Chapter Text
Seventeen-year-old Lucas Massina and his buddy, Brian, had been riding the fence all morning long on their dirt bikes, checking the fence line of the Massinas’ cattle lot. The lot and surrounding land stretched out over 760 acres of scrubland with a small herd of cattle; one bull, eighteen cows and thirteen spring calves—except one of the cows hadn’t come in the night before.
Normally Carlos Massina, Luke’s father, might suspect that she’d gone out in search of privacy for calving, but it was the wrong time of year and she wasn’t pregnant. So he’d sent his son and his friend out to search for her and bring her in.
There was, of course, the concern of the occasional coyote or the even more rare mountain lion that came down from the hills to hunt, but even working in a pack, the coyotes would be hard pressed to carry a 1200 pound adult cow over the fence line without some tell-tale sign. And if she couldn’t be taken from the lot, there should be a carcass. 760 acres wasn’t that much land to check.
Using their dirt bikes, Luke and his friend had scoured all of the land and had turned up no carcass of any kind; no blood; no buzzards overhead signaling sun-cooked flesh; nothing. They’d found nothing at all until…
“Luke! You better come look at this.”
Luke turned sharply at the sound of his friend’s voice on the dry wind. Sixty yards down the fence line stood Brian, waving Luke down.
“What is it?” Luke hollered.
“Just come look, will ya?” Brian shouted back, shaking his head in exasperation.
With a kick, Luke brought his motorbike to life, throwing dirt and rocks as he tore across the dry lot to where Brian was waiting for him. He cut the engine and dismounted the bike, gasping when the heel of his boot sank two inches into the unusually soft ground beneath him.
“What the Hell?” he muttered. He stepped back and frowned, examining the pillowed dirt beneath his feet. It wasn’t uncommon to find burrows in the sun-scorched ground; small animals often dug their dens into the earth to escape the day’s heat, but this was unlike anything he’d seen on their property; a long tubular mound of dirt that trailed back toward the fence, like a groundhog tunnel, but bigger. Much bigger.
“Hello, did I lose you?” Brian asked, snapping his fingers in front of Luke’s face. “I need you to look at this. I think this might be the clue we’ve been looking for.”
Luke tracked Brian’s gesture towards the fence and frowned. A clue, indeed. It was a 4x4 inch by six foot fence post, one that he had helped to put in himself, and it was lying clear over on its side. No way was anyone pulling that post out of the ground, not without some heavy machinery anyway. He and his father had buried those posts over two foot into the ground…they weren’t budging.
“Well? What do you make of this? Think maybe she just walked away?”
“What for? Not in search of food or water.” Luke shook his head in disagreement. “Animals are smart, man. She knows she’s got food, water and protection here on the farm. She’s not going out there,” he thumbed out into the desert hills. “Not without a damn good reason.”
“Maybe somethin’ chased her. I mean look at this fence, it’s all but laying on the ground. Sure looks like it’s been knocked over to me. It coulda been a stampede.”
“A stampede, Brian? Really? One cow. That’s one helluva stampede man. Besides, that post wasn’t knocked over, it was uprooted, like someone came along and pushed it out from underneath.”
“’Well then, maybe somebody stole her.”
“Again…one cow? Why even bother? Plus there’s no tire tracks here but our own. No, I don’t think she was stolen.”
“Well, what then? A cow just doesn’t up and disappear without a trace.”
“Right.” Luke removed the cowboy hat from his head and ran the back of his hand over his forehead, swiping at the sweat that was gathering at his hairline. He pushed the excess blond locks away from his face and settled his hat back into place firmly. “Let’s umm… Hell, I don’t know.”
He looked around him and his eyes once again caught on the displaced earth that formed a rather large tunnel pointed directly at the uprooted fence post.
“I say we follow this tunnel; see where it takes us. Maybe it’ll lead us to this God forsaken cow.”
“You’re the boss…or, well,” Brian smiled, smacking Luke on the arm playfully, “the boss’s kid, anyhow.”
They pushed their bikes over the downed fence wire, carefully avoiding the barbs with their tires, and then kick-started their engines; the raspy sound echoing loudly across the desert as they sped off toward the hills in the far distance.