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 BIRTHRIGHT is the powerful story of a traditional American family driven ever westward by changing climates and economic conditions until they finally are faced with the loss of their farm and, more importantly, the loss of the way of life they had followed for countless generations. All this comes crashing down on Harry Isaacson, the heir to the farm, on the morning of the auction. As he makes his final rounds of the old place he recalls his own life, that of his parents and his grandparents, and he gropes for an answer that will allow him to continue farming and pass the knowledge on to his own children. He must not break the chain of life on the land. Harry's Native American wife, Judith, is gone with the children, moved to the city to survive. Harry remembers his grandfather's wisdom and the teachings of Long Joe, a Native elder and relative of Judith, and he tries to steady himself, to face his bleak prospects with courage and grace. The story is resolved in a breathtaking ending full of twists and surprises.
CHAPTER 1
The icy ground rang like iron beneath his frozen boots. Echoes sounded from the barn and machine shed, hard-edged, like winter shadows. The nearly new moon had long set. Only the cold glitter of stars refracted sparks through the dry snow.
Harry liked the cold. It sliced through the foggy membrane of the dream, forced back the dark eyes that mocked him, into the shadowed corners where he did not go. The bite of the wind brought tears and he blinked them away. In the dark corral, the steaming cattle stirred and jostled towards the feeder, certain there would be fragrant hay and some grain with a little molasses. Their warm, sweet smell rushed at him in waves, modulated the chill breeze.
He broke bales of alfalfa, rich with late-summer blue flowers. He used a two-pound Yuban can to sprinkle the soft hay with cracked corn from the steel barrel where they laced it with blackstrap. With his gloved hand he shattered the ice that skinned the round galvanized stock tank.
As the hungry cattle sorted themselves out along the pine- board feeder, Harry could see the results of his family's careful weaving of bloodlines. Patterns of skin markings ebbed and flowed through generations. As he watched them he scooped up a handful of the snow, let it melt on his tongue.
The hides were the visible witness of the subtle advantages sought by a good breeder. Tiny details of confirmation, feed usage, disease resistance and calving ability, were gently coaxed into dominant traits, as the animal adapted to its particular matrix of seasons and pastures and uses and markets.
None of that counted anymore. All that mattered was price. Corporate feedlots bought the calves cheap and fed them cheap, on by-products or industrial wastes. With the right mix of hormones and antibiotics, they could be kept alive the necessary few months while their sickened bodies bloated up to market weight. Well-marbled, the packers liked to call the flabby meat.
The Old Man, his grandfather, would not touch commercial beef. He had preferred to fatten and slaughter his own. A point of pride had been his freezer perpetually full of homegrown beef.
Now that the Old Man was gone, Dad didn't care how their food was grown. He would rather make the money to pay high grocery store prices for feedlot beef.
Harry was tempted to hold one of the yearling calves aside, hide it up at the old place and tell the banker they had counted wrong. If he split the meat with his parents, it would last them all a year. He would give his half to Judith. For the kids.
He gently pulled the ears of a couple of the new calves. They shook their heads in irritation. He whistled, and a ragged ball of fur he called Reject slid to a stop beside him. Harry had saved the brown and black and white Australian Shepherd from starvation and hand raised him. He was a good one.
The dog shivered with cold indignation that he had overslept, missed the start of the morning ritual. He cocked his head to the side and gave Harry that odd stare which came from his one brown eye and one blue eye, the badge of his mixed breed. Reject was always ready to chastise a runaway calf or bring the horses to be saddled. When it came to stock dogs, these half- breeds were the best.
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