A Taste for Veal

Nostrils full of Hoppes #9, I am surprised when Robbin closes me into the office. I can’t smell anything else, not its combined scent with WD 40 and 3-in-1 Oil wafting throughout the house. Too long postponed, I’m cleaning rifles, still angry over the Wagyu calf we lost yesterday.

Zach & I fed the heifers about 8:30, short in a suspect count on the east side of the creek. We fed the bulls and replacement heifers down the road, then got back to the house about 11:00. I left in the Kubota to get another count and to check on the heifer with new calf at the north end of the pasture, having spotted a young coyote nearby when we fed. Though open to the hillsides, the heifers are calving along a mile and a half stretch of the creek.

There were four pairs nursing across from the house when I left the driveway to check on the heifer and calf. Getting a count on my way back, I approached where the pairs had been, when a big coyote jumped up from the creek ahead of me, running across the flat towards the steep slope. I rationalized that my two misses from dirty barrel and dusty scope, long shots half-way up the hillside, were at the least, fair-warning and educational. I finished my count and was driving home when I spotted the motionless form of a calf on the green bank, head downhill, across the creek. I whistled twice. Nothing.

Within the thirty minutes I was up the road, the 1st calf heifers had finished nursing and left to clean-up the last stems of alfalfa hay, about a 100 yards away. Without a babysitter, without a sound, the coyote killed a week-old calf. I inspected it, a hole for a hindquarter as the meat bees swarmed. No mother around.

A few hours later on my way back from errands in Exeter, I identified the heifer standing vigil over the carcass. I recorded her tag number and went to the house, angrier. Certainly not our first calf lost to coyotes, I could picture the thick-bodied male in the scope, broadside, head high, cocky and aloof on the hillside. I began imagining, piecing together what went down, giving him human attributes—I hated the SOB and wanted retribution. No clever trickster, just a bold thief stealing what might have been an $850-calf next May.

Initially, I was going to haul the carcass up the canyon, but as she continued to bawl beside the calf into evening, I left it, hoping all the new mothers on both sides of the road might hear her complaint all night and pay closer attention to their calves. But I thought it strange when shortly after dark, her bawling was moving farther away.

This morning the carcass was gone. After several circles, I found no drag marks in the dry grass within a hundred yards, no bones, no hide. Whatever packed it off, picked it up. Even the feral hogs would have left something. The second suspect in this grizzly caper: a small bear that has been working up and down the creek these past few weeks.