Albin did not say anything for a moment. Then he said, "Well. She's forgiven worse," and Arne did not know whether he meant the dog or somebody else.
It took them most of an hour to get to the house. The heifer and the calf they put in the old calf shed off the south pen, out of the wind, with the other ten bunched against its wall. Arne carried the calf. Albin came behind on his hands and knees and then on one foot with his arm over Arne's shoulder and then, for the last forty yards, on the rope from the generator shed, and Fly came behind them both on three legs, herding, the whole way.
The rifle was under the barn. Arne did not think of it until the next morning, and when he did, he found he did not much care.
In the kitchen the Onan kept the lights on and the furnace going. Arne got Albin into the chair by the stove and got his boot off, and the shin was black and swollen and skinned to the bone along the front, but the leg was straight and Albin could move his toes, and Arne wrapped it in a towel with snow in it and put it up on the woodbox. He looked at Fly's leg under the kitchen light. A pad split open, a sprain maybe. He washed it with warm water and wrapped it in strips of a dish towel and she let him, licking his wrist the whole time.
Then he went to the CB and picked up the microphone, and for a moment he only held it.
"Kasper place, this is the Tolstad place," he said. "Dorit, this is Arne. Over."
The hiss. Then her voice, so fast it nearly ran over his. "Arne. Arne, go ahead. Over."
"He's here. He's with me in the kitchen. He's hurt his leg but it's not broke and he's warm and he's all right." He stopped. He made himself say the rest of it, out loud, on channel nine, with the whole Mullen road listening. "My barn came down tonight, Dorit. He was in it pulling a calf for me, and he got my heifers out, and he got me out. I'd have been under it. Tell Dieter his heifer's fine. She's got a bull calf. Over."
For a long time there was nothing on channel nine at all. Then Werner Haumann's voice came on, slow and rough, and said, "Well, God bless," and somebody else said, "Amen," and Dorit Kasper was crying and saying thank you, thank you, Arne, over, and he said, "Tolstad clear," and set the microphone down and sat at the table with his face in his hands.