The old truck swerved left into what on most roads would be considered oncoming traffic. But on this gray Saturday morning, like most mornings, the narrow country road was quiet. On either side, the land opened wide and flat. A hundred yards off, a small herd of white faced Herefords munched placidly on the last of the summer grass now golden and gone to seed. The cattle, those few that looked up from their grazing, were the only witnesses to the old man’s traffic violation. But it was not other vehicles he feared hitting on that lonesome farm-to-market road.

He pressed the brake pedal down to the floorboard and overcorrected the steering. The old truck lurched right, creating an inch of air between the driver’s-side tires and the caliche road below. If not for the one thousand pounds of round baled hay weighting the truck bed down, the vehicle would likely have rolled. Two deep tracks and a line of white dust marked the distance it took for the truck’s worn brakes to complete their task.

The two inhabitants of the cab exhaled, looked from the road to each other wide-eyed, and checked themselves for injury.

“Did we hit it?” the boy asked.

“What? Where am I?” the old man asked. He touched his brow tenderly where a bruise the width of his steering wheel was beginning to blossom. “Travis, why am I driving your truck?”

This was the second time this morning the boy had been called by his father’s name. “Grandpa, you know I can’t drive. This is your truck. Dad is at the house with Mom and Grandma. Are you okay?” The boy reached up to inspect his grandfather’s head.

“I’m fine,” the old man said. He swatted the boy’s hand away. He felt the dull swell of anger and disorientation pulse through him and settle in his forehead with each beating of his heart. He blinked long and hard. Took a breath. Tried to focus, straighten out the jumble of his mind.

“Yes, I know,” the old man opened his eyes, “This is my truck. You are my grandson.” He glanced at the rearview mirror, obscured by the bulk of the round bale in the truck bed. “We went to get hay for the horses. They must’ve been low.” He looked out the windshield and side windows. “Now, why are we sitting in the middle of the road?”

The boy pointed out his window toward the barbed wire fence that ran parallel to the road.

“Oh,” the old man said. He put the truck into gear and pulled off into the grassy shoulder. He cut the engine and took off his seatbelt. “Reach back there and get the gun,” he told the boy.

The boy’s mother woke him early. He tried to burrow down into his sheets, but she insisted.

“Grandpa needs your help,” she said, “He wants you to go with him to get hay.”

“But Dad always does that,” the boy said.

“He asked for you. Dad says it’s ok. You’re old enough.” 

The boy leaned up on his elbows, stretched. He hopped out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans from the floor.

“Grandpa really asked me to go with him?” he asked.

“It’s a big responsibility. You must pay close attention and remember the way. Grandpa won’t ask for help, but he will be depending on you. I can ask Dad to go instead,” she said.

“No Mom, I’m old enough. You said.”

“Dad said. But I trust you. Now hurry along, Grandpa’s waiting.”

The boy found his grandfather sitting at the kitchen table, huddled over a mug of coffee. He took a sip and looked the boy over. “Here,” he said, holding up the mug, “You’ll need a jacket.”

The boy took the ceramic mug with both hands. The heat made his hands pink, but he did not want to drop it. He breathed in the smell of his grandparents and of his parents, of early mornings and newspapers and running late for work. He pressed the hot mug to his lips and drank. The black liquid with no milk or creamer scalded his tongue and made him cough. But he kept it down. He was old enough. He handed the mug back to his grandfather, coughed again, and went to retrieve his shoes and jacket. The boy returned sporting a windbreaker and sneakers. He looked at his grandfather with a raised eyebrow. “You need a new coat,” he said.

The old man glanced down at his own jacket, a khaki colored Carhartt made of once-stiff canvas, now worn soft. The left breast pocket showed stitching of a darker color, a mended reminder of the danger of barbed wire and a spooky horse. He stood and brushed a line of dust and hay fibers from the coattail seam. “She gets the job done,” he said. He finished his coffee and headed for the door.

Outside their breath trailed behind them in short white puffs as they walked to the truck. At the sound of the truck door opening, two horses in the nearby paddock raised their heads. They left the few flakes of hay in their feeders and trotted to the fence line, nickering expectantly. “We’ll be back soon,” the old man said. He waved to the horses and started the engine. He and the boy waited in silence for several minutes for the engine to warm.

“Where are we going? Is there a store that sells hay?” the boy asked.

“There is, but that’s not where we’re headed,” his grandfather said. They backed out of the driveway.

“Is it far?”

“’Bout thirty minutes.”

The boy stared out his side window. With one hand he shielded his eyes from the rising sun. With the other he doodled in the fog at the bottom of the window.

“Look there,” his grandfather said. A herd of twenty or so pronghorn stood in the field ahead. The small antelope-like creatures appeared to float over the sea of yellow prairie grass like ducks. One of the males with its stubby antlers leaped through the grass between the herd and the road, its white tail bobbing up and down like a tiny flag.

“Ain’t that a sight. Used to be you’d see them all over this place, when I was a boy.” The pronghorn watched the truck pass. “I’m glad you came along this morning, Travis. You need to learn how to care for things here. It’ll be yours someday, after all.”

The boy laughed. “That’s Dad’s name, Grandpa. We don’t even live here.”

The old man gripped the steering wheel tightly. He took a long breath, “I know. Travis and you and your mom live in town. You’re visiting your grandmother and me for the weekend.” He looked at the pronghorn in the rearview mirror, “I asked you to come with me to get more hay for the horses. I still have the horses.”

“Yup, Red and Snowy. How much longer?”

“And Chief.”

“I thought Dad said Chief died last year?”

“That’s right. Red and Snowy. It’s not much farther.”

They passed a nascent construction site on the old O’Hara ranch. Giant earthmoving machines sat silent inside a hastily constructed chain-link fence perimeter. Utility poles dark and gleaming with creosote lay in a pile near massive spools of line. Crushed white rock, the imprint of a suburban cul-de-sac, covered over a century of cattle trails. Soon this section of road would be as busy as any city neighborhood.

Farther down the road, at a patch of cottonwood trees that had outlived their original homestead, the truck turned. The boy made note of the landmark in his mind for pointing out on their return trip. His mother had said grandpa would not openly ask for help. Eventually the truck pulled into a packed dirt driveway. Beside the house at the end of the drive, at least thirty round bales of hay sat in two neat rows. The truck pulled alongside the far row.

The old man pulled a phone from his pocket. He punched a short message into the screen: Here. He waited a few minutes, then exited the truck. He motioned for the boy to join him at the round bales. He reached his lightly tremoring fingers into the center swirl of the bale and extracted a half handful of hay. He put it to his nose and breathed deeply. He smiled and uttered an approving low whistle. He nodded at the boy.

The boy reached up to the same small indention in the center of the bale. The hay was tightly packed and harder to pull out than his grandfather had made it seem. He pressed the handful to his nose and inhaled. He sneezed and crinkled his nose.

“You smell that?” his grandfather said.

The boy nodded.

“Always check before you buy. It should smell like hay. Some stores will try to sell you old stuff that smells like dust or mold. Horses ain’t like cows. They only have the one stomach, so good hay is important. This is a good bale. If you could pull some from the center it’d still have a tinge of green to it.”

The boy nodded and smelled the hay again. It had a sweetness to it that reminded him of summer and laying in the grass. He did not sneeze this time.

A shout issued from the house and they both turned. A stocky white-haired man waved and walked toward them. The two old men shook hands. The boy tried to give a firm handshake to the other man.

“You after a bale?” the white-haired man asked.

“Yes, sir. For Grandpa’s horses.”

“Speak up, son. These old ears don’t work like they used to.”

The boy looked at his grandfather, who nodded and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

“Don’t try to sell us anything that smells like dust or mold. We only want good hay. We’ll take this one here,” the boy said to the white-haired man.

Both old men laughed. The boy smelled the hay he still held in one hand, wondering if he’d made a mistake.

The white-haired man leaned down to the boy’s level. “Well I can see you’re as shrewd as your grandpa,” he said and laughed again. He ruffled the boy’s hair then turned to his grandfather. “I got this load in last week. First cutting from Vernon,” he said. “My daughter Judith’s bringing the tractor around back. She’ll load you up.”

The boy listened intermittently as the two old men continued talking of calendar dates and storms and closed storefronts that he had never heard of. He watched a beetle climb out from the dark space between two round bales and stumble along the short-mowed grass. He was attempting to coax it onto a stick when he felt a hand on his arm. His grandfather led him toward their truck. The boy now heard the tractor’s heavy engine approaching. He watched as the forked mechanical arm pierced the round bale and lifted it off the ground. He wondered how the tractor did not tip over from the weight. He watched his grandfather motion with his hand for the tractor to move forward another two inches as it lowered the bale into the bed of the truck.

“You don’t have to bother directing her. She knows what she’s doing,” the white-haired man said. The boy’s grandfather put his hand in his jacket pocket. The tractor’s forked arm withdrew and the truck sank as it accepted the full weight of the round bale. The woman inside the cab waved, returned to the line of bales to pick up another, and drove off back to the pasture behind the house.

“That one’s for our horses,” the white-haired man said.

“Does she ever let you drive it anymore?” the boy’s grandfather asked.

“These old eyes don’t work like they used to,” the white-haired man said. “See you next month?”

The boy’s grandfather nodded. He paid and they shook hands.

“I hope I’ll see you again, too, young man,” the white-haired man said to the boy. “Even if you do drive a hard bargain.”

The boy smiled and joined his grandfather in the truck. He felt the truck’s engine struggle under the extra weight. He looked to his grandfather, but the old man seemed unconcerned. They drove on while his grandfather softly hummed a tune to himself—something the boy had rarely witnessed. When they neared the patch of cottonwoods, he said, “Here’s the turn.”

“I know,” said his grandfather. He slowed and switched on the blinker, though no other vehicles were in sight.

They passed the construction site and then the open fields. The boy looked for the herd of pronghorn while his grandfather mumbled the melody out of tune. He found them in the field on the other side of the road from where he had first seen them.

“Grandpa, look out!”

A lone buck had darted into the road after its herd. It now lay still at the fence line, one horn caught in the lowest strand of barbed wire. It huffed and snorted white hot breath from its nose and open mouth. The truck pulled off onto the grassy shoulder ahead. The boy and his grandfather exited. They paused at the truck’s front bumper. The boy grimaced. A spatter of blood covered the corner of the bumper, trailing midway up the hood on the passenger side. A cruel stain against the white paint, dark like the red clay dirt that splashed up after a rain. The boy wondered if it would wash away as easily, back into the earth.

 They walked slowly toward the buck. The old man held one hand to his bruised head. The boy held a rifle in both hands. They stopped a few feet from the animal.

“So small up close,” his grandfather said.

“It’s the same size as Shep,” the boy said.

“I reckon your dog might be bigger.”

The buck convulsed violently but failed to stand or free itself from the barbed wire. Its side, white like the truck, had a similar stain. One hind leg lay out straight and limp, a red gash marking its golden fur.

The boy handed the gun to his grandfather. The old man looked down the road in both directions. “There’s never any police or rangers down this road,” he said, more to himself than his grandson. He inspected the rifle, clicked off the safety, and handed it back.

“Put it to your shoulder and look down the sight, just like I’ve shown you. You can pretend it’s just a Dr. Pepper can on a fence post if you want,” the boy’s grandfather said.

The boy steadied the rifle and sighted the buck. The pronghorn huffed and twitched its neck muscles. The boy moved his finger to the trigger, closed one eye, and took a deep, unsteady breath. He lowered the rifle.

“Do I have to? It was just trying to get back to its family,” the boy said.

“Its leg looks broke. Poor thing’s suffering. It’s the humane thing to do.”

“I can’t,” the boy said. He sniffled, wiped his blurry eyes with the sleeve of his jacket, and handed the gun back to his grandfather.

“I told your dad you were old enough,” the old man said. He raised the rifle. His hand tremors caused the rifle’s sight to wobble. He took a few steps closer. He saw the buck through the rifle’s sight, wide-eyed, likely in shock. He saw the excessive white hairs around its muzzle and neck, the scarred lines of bald or white fur down its back from years of slipping under barbed wire because pronghorns can run over fifty miles an hour, but they dislike jumping even four-foot fences. He saw the fresh wounds on its side and right hind leg.

The old man lowered the rifle. He clicked the safety back on.

“You said we had to,” the boy said.

“And you said it just wants to get back to its family. Now hold this and stay put.” Looking back, he added, “And keep that barrel pointed away.”

The boy watched as his grandfather cautiously approached the buck. The old man whispered softly to the animal and crouched near its hindquarters. The buck’s eyes opened wide like shiny black skipping stones. It snorted but did not move. The old man slowly stretched out one arm. He held his hand above the injury for several long seconds, then he lightly touched the buck’s leg. The buck remained still. The boy held his breath. The old man ran his hand past the red tear down to the knee. The buck lay still, caught in the barbed wire and the old man’s steady gaze.

When he moved his hand back toward the wound, the animal kicked. Its sharp two-toed hoof missed him, but the shock nevertheless sent the old man falling backward several feet. The boy ran to his side and helped him regain his feet. They both exhaled for what seemed like the first time in several minutes.

“Well, that leg sure ain’t broke,” the old man said. They laughed and held on to each other for support. The boy’s grandfather took the rifle and replaced it under the backseat of the truck. He returned with a pair of pliers and a small spray bottle. He showed the bottle to the boy. The label had a large picture of a horse’s head flanked by the smaller heads of a dog and a sheep.

“Wound and skin care,” the boy read aloud.

“This stuff comes in handy,” his grandfather said.

The pronghorn was now on its feet. Its head was down, the short forked horns still held tight by the lowest string of wire. The old man stepped toward it and aimed the bottle. It jumped away when the antiseptic liquid hit its wounds, slamming the opposite side of its body into the barbed wire.

“Huh. It ain’t supposed to sting,” the old man said.

Once the buck calmed down, the old man pulled pliers from his pocket. The pliers had wire cutters at the back of their grooved jaw.

“These’ll have to do,” he said. He approached the buck again, careful to stay clear of its hind legs. He snipped the wire close to one horn.

Sensing the lessened pressure, the buck tossed its head and attempted to run. But the tension from the wire still holding its other horn whipped it violently back to the ground. The buck continued to struggle but could not free itself from the wire. By the time it calmed down, the buck was at least six feet inside the field, held like a kite to the wooden fence post.

The old man knelt but he could not get low enough. The next lowest wire scratched the top of his head and snagged on his jacket collar. He retreated. He looked at the struggling buck, at the pronghorn herd fifty yards away. He shook his head. 

“I can fit,” the boy said. The boy took the pliers from his grandfather’s hand and scrambled under the barbed wire fence. He crept toward the buck. He spoke softly to it, assuring the animal that it would be okay, that he, like his grandpa, was just there to help. The buck ran backward as far from the post as the wire would allow. When it stopped, the boy continued his approach. He reached as close as he dared to the buck’s horn and closed the pliers around the wire. He could feel the animal’s hot breath on his hand. He had to use both hands to squeeze the pliers shut. The buck fell back when the wire finally snapped. It immediately jumped to its feet and shook its head, the cut wire still clinging to its horns. Another short jump and the buck was off, limping toward its waiting herd.

“Will it be okay?” the boy asked, after he crawled back under the fence.

“It should shed its horns next month or two. But that leg, I don’t know. I hope so. It’s moving along a lot quicker than I’da thought,” the boy’s grandfather said. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and watched the buck a minute longer. Then, studying the cut fence, he said, “We can’t leave it like this.” He looked around him, at the ground, the truck. He returned with a strand of nylon twine, cut from the round hay bale. He twisted it tight into a straight cord and, with the boy’s help, tied either end to the fence posts at the level of the broken wire. They stood back to admire their handiwork. They watched as the pronghorn herd floated away over the golden grass and out of sight. The old man patted the boy’s shoulder and headed back to the truck.

“I could use a cup of coffee, how about you?” he said.

“You mean a second cup,” the boy said.

“Yes, a second cup.”