Not words exactly, just sound, steady, and unhurried, telling the animals in the only language that worked in conditions like these, "I'm here. I'm calm. Follow the calm. " The yearling shifted, not toward the gate. Not yet. They were still bunched, still uncertain, swinging their collective weight left and right like a single nervous organism.
She took one step closer to the left fence, just one, narrowing the space on that side. One of the yearlings at the edge of the group turned its head toward the gate. That was something. That was the beginning. Calder kept talking.
EMTT moved the horse in a wide arc to the right, not pushing, just presence. The same principle she was applying on the left. Slow the world down. Make the right direction feel like the easiest direction. Her fingers had stopped hurting about 10 minutes ago, which she understood was not a good sign.
When cold stops hurting, it means it's moved past the nerves ability to report, and that happens in in stages that are easier to prevent than to reverse. She flexed her hands inside the gloves, a repeated deliberate motion, trying to maintain circulation. The yearlings moved, not a stampede, nothing so dramatic or disastrous. The animal at the front of the group, which happened to be the split-eared steer that Emmett had flagged two months ago as the strongest in the pen, simply took three steps toward the gate. Just three.
But the animals behind him followed the way cattle always follow the leader, not because they decided to trust the direction, but because the animal in front of them had moved, and they moved, too. She walked with them on the left, maintaining her position, not pushing, just present. She could feel rather than see the gate opening getting closer. The rope called her had strung a guide rope from the gate post. She realized he'd done it while she was getting into position and she hadn't seen it in the white.
The rope was there when she found it with her left hand. And she held it and followed it and the cattle moved with her and with EMTT's horse on the right and with Calder's voice in front of them through the gate. She felt the ground change underfoot. They were through the gate. They were in the narrow lane that led back toward the barn.
The wind was still brutal, but the lane had a fence on both sides now, and the cattle couldn't scatter. She kept her position on the left, walking, not running, not letting herself feel the relief yet, because relief made you careless and careless in these conditions had consequences. She could not feel her fingers at all now. She flexed them anyway. The motion without feeling was strange and alarming, and she cataloged it and kept walking.
The barn materialized out of the white like a dark shape emerging from fog. First a suggestion, then a reality. She heard Calder's voice change, a different note in it, still steady, but with something released, and she understood that he'd seen it, too. The split-eared steer walked into the barn first. The rest followed.