't use fences; they just dig small ditches and keep them full. The cows stay in their fields.” He reached between his hip waders and pants and pulled out a familiar key ring, then tossed it over.
“What? All I had to do was save a cow?” Jamison grinned.
“Nah. Skye's ready to go. I'd wash real good before you let her see you.”
***
“Unbelievable.” Jamison assumed he was in mild shock, since he'd said it half a dozen times and he and Skye hadn’t gone yet a mile from the ranch house. An army in white had taken great pleasure in washing him down, with a hose powerful enough to clear dried mud from a four-by-four in ten seconds flat. Only after a few Somerleds had taken their turn and Shawn was reaching for the sprayer did Jamison protest. Then someone had had the brilliant, although belated idea that Jamison be given clean clothes to wear home.
So there he sat, driving calmly out of the Twilight Zone, girlfriend intact, wet clothes in a sack in the trunk which was nearly rusted through already so a little water wouldn't hurt much, and wearing a designer ensemble, straight from the runway of Somerled and Somerled.
It was so