One More Season, 1965

“The last calf of the day came out of the chute running to the right. It was a quick little Brahman crossbred, maybe three hundred pounds, with wild eyes and no intention of cooperating with anything. Adam's horse broke clean after it and Adam's arm came up and the loop went out the way it had gone out ten thousand times before, lazy and flat and true. The catch was good. The dismount was not. His right foot hit the ground wrong. It had been hitting the ground wrong for twenty years, ever since a Belgian forest in December of 1944 took most of the feeling out of both feet and left him with a permanent reminder that wars did not end when the shooting stopped. But today the wrongness was worse than usual, a bright flare of pain that shot up through his ankle and locked his knee and nearly put him down before he reached the calf. He got there. He got the tie on. His hands still knew the work. Three wraps and a hooey, and his arms went up, and the clock stopped. Twelve point four seconds. It was good enough for third place and not good enough for anything else. The young man who won had done it in nine flat, which was a time Adam could have posted five years ago without breaking a sweat. The young man was twenty-three. He had wide shoulders and fast hands and the kind of hunger that came from having nowhere to go but up.”

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