It was wet. It was warm with blood and fluid and it smelled of everything a calving smells of, and his knees went into it, and his hand found the heifer's hip, hot and shuddering, and slid down it, and found two thin legs sticking out of her, wet and slick and upside down, the hocks pointing at the roof. Backward. Hind feet first. And the chains on them, and on the chains a big hand in a wet glove, and he followed the hand to an arm and the arm to a shoulder and found Albin Kasper sitting in the straw with his back against the partition, holding on.
"Where's the joist?"
"Across my left shin. Other end's on the manger. It's not broke. The leg, I mean. I don't think." Albin let out a long breath. "We do the calf first. She's got about two more good pushes in her. Then she quits on us."
"It's big."
"It's a Simmental cross, Arne." Albin's voice in the dark was flat. "My Simmental bull went through the fence into the heifers in June. I knew which ones he got to. I knew she was one of them. I should have said, when you bought her. I didn't say. I wanted the five-fifty." A pause. "That's what I came over here to tell you. That and the beam. Something I should have done in the fall."
Arne's hands were on the chains beside his. He could feel the calf's legs. He could feel, through the chains, the slow gathering of the heifer's body, the muscles beginning to tighten.
"Here she comes," said Albin. "Wait for her. Wait. Now."
They pulled. Not hard; steady, down and back toward her hocks, the way you are supposed to, both men leaning together in the straw in the dark. The heifer bellowed. The calf came, a few inches, the hips, and stuck.
"Hip lock," Arne said.