Free Borderline by Nevada Barr

asked.
    “Let me try.” Anna took the lettuce and tried to make the prospect of following it attractive, but had no better luck than Cyril.
    “The carrot isn’t working,” Anna said. “Time for the stick.”
    Paul moved up behind Easter and Carmen pulled on the downhill rope. Easter collapsed, knees folded beneath her, chin on the rocks.
    “Plan C?” Steve said hopefully.
    There was no Plan C. Paul pushed and Carmen pulled and Cyril lured and Anna walked on the cliff side of the cow, prodding her and encouraging her. Steve made sounds that he insisted were irresistible to female bovines and they began the descent with Easter staggering, collapsing, being hauled to her feet, mooing plaintively and stumbling a few more feet before she again went to her knees.
    The ledge had been fairly smooth going, a gentle slope leading upward in two zigzags following a natural sheer pattern in the rock face. They’d descended to a place where the ledge broke into ragged steps for five or six yards before the trail smoothed out again for the last turn and down to the river’s edge. Where the broken steps began the ledge was wide and only fifty or so feet above the river, forty above the sand hill capped with Bermuda grass. The cow took one look at the steps, dug all four hooves into the rock and leaned back. When Anna pulled hard on the rope Easter fell and no amount of encouragement or harassment could induce her to rise again.
    Anna knelt by the stricken bovine and stared into one great brown eye. “Move or die, old girl,” she said. “Up and at ’em.”
    Easter was unmoved in every way.
    Anna stood again. “Let’s see if we can lift her up. Maybe it will inspire her to help us.”
    Coiling the rope as he came, Paul joined her on the other end of the cow. “I don’t think it’ll do any good. I should have thought of that on the way up but my cattle-wrangling days were a while back. Cows will go up, but they won’t come down. They’ll come down slopes but not stairs. I guess stairs have the same effect on them as cattle guards; they look like horrible traps for some reason.”
    “What if we pulled her and you pushed her?” Anna suggested.
    “We could try, but if I remember right, cows are serious about their phobias.”
    Anna looked at the cow, then down the shattered rock slope, then down toward where Chrissie and Lori waited with the raft. On the way up, she remembered the drop being breathtaking, the height precipitous. After ninety minutes cattle rustling two hundred feet higher than that, it looked as if they could almost jump down it.
    Carmen sat down, her back against the cliff, her feet against the cow’s ribs. “I wouldn’t mind a little rain about now,” she said. “You guys didn’t pay me to work this hard.”
    Anna sat down next to her. She, too, was drenched in sweat and reeked of cow manure where she’d repeatedly stepped in it on her backward progress down the ledge. Paul stood, hands on hips, breathing hard, staring out across the canyon, his eyes shaded by the brim of his hat, his white hair plastered to the back of his neck.
    Cyril and Steve were positively peppy. The difference between twenty and forty, Anna thought without rancor. At twenty hard work eventually made one stronger. After forty it eventually made one tired.
    “What now?” Cyril asked, squatting in front of the cow and cradling her nose between her hands. “Do we carry Easter the rest of the way?”
    “She may be small and starved but she still weighs a good four or five hundred pounds,” Paul said.
    “We could just roll her off,” Steve suggested. “Have steak for supper. The bouncing would probably tenderize her.”
    None of the women dignified that with a response but Paul looked interested. He loved animals and was kindness itself to Taco and Piedmont and Anna’s little tuxedo cat. But having been raised on a dairy farm, wringing the necks of fryers, butchering hogs and the occasional cow, he tended to be pragmatic