On the last afternoon of docking and branding, Uncle Gene Laury told John Fremont Adams it was time for him to cut a lamb. The men laughed and nodded. They paused to wipe their bloody, shitty fingers on the tails of their wet neckerchiefs. The men believed Adams was big enough now, tall enough to reach the barrabilak with his teeth. And he was ready. He felt like he’d been ready for a long time. He had a good Baker knife with a four-inch blade. He’d used the knife to notch the ears of some older ewes the year before. He pulled the Baker from his pocket, and Uncle Gene checked the blade but didn’t bother to slide it across his oiled whetstone. It was sharp.

Shaggy-haired Francisco lifted a trashing buck lamb onto the flat-topped docking rail. He pinned the lamb against his hard, smeared belly. He didn’t want Adams to get kicked in the face his first time. That would happen soon enough. They’d all been kicked, all been nose-broke, by skittish lambs.

Old Etchepare, the boss herder, talked him through it. First, the step cut—down and out—on the right ear. Then you grabbed the lamb’s flabby pink sac. You sliced the end off as fast as you could, squeezing the tiny, pale balls until they could be tugged loose with your teeth. You breathed slow through your nose, and you held the balls soft and hot and easy in your lips, the tendons dangling against your chin while you swiped the lamb’s belly with antiseptic. Next came the tail. You pulled it straight and twisted, cut it half through, then twisted it completely off in one more motion. That was the best way to staunch the bleeding. Buck tails got tossed into one pile, ewe tails in another so you’d know how many you had of each. He spat the slick, gristly balls into the metal bucket at his feet. The bucket was nearly full of barrabilak. It had been filled many times that day. Later, he’d eat his share of them fried with onion and potato. They all would. He wiped his sticky mouth with his checkered sleeve as the men hi-ohed and clapped.

Another lamb. Old Etch said it was good to start with two. Adams planned how he’d learn to do it fast—under twenty seconds like the finest artzainak—as he slit and tugged and spat again. Francisco’s brother, Basilio, smiled to show his soiled teeth and tossed Adams a grimy, half-filled bota. Adams uncorked the goatskin bag and rinsed his mouth until wine spilled down his neck into his collar. Uncle Gene reset his ruined felt hat on his white brow and pretended not to notice. Uncle Gene wasn’t one to exaggerate a mood, but Adams knew he was pleased. Gene had no sons of his own, no children. He’d built the Trumpet Bell piece by piece, wool contract by wool contract. In just a few years, he’d made it into more than a lingering Laury homestead. But he’d made his share of money mistakes, too. The land he managed belonged primarily to his sister Portia and her husband, David Adams, though it never felt that way to Etchepare and the men, or to young Fremont.

He raised a dirty hand in the direction of his uncle. Gene flicked a thumb against his hat brim in response.

Then it was C.D. Hobbs’s turn to cut a lamb. Francisco, who liked to startle the smaller boy, shouted at him to step up and take his own knife from the village of Saint Etienne and do his good work. Adams looked at his friend who was dappled with branding paint and sweat. He was sure the attention would make C.D. nervous, even though C.D. knew Francisco and all the men of the Trumpet Bell. C.D. was on the ranch nearly every weekend. He hitched rides out of Baggs with other ranchers, and his mother, who had no husband and was known for her bad habits, didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Adams liked C.D.’s company. They were the same age, and they got along fine. But C.D. didn’t have a horse of his own, or even a saddle. He had to borrow gear. He helped with the chores as well as he could. Adams’s mother said C.D. Hobbs would always find his way in the world because he worked so hard at it. That was easy enough for Adams to believe. As far as he knew, the lives of boys were meant to strike an honest balance. His own brother, Buren, was up at the house right now with his nose in some book from a correspondence course. Buren sure as hell had never docked a lamb. It wasn’t something a person had to do.

Francisco planted a lamb on the rail. Old Etchepare urged C.D. forward, muttering slowly above his tobacco-streaked beard just as he had when he showed the boy how to approach the collie, Nina, and her newborn pups. C.D. got through the step all right, but when he went for the lamb’s sac, the animal’s struggle was fierce and seemed to put the falter in him. He stopped. His head wagged as if it were going loose on his neck. Old Etch stepped closer and spoke briefly into his ear. C.D. jerked the knife hand upward from where it hung by his pant leg and finished the job with an awkward, tearing ferocity. The lamb made a strangled, gummy sound, but Francisco held it fast. C.D. Hobbs made no sound at all.

The men hesitated a moment, then cheered when C.D. unclenched his left hand and dropped the nubbin buck tail onto the pile. Francisco laughed his gallant, victorious laugh. But no one gave C.D. the bota. They waited for Adams to do that. C.D. sloshed the sour red wine over his sunburned lips, coughed, then pretended to hiccup. The men laughed again as they broke away to their assigned tasks as smoothly as mallards breaking away from a flock in flight. The day was passing. There were lambs and ewes left to muster.

C.D. stood close to Adams, his eyes crinkled shut below his flushed forehead. His chin glistened with mucus and blood. “You see that, Fremont? Cisco picked me a big one. I damn near had to tear his tail off. It ain’t easy like it looks.”

“No, it’s not. Old Etch and Gene’s the only ones I ever seen good at it.” Adams wiped his hands for about the twelfth time on his denims. The two big swallows of wine he’d taken had only made him thirstier.

“So how’d you like the taste, them raw balls?”

Adams spit into the dirt to keep from smiling. C.D. Hobbs never knew when to hold back. He always got so excited, so talky. Hobbs wasn’t tall or strong, and he sometimes went rabbit when you least expected it, but he generally headed toward the things he liked at a full tilt gallop. “They ain’t in the mouth to taste,” Adams reminded him. “It’s work.”

“I was just thinking they’d have to taste like some flavor. They’s from lamb, and I know how lamb is flavored. I’ve eat it enough. Your mother cooks it good.”

“So does Basilio.”

“Well, yeah, I’ve eat his, too.” C.D. stopped to look at his loose bootlaces. Even those seemed worthy of pride. Behind him, the newly docked lambs cried so hard their ribs flexed. The young animals were stunned by the heat and the grappling. It sometimes took them hours to find their frantic mothers in the packed corrals. “Balls must taste of something,” C.D. said.

“But they don’t.”

C.D. gave another false hiccup. “I’m ready to do it exact right next time.”

“Me, too.” Adams hadn’t realized until then that Hobbs had only cut one buck lamb.

Maybe Old Etch and Uncle Gene thought one was enough since it had so flustered the boy. Etch and Gene had a good understanding of people. Uncle Gene was the one who had suggested it was sometimes best to let C.D. Hobbs go on for a while until he got himself unwound into a place where he could stay put.

“We get in on the grub, right?’

“Yeah,” said Adams, thinking of the lamb fries and Basilio’s peppery mutton stew and fresh sourdough bread. “I’m dead hungry now.”

“I can’t wait to try again. That’ll be all right, won’t it, Fremont? Your uncle will let me try again?”

Adams swatted at the fat horse fly chevroned on his thigh. He didn’t like it much when C.D. came at him with a plea. It made him tight. “Sure he will. Gene likes cheap help, especially if it don’t drink.”

“You’ll ask him for me? I...I don’t know if I can say what...Please?”

Adams saw the bright and bottomless worry at the center of C.D.’s eyes. The boy looked like he was about to cry. Adams knew his mother would tell him to pay attention to C.D.’s feelings because good friends didn’t add to one another’s troubles. His mother would remind him he needed to go easy on the people he liked. “Yeah, sure, I’ll take care of it.” He tried to ignore the irritation that bit at the back of his neck. “It won’t be no problem.”

They heard a loud squawk then, a familiar stubborn shriek. Adams’s little sister, Charlotte, had apparently put her baby fingers in the hot branding paint again. Adams pulled his hands over his denims, drying them, while C.D. hustled around the chute to where Fred Cosgriff was painting the ranch’s symbol on the lambs, and Charlotte was supposed to be staying out of trouble. Fred Cosgriff doted on Charlotte, but he couldn’t always keep a close eye on her. C.D., who didn’t have any little ones hanging onto his britches’ legs day and night, had a lot of patience with the younger girl. Adams watched C.D. bend down and swing Charlotte up into his skinny arms. His two-year-old sister’s golden hair flew above the fence line, tangling around the meadowlark feathers she’d woven into a flapping crown. He heard C.D. say something that made Charlotte laugh. C.D. was also good at that, getting Charlotte to laugh. He would be able to convince Charlotte that her job was to keep Nina’s new pups away from the camp stove while the older dogs, Nina and Pat and Nola and Bill, leaped in and out of the corrals, adding their scolding barks to the gruff shouts of the men.

From Snow, Ashes. Copyright 2007 by Alyson Hagy. All rights reserved.