9

A short story by T. A. Nelson

9 raised his head and looked over the sea of other identical bobbing, dehorned heads in front of him. He and his companions were tired and restless after days of swaying side to side in the crowded, small and constantly moving railroad car. The lowing of the others was sharp and short: more like little grunts that spoke of irritation rather than of the contentment they had known for the past two years that had made up their lives. There was no communication in these sounds, only the expression of their discontent.

9 felt sick. He wanted a drink of the cool water that flowed in the creeks and to rest someplace where it was quiet. He wanted to go back to the grassy plain where he’d grown up. Life had been good there. There was always food and always water, more or less, in the creeks. It was cold in the winter but still there was always food. When crusted snow covered the grass there was hay in bales, piles of it, whenever they wanted it. It was good and it was always enough until the snow melted and the new Buffalo Grass sprouted. There was the food, the water and room to roam. He had never desired anything more. It was the place where he belonged, he was a part of it. It was only proper that he should be there and nowhere else as he was part of the brown earth, the green grass and the rolling hills. He was the earth and the grass and the hills and it was the cattle who fed and slept there.

Yet there was something more to it. There was a hill and a winding, well-worn path. Whenever 9 had wandered away from that particular, familiar sight he would get a feeling of longing. It wasn’t a strong, unpleasant yearning but just a pull into the direction of that place where he had spent so much of his life. Always, he would go back there and tread those same steps, climb that gently sloping hill and settle down in a little hollow. Once he was back there everything was right. 9 didn’t have a profound sense of rightness but there was just that pleasant familiarity and feeling of belonging. This was his place. This was home. He had never questioned the presumption that life would go on like that forever.

There had been, sometimes, itchy, stinging insects, too, but the men had compelled the steers to swim through a foul smelling bath–and they had swum with only their muzzles lifted out of it to breathe. After that there was no more stinging. He could only think that the men had always been good to him. It seemed that way. There was no reason for it except that it was the nature of men to be so. Could there be any more to it? He had had the feeling that there was indeed something more, something that he could not understand, only because the information that would reveal it was not available to him. The idea always escaped him when he tried to think about it. Why should he question the men? They had always been good to him and everybody knew that. It was just the way it was. And there was nothing wrong with that.

9 had been dismayed by the roundup. He had never known the men to act so roughly or to be so much in a hurry, except for the time when he was tied up, burned and cut. That was a long time ago and his memory of it had grown dim. That was when he got the marks tattooed on his ear, too. One of them is a “9.” There’s more to the number of course but his ear is curled and the tattoo is on the inside so only the “9” shows to someone standing alongside. The others had their marks too; there was a “62” and a “141” that were making the unpleasant journey with 9. He had often stood alongside 141 and they would switch flies away from one another’s faces. That was on the range where life was so good. He had thought it would be that way forever. Why wouldn’t it? There had been no reason to suspect otherwise, until now. Stocker cattle had as good a life as anyone had thought could be. But these new events, the round up, the long train ride, had made it all uncertain. He had not seen any of his companions since the round up. And now…

Suddenly the sharp, burning thing bit into 9’s rump. It was the same thing that had bitten him when he was pressed into the railroad car with the other steers. He lurched forward. Some of the other cattle must have felt the same thing; several of them let out an abrupt grunt and pressed forward in the same direction that 9 was going, to get away from those painful bites. They moved in a jostling, tightly packed mob, down a wooden ramp, slippery except for the slats of wood running crosswise that stopped the sliding of their hooves. The ramp took them down to the firm ground they had not stood on for several days. It was a wonderful relief to 9 just to be standing on it again. Firm, solid ground made him start to feel like himself again, like he had on the open range. Maybe this was finally taking him back to it, back to where he belonged.

He moved now with the herd and being a part of the herd always meant inexorably doing what the herd did. It pressed him forward now, along a narrow passage between wooden rails on well-trodden ground, worn smooth and powdery by countless hooves. 9 became aware that this was the normal thing for stockers to do, to come here in the cattle cars, to walk along this narrow path. They may all come here sooner or later. It all just went in such a regular way, as though it were planned and natural. The men had rounded them up, prodded them into the cattle cars with the sharp, biting things and now were prodding them out again. It must be normal to do this and so it must be all right.

9 thought the men certainly were benevolent if not always as kind as they could be. 9 thought he should be reassured by this line of discovery, but he was not at all sure he was. He looked at the other cattle around him and saw the same vacant, staring and accepting faces as always. He thought the other cattle may not have had thoughts like he did. He had long suspected it. Were they thinking now about their circumstance? Did they ever? 9 found his own kind to be one of the most impenetrable puzzles of his experience.

Events followed rapidly on this eventful day. All of 9’s fears and hesitations were dispelled by the scene that awaited him at the end of the walk in the narrow passage. Here was a pen, cleanly scraped and roomy, with a trough along one side filled with an abundance of excellent grains. There was corn, barley and soft wheat and other things he had never imagined, that made it smell and taste delicious. There was not just one such pen, either. He could see a seemingly endless line of them, all identical and all filled with cattle like himself, contentedly and intensely feeding on the excellent provender in the troughs. Far in the distance the only other object was the hard, rectangular outline of a building, the biggest building 9 had ever seen. That meant nothing to him.

How exalted he and his companions must be to receive such fine treatment. How important they must be to the men, who went such length to make their lives so enjoyable. The men truly were benevolent. But why? 9 felt ashamed for thinking it, but there must be something in it for the men. There must be something they got from it, something of importance to them, for the pens filled with cattle stretched on for a great distance as far as he could see from his low vantage point.

Days passed as 9 and his companions ate their fill. Oddly though he never did get filled up as he expected he would. It seemed that the more they ate the more they wanted. The food itself seemed to feed their desire for more rather than to satiate. But it was good so why question it? It was just that 9 couldn’t help thinking. That was his personal cross to bear, the thinking. It never stopped. For most of his life he had thought that everyone was like that, that thinking was like breathing or digesting. Recently he had gotten the idea, upon observing his companions more critically, that what went on inside of himself was absent from them. The vacant stares and complete predictability of their behavior denied much of a voluntary process of choice or discrimination. They often did not seem to be individual cattle, but only a homogenous, swarming mass. It was more like drops of water blending and flowing together than separate elements acting in unison. As 9 had that thought he judged it to be a good, clear thought on the subject and he gave himself a good feeling as a reward for the accomplishment. 9 had learned early in life to give himself good feelings for discoveries and thoughts that seemed to be true to the world around him, and gave himself bad feelings as well for thoughts that were not true to his world or for what he disdained as idle-mindedness.

More days passed and the pen was becoming filled with the waste of the steers’ constant gorging. That’s not usually a matter for concern to indulging cattle, but it really was getting to be a problem. The troughs were endlessly replenished with fine grains, but the foul mass underfoot, or now actually up to their knee joints, was growing constantly. 9 found it hard even to move his feet when he was again prodded with the painful, sharply stinging instrument that had goaded him into, then out of, the railroad cattle car. He heard others complain aloud of the prodding as they all moved together toward the end of the pen. There the railing had opened and they were able to flow as one seething mass into another pen. This one was exactly like the first they had enjoyed: scraped clean and provided with a copiously stocked trough of excellent grains. This, then, was how the men solved the waste problem. Move us to a new, clean pen where we can feed some more. It worked wonderfully but still the same question came back to cause him a vague discomfort: Why? Why did all this happen? Did it just go on like this forever? Why, above all, did men behave in such an inscrutable way?

Weeks passed. 9 was sure now that they were moving slowly in the direction of the great, square building. He hadn’t noticed it for a long time, being absorbed in constant gluttony. (And gluttony it certainly was, for he was becoming very fat and could see the others fattening up from it as well.) But each move seemed to be in the direction of the building, or at least parallel to it, but never away from it. They were getting slowly and steadily closer. Well, that was fine because he was acquiring a slight curiosity about it, anyway. Perhaps he would, in time, be able to see what went on there.

9 felt like a machine built for no more purpose than to take in food and pump out waste. Eating was good; it was always the greatest pleasure in life but he started to think he could actually do too much of it. He was fat but he didn’t mind that. All he had to do was stand at the trough and eat more and more. He felt sluggish, especially in the mornings, and was feeling a strong urge to take a walk, or even run like a silly calf as he once had on the range where he grew up. Memories of those two short years on the range were becoming more and more distant — and missed. He longed to quit eating and just go back there and maybe; maybe even experience the occasional feeling of hunger he had known. But that would be silly.

It was a slowly dawning, sluggish morning when 9 was watching the sun light the grey sky and the wind just beginning to stir when the odd thing happened. He was looking directly through the rail fence to the pen next to his when a steer, no one he knew, just one of the many, faceless cattle of the feed lot, suddenly raised his head in a startled gesture. 9 could see those last numbers of the tattoo on his ear: “62.” No, 9 had never met 62 before. But 62 was troubled by something, more than troubled, something had caused his normally languid mood to suddenly rise to near panic. He tossed his head and started to bellow, short staccato bellows of a terrified steer, cornered or confined something terrible but which he could not escape.

9 did not have long to puzzle over 62’s behavior. Suddenly he smelled it, too. There was an odor on the morning wind, an odor he had never smelled before and the source of which he could not imagine. It was meaningless as information to his conscious brain, but it conveyed a message of the most awful dread to some deeper knowledge that had never before been stirred to the surface of 9’s being. There was terror, the kind of terror that knows its full degree without knowing its kind, or, indeed what kind of a horror could even be imagined that would provoke such terror. 9’s life had always been absent of terror. The men had protected, fed and provided everything in his perfect life.

9’s fat, sluggish body would not respond to his sudden urgency to flee. He heaved against the cattle beside him and tried to bolt away from the feed trough. They shifted their weight sluggishly with slowly evolving awareness of the terrible thing that had come on the morning wind. 9 could not get away; he could not distance himself at all from the nameless dread he was breathing. The fat, mindless cattle, the pen and the feed trough held him prisoner to whatever it was. He could only raise his head and bellow, a long, mournful bellow into which he poured the Terror and sent it back to the wind to carry it away. 9 purged himself of the awful dread through an awful, dreadful bellow, again and again, unable to confront or even understand the nameless, invisible object of his terror he could only expel the Terror in meaningless noise that came up from the very depths inhabited by the Terror itself.

Soon the other cattle, dimly becoming aware of the awful thing on the wind, took up the call. The pen became a mass of striving, thrashing cattle filling the air with the awful din of the incomprehensible Terror.

And then it stopped. The wind turned again and brought the familiar smell of grain and manure, the body smells of sweat and urine and ammonia from the sprawling paradise of abundant feed and effortless living. And with the shift in the wind the mood of the cattle changed almost as quickly. They settled down, their shifting hooves were stilled and as 9 watched in astonishment and perplexity they went quickly back to their interminable feeding. He stood in the middle of a spectacle seen only by himself, heart still pounding, remembering the invisible Terror of only a moment before, watching the other bovines return to their mindless, unquestioning indulgence. The wind was no longer blowing from the direction of the building. Everything was back to normal.

9 had known the passage of time only by the changing seasons. There was a cold time, a wet, a warm, and then the windy Autumn. The season hadn’t changed since he had been in the feed lot; it was often warm and hot and sometimes cloudy and cool. Then it would be warm again. 9 could only account that he had not been there for very long. The building, though he never moved very far, or very fast in his progress toward it, was definitely becoming larger and closer. It stood now as the only distinguishing feature on the horizon of fence rails and the nodding heads of the feeding cattle. The building came more and more to dominate 9’s thoughts. He had quit wondering about the other cattle. Unlike him they lived only in the moment of the present stimulus and events around them. They seemed to have no awareness of past or anticipation of future. They even seemed to have forgotten the Terror almost as soon as it had vanished from the wind.

The wind had changed; only the wind had changed. To 9 that didn’t mean the Terror no longer existed. It only meant that he was no longer receiving news of it. It may have gone away in which case it only belonged to the past. It could still be waiting, somewhere, perhaps in the building or the unknown places behind the building, in which case it was both in the past and the future and only absent from the present. The past held no fear; the present held only pleasure. It was the future, the vaguely dreadful unknown, about which he was always wondering and questioning, the future in which the Terror may again appear without warning. That was the problem. Now 9 had finally defined the problem and he knew how to think about it. He must think about the future. This was a problem he would solve in time, he was sure. With the satisfaction of his new insight 9 lowered his head once again to the trough and began feeding, with pleasure, on the excellent grains.

The days after that acquired such a sameness that they blurred together in 9’s recollections. The coming of evening was a welcome change from the dullness of the day, but every morning in turn was a blessing after the sameness of the nights. The heat, the flies, the dull, inane lowing of the other cattle were inseparable from grey motionlessness of time itself. Even the slow, constant movement from pen to pen diffused in 9’s mind with the unchanging dullness of his life and lost its significance.

The fetid squalor of the pens, deep in waste, contrasting with the pleasurable feasting even lost the absurdity of its contrast. How long could a stocker steer hold the idea of absurdity in his mind? How can the sense of absurdity survive numbing sameness? How long could resentment or even outrage withstand the attack of constancy or imperceptibly slow, incremental change with senses inebriated by tireless attention to gluttony? In the drab, uneventful days 9 even forgot the Terror. He tried once to recapture the thoughts he had had about it. Then for a brief instant he had an idea, or something like an idea, but only a flash of it, whatever it was, but he could not hold on to it. It flowed into his brain and fled again in an instant but brought with it a flash of realization so dreadful, so absolutely unthinkable, that he rejected it with all his will. 9 the thinker had found a thought for a split second that he could not bring himself to confront.

He looked at 141 next to him and found the latter to be staring at him forcefully, inquisitively. 9 could only look away. He lowered his head back to the feed trough with profound unease and tried to lose the feeling by feeding himself again mimicking, but also seeking, the torpid insouciance of the other cattle.

While the cattle absorbed themselves in feeding the sun crawled across the sky once again and the shadow of the great, square building began to inch slowly into the feed pen.

© 2026 Thomas A. Nelson Sr