 Something has been killing my father's cattle in the night, and he is furious. It's important to understand just how much these cattle mean to my father, they're more than just beef. My dad's a highly respected, award-winning cattle rancher. Every one of his 2,000 pound Brahmin steers represents hundreds of hours of careful labor, years of investment, and tens of thousands of dollars in returns, and something is slaughtering them. It drives him crazy that he can't figure out what is doing it, let alone where it's coming from or how to make it stop. The killing started a year ago, when three different steers turned up completely mutilated on three consecutive mornings. Obviously, his first instinct was to assume it was the work of some wild animal, wolves maybe, or a bear. There'd been rumors of jaguar sightings just south of us too, down by the Mexico border. So on that third day, he went out and set some traps and poisoned some bait, and patrolled the ranch in his truck. His 12 gauge loaded with deer slugs. He didn't get the chance to use it, which I'm sure left him feeling put out, but that night the maulings stopped. For about a month, then six more of his steers died in one night. Well, no, died doesn't quite describe what happened to those steers. By the time my father stepped into his pasture that morning, those six steers had been rendered almost completely unrecognizable. The remains of the cattle, not corpses, so much as loose piles of pulped flesh and torn hide, had been left scattered over several acres of land. This was not the work of a pack of hungry dogs, or a rogue bear, or even some rare jungle cat. My father must have realized this because as the killings continued, almost always a few weeks apart, he began to treat the brutalization of his precious cattle less like a problem to be solved and more like a personal attack. I've seen him handle setbacks before farming is full of them. Sure he'd get pissy about drought and disease hurting his stock. He'd fume over hikes and land taxes and the cost of antibiotics. But he treated those sanely directly as obstacles and occupational hazards. This was different. As time went on, my father began to see the bizarre mutilation of his cattle as some sort of personal affront. Everything being done specifically to insult him. And with every fresh rash of killings, he'd get more obsessed, more paranoid, and more importantly, more furious. Anger is a special emotion in that more than any other feeling, it tends to spread outward from whoever's feeling it. Sadness, fear, even joy are largely internal emotions, more easily processed and more potently felt alone. Anger though, anger spills out and corrupts its surroundings pushes people to hurt and abuse and destroy. Anger is like floodwater. It has to go somewhere and it often travels downhill. My father's always been an angry man. And for as long as I can remember, I've been his favorite outlet. I make an obvious target. The bookish runt. Honestly, the fact that I make such a convenient punching bag might be the only thing keeping him from hating me outright. He's hit me plenty of times. Sure, he's never gone too far with the physical stuff, never really injured me past a bruise or a welt, can't help out around the ranch if my eyes swollen shut or my legs busted up. No, the beatings they're trivial compared to his real punishments, the lengths he likes to go to when he gets angrier than he can handle and I'm within venting distance. He's a big fan of withholding privileges or whatever basic human right he suddenly decides to consider a privilege. No food for a day. No school for five. He once banned me from showering for two weeks, actually removed the shower handle from the wall and kept it in his bedroom safe just because I'd forgotten to lock a gate and one of the dogs got loose. He'd do these things not because he wanted to teach me a lesson, not because he wanted to make me into a better person and not even because he necessarily wanted to see me hurt. He just gets so angry and all that anger had to go somewhere. Besides, I don't think he thinks about me enough to hate me. I'm a minor detail in his life, an inconvenient roommate, a bad employee, a tax deduction. Once in eighth grade, I chopped all my hair off, shaved my scalp clean, just I don't know to get some attention to see what he'd say to find out what weird draconian anti-punishment he dole out if it somehow bothered him. He never once mentioned it. He and I got into this argument a little over a year ago. I'd injured my foot at school, tripped over a curb and sprained my ankle, and he was driving me back from the clinic. We got into an argument after he insisted that I must have done it on purpose, must have injured myself to get out of working. I yelled at him. He yelled at me. He got angry. He pulled over to the side of the single barely paved country road that led to our property and he kicked me out, told me to walk the rest of the way home. He peeled out before I could do anything about it, leaving me to navigate what must have been a five mile expanse of road on an injured leg. The rest of that night was something of a blur, a disaster that I only remember in feverish patches as little vignettes of painful memories limping along the shoulder, my ankle burning and protest as the sun drooped towards the horizon, squinning through the darkness as night fell, the light of the full moon not nearly enough to illuminate the unlit country road. The pounding of adrenaline at the sound of distant heavy panning and accelerating footfalls is something darted out of the scrub behind me. The weight and heat and pressure as a black mass barreled over me, the fresh starburst of agony is a row of teeth sawed into my good leg, the sudden rush of blood to my head and the comforting blanket of unconsciousness smothering me, waking up alone. Back at the same clinic I just left, apparently admitted by a good Samaritan who found me lying and bleeding on the side of the road. When my father came to collect me a day later after I'd been sutured shut and pumped full of antibiotics, did he express any concern? Did he ask the doctors about rabies shots about when I should change my bandages about whether they'd ID'd whatever animal attacked me? No, of course not. I was treated to a wordless drive home and an unspoken admittal that if I wasn't fit to work before, I sure as hell wasn't fit to work now. That's as close to a gift as I could have gotten from him, I guess. And of course, he didn't notice when my new leg wound miraculously healed over after just three days, nor did he notice the limp from my sprain suddenly clear up around the same time. He never seemed to pick up on the three inches I grew over the course of that month or the healthy new sheen my hair took or the slight amber tint my eyes developed. He didn't notice when a month after the attack, I fled from the house in a panic screaming in uncomprehension and pain as my limbs warped and my face changed and my skin split. Maybe he was asleep and the commotion didn't rouse him. Maybe he heard my shrieks and just didn't care. Regardless, he didn't comment on it. When I stumbled back in the next morning, my shirt torn and my fingernails caked with dark red dirt. No, he had bigger things to worry about. Something had killed one of his steers. It's taken him nearly a year, but I think he's finally putting two and two together. He's revoked my school privileges again on top of the standard phone and internet ban. He won't say what I've done wrong. I don't think he could even if he wanted to. But I think he knows something has been killing my father's cattle in the night. And he is furious. But more than that, he's terrified. I can smell it on him. He reeks of fear more and more each day. Because with each mauling, he has fewer cattle, fewer easy targets to put between himself and whatever force is tearing them apart, not out of hunger or need, but so clearly out of fury. He's scared because the only real lesson that my small, petulant, backwards waste of a father ever managed to teach me is that all anger has to go somewhere. And he's managed to raise one very angry child.