We used to get up earlier for this, but we’re older now and the herd is smaller. We’re down to 50 head, which is just enough to turn a meager profit in a good year, hay prices and natural disasters notwithstanding. It’s still somewhat a family affair. The new team consists of my dad, Daniel Kilian; my brother, John Daniel Kilian (JD); my nephew, Jacob Daniel Kilian (Jake); my dad’s best friend, Daniel Kasper, who’s just there to cut up and fart around; Ricky, the one hand who actually earns his 50 bucks for the day; and Ricky’s 12-year-old son, who goes by Hardhead. I assume this child has a government name, but he’s been called Hardhead since birth. The boy answers to it. It’s Saturday morning in Central Texas—time to work cattle.

The land out here is sprawling, empty, and gorgeous. East of Smithville and west of Winchester, we run our cattle on a pasture just off River Bend Road. My family has managed cattle on these 400 acres for over 50 years. We call it “the bottom” because it backs up against the Colorado River. We don’t own this land; we lease it. We prefer to ignore this fact, even as the landowner keeps trying to put up a For Sale sign.

When I was a kid, working cattle was a normal chore. Dad would interrupt my Saturday morning cartoons and have me ride in the bed of the truck as we maneuvered through the field—the smell of manure and dusty hay, the sound of cattle lowing at dawn. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I moved away to college, where I studied music, quit music, and then still ended up in Nashville married to a musician.

It’s early May and I’ve come home for just one day. We’ve got KBUK 104.9 on the radio blasting honky-tonk hits. My dad’s hearing’s not so good any more after all the years of trucking and tractoring, and I have to ask him to turn it down. It’s 7 in the got damn morning.

We get there before the rest of the crew so Dad can ready the cattle lot. Everything looks smaller than I remember, and I remark on this to Dad.

“That’s ’cause you were smaller,” he says, walking off to the barn to grab the table.

I crouch down to the height I would have been as an 8-year-old. That’s more like it.

Dad comes back with a plank of wood he balances over a pair of welded metal legs to make the table. He sprays some WD-40 on the rusted headgate to loosen up the hinges. Out of the cab of his truck, he grabs the cooler of vaccines, the ear tagger and tags, the pump for the insecticide spray, the castrator, and a clipboard with a yellow legal pad to keep the books. I flip the clipboard over and see my collection of childhood stickers—little gold stars, iridescent hearts, Lisa Frank motifs, rewards praising my prowess as an accelerated reader. It’s the only evidence that there had ever been a daughter here.

Prepped, we drive the half-mile out to the farm road to meet the crew. They’re lined up, three large pickup trucks. When we meet them at the gate, everyone is quiet, listening for Dad’s instructions.

“We’re gonna hold back calves 20, 83, 45, 10, and cow 58,” he says, referring to the calves who will be separated out for the sale barn. “58 will teach them how to eat.” The calves have only experienced grazing in the pasture; they’d never eaten out of a trough in the lot. The older cow would show them how to do it. There are some requisite morning pleasantries, light ribbing from Daniel Kasper, commentary on whether the neighbor’s watering routine makes sense or is a waste of time. (Probably a waste of time.) Then all right, let’s do this, each in their trucks, and off.

Dad goes over the specifics of the operation with me before we get to the pasture. Today’s job is to run the herd through the lot and check numbers, administer a vaccine to keep down black leg, apply insecticide to keep flies off their backs, and then work the calves that haven’t yet been run through the lot. Vaccinations, ear-tagging, castrations for the males—the usual.

When I was a kid, we tackled this as a family—Papa and Uncle Allen herded the cattle into the lot while Granny kept books and covered bases. Mom administered the vaccines, seeing as how she’s a nurse and all. JD worked the headgate while Dad did the castrating and branding. And I, in my 8-year-old importance, slapped on the ear tags. The new crew, a ragtag jumbling of two families plus Daniel Kasper, is a strange one, but the operation still works.

It’s going to be a good day, Dad says. It isn’t a full moon, which my grandmother always said made the herd crazy. The cows are sticking together, trained to come running when they see Dad’s truck because that usually means feed, the poor dummies. He boasts about how he runs a tight operation. “No hooping or hollering, no hotshots,” he says. He has worked with this crew long enough that everyone knows their role. Sure enough, he pulls off the gravel road to get out and open the gates and the rest of the trucks growl forward, tailing the herd on both sides, pushing them toward the lot.

“This is how you do it if you don’t have horses,” Dad says. I see it, the way Ricky’s truck crisscrosses to keep any stragglers from falling behind. Horses are expensive to keep. Trucks just require gas.

When the cattle get to the lot, Ricky hops out of the truck to pen up the herd while Hardhead sits short in the driver’s seat to pull the truck around and park it with the others. Everyone gets out and takes their places. Ricky and Hardhead are stationed in the main pen, their job to herd in five at a time to run through the chute. Jake works the headgate, and Daniel Kasper stands at the end in case a cow makes it past the headgate on accident. JD is tasked with ear-tagging and fly-spraying. Dad handles the vaccines. I take up my clipboard for bookkeeping, a job Granny passed on to me once I got old enough. I used to perch on the top rung of the metal fence so I was out of the way in case any of the animals got loose. I’m older and not as dexterous now; I opt to stand at the table.

Ricky herds the first five in. “5, 15, 28, 30, and a calf,” he calls. I copy the numbers down. Let’s go.

This land, though we’ve worked it across four generations, is not ours. We lease it from the Cains.

The late Dr. Cain was a rich man from the Spring Branch neighborhood of Houston. He was a surgeon and team doctor for the Houston Oilers, the kind of rich who went on trophy-hunting safaris. I remember visiting his opulent home in Houston once, to pay our respects after he died in 1996, and it was the first time I’d seen an actual bearskin rug. Taxidermies from African hunts lined the walls. Dr. Cain was a city man, but he wanted his kids to stay country humble, so he did what any rich city man might do and bought ranchland and a handful of cattle. Then he hired a local farmer to take care of the land and animals in his absence. That farmer was my grandfather.

Papa never wanted to be a rancher. He was happier as a farmer, growing peanuts for candy companies and other agricultural suppliers. But the subsidies ended in the 1970s, and it wasn’t enough to just grow peanuts and food for the family. He tried his hand at a few other crops—corn, milo—but money was tight, and the land was too poor for growing. My grandmother saw the potential of cattle. She urged my grandfather to take the job for Dr. Cain, maybe see if we could share land and have our herd graze with his. Industrious and German, Granny never missed an opportunity for work. When she saw the acreage, the cattle, and the end of the farm subsidies, she saw the writing on the wall. From that point on, we were a ranching family.

I am surprised to hear this from my father. I’ve never known us not to be a ranching family. Dad lives and breathes cattle. His life revolves around when he can get out to check the cows, put out hay, and fix whatever has broken between now and the last time he got out to the bottom.

My father’s love affair with his cows has at times frustrated my mother. They married young and went through a few bumps of finding themselves in the marriage until they came to an agreement—Dad would work full-time to put Mom through nursing school. Once she got an RN job, he could drop down to trucking part-time, which meant more time for the cows. Also, Mom wanted another child, preferably a girl since they already had my brother.

My poor mother—I still grew up wanting to be a cowpoke just like my dad. I inherited his stubbornness, his short but scrappy stature, his infatuation with the land. But I didn’t grow up to be a cowpoke. I grew up to be a writer of cowpokes. The cowpoke honor—that went to my nephew, Jake.

When Jake was growing up, he was just like me. He was quiet, a reader, smart, and preferred to go his own opinionated way. Just like me, when he hit high school, his personality opened up, and what emerged like a butterfly from a chrysalis was a double of my father.

Both decked out in Wranglers, pearl-snap shirts, straw hats for summer and black suede for winter, bushy beards, and hair that curls around their necks. Mostly silent, saving their words for the right moment. My dad has a good sense of humor, but Jake’s is better, quicker, a rare good-natured sarcasm.

Jake spends his weekends working the land for Dad, shredding hay, fixing whatever needs fixing, and working cattle when it calls for it. Jake has taken up Dad’s spot at the headgate, the part of the lot that stops each cow at the neck to steady them in place while work is done. The headgate is a young man’s job, someone strong and quick.

“8, 32, 67, two calves,” Ricky calls out. “You hear me?”

“Heard,” I say. I hadn’t heard him, too lost in thought over my nephew.

“Don’t worry,” my brother tells me. “You’ll get it right when you’re fired.”

We fall into an easy rhythm. Ricky rounds up five cattle at a time, calls the numbers out for me to record. Hardhead ushers them into the chute one by one, waving his arms and whistling. Ricky coaches his son when the herd doesn’t comply. The cows are behaving today but “the calves ain’t acting right,” Dad says, them going all squirrely once they get in the chute.

Ricky and Hardhead are generational hands carrying on their own tradition. Ricky’s uncle, Ed, became my father’s top guy 20 years ago—after Papa died and my brother and I got too busy to help. When Ed retired, he turned the reins over to Ricky, who Dad started leaning on, along with Daniel Kasper and a few others in the area who were game for cattle work. But now that Jake is grown, the tradition carries on—even with Ricky, who is teaching Hardhead the way.

Seeing younger kids in the lot is refreshing. It’s not clear how much longer this ranching tradition can keep up. When Dr. Cain died, the land passed to his son and daughter. The son leases his half to hunters and Dad; the daughter has talked lately of selling her share.

It’s hard not to feel like this land is our land. Dad’s worked it nearly every day of his adult life. He knows where the river will flood, when the bluebonnets will come up, how much rain is needed to supply a hay field. His father built the lot we use to work cattle; Dad built up the rest. There’s still a massive tractor-sized dent in one of the barns where Papa backed up wrong, and we figured he probably shouldn’t go down there alone anymore. His old red ’79 Chevy pickup stayed parked at the barn for more than a decade, grown over with weeds next to rusted machinery. I could open the door, get in, and still smell his blend of dust, sweat, and peanuts.

How many of us can say something like that? How many of us can walk the land our ancestors tended and still see their physical manifestations on the earth?

There are several ways this tradition could play out. Watching Jake, there is a hope. Jake has expressed interest in taking over the cattle operation for Dad, like Dad did for Papa. But this is a difficult hope to maintain, despite Jake’s insistence. Ranching is damn expensive and damn near impossible to get into without generational wealth at your back. Most years, Dad doesn’t break even until halfway through the year. That’s if no catastrophes happen, and there’s nothing but catastrophes in ranching. Unpredictable weather; broken equipment; rising prices of land, hay, and feed; falling prices at the sale barn.

Every year feels more impossible. As land gets more valuable, and Austin and Bastrop encroach outward toward the ranch, it’s difficult to sit on 400 undeveloped acres. Already, land is listed for sale all around us, mostly going to wealthy retirees who, like Dr. Cain, want to slow down into the country life. Family farm and ranch operations have shut down, the cattle herds sold off to corporate lots. Elon Musk’s factories are looking for Central Texas homes. There are plans for highways and train lines to connect Austin and Houston, the ideal path cutting right through these prairies. There are fires in the Panhandle, hurricanes on the coast, tornadoes in the plains—all of it affecting Central Texas ranching.

Most years there is little to no profit from this work. But my father keeps doing it. I don’t know who he is without the cattle. I don’t think he knows either. I asked him once why he keeps going despite the financial losses, the backbreaking work, the disinterest from the rest of the world.

“You just gotta love it,” he says. “I love it.”

We’re down to the last calf. JD picks up the ear tagger, but I take it from him. I want to tag this one. I load the applicator, tag in the front, button in the back, then squeeze them together to test, muscle memory leading me. I walk up to the calf, its little head squirming in the headgate. I pull the ear taut, find the thin part between the veins, and squeeze. The calf shakes its head but doesn’t buck.

“There you go, girl,” Daniel Kasper says, the men watching me appraisingly.

“Like riding a bike,” I say.

Jake releases the headgate, and we turn the last calf loose, the lot now quiet and empty. We file out. It’s noon and we’re covered in dust on our arms and cow manure on our boots. Dad opens a cooler in the bed of the truck and hands out Lone Stars to me, JD, Ricky, and Daniel Kasper. Jake and Hardhead get Dr Peppers. The wind breezes through the tops of the pecan trees and makes waves in grass grown long. A mourning dove coos. An old live oak appears to have been struck by lightning, the dead limb crumbled to the earth.

The thistles are coming up, purple and fuzzy and pretty, which means it’s time for Jake to shred. Once the thistle flowers turn white, the plants tangle in the implement too much and the work becomes untenable. I’m always sad to see the shredding happen. The field is ablaze with wildflowers—bluebonnets, Indian paintbrushes, pink and purple buttercups. But the field must be shred so the coastal grass can come through easily. This is where we get our hay. That, and the bluebonnets are toxic to cows. Even the state flower of Texas can’t come between my father and his cattle.

Ricky and Daniel Kasper are resting their arms over the side of the truck bed. Hardhead stands between them, just tall enough to peer over the edge. All I can see is his Bluebonnet Coop hat, his squinty eyes, and his nose. We down the last of our Lone Stars and toss the empties in a bucket on the back of the truck. Dad stands at the tailgate and cuts a $50 check for Ricky. He asks Daniel Kasper if he wants to be paid. He says no; he’s just here for beer and entertainment.

Ricky, Hardhead, and Daniel Kasper load up and head out. My brother and nephew stay, remarking on the five head we held back in the lot. 58 is eating out of the trough and the newbies are following suit, just like Dad said they would.

“No need to keep her in there then,” Dad says.

He goes in and singles out 58 so she can join the rest of the herd. She follows his lead, gently.

“Go on, cow,” he says, and shuts the gate.