Their bellies had been slit open with more precision than a first-class butcher.
The teller heard this story from her husband's great-grandfather shortly before he died. He was a sound, logical man who had never come to terms with what plagued his ranch for most of a decade. He only told her once he learned she was interested in the unexplained.
He had inherited a ranch of more than a thousand acres in Montana from his father in the early 1950s. One fall evening around 1956, his head count came up three short. That wasn't unusual on a spread that size, since strays tended to wander back. The next morning the teenager who helped him before school came into the barn looking green and could barely speak. The rancher rode out with him to a big shade tree far out on the property.
Under it lay the three missing animals, two cows and a calf. A mountain lion had taken a couple of cattle that season, but no lion kills three at once, and three cows don't stand in one spot while it happens. There was no blood anywhere, not a drop, and no bite marks or bullet holes. Their bellies had been opened, he said, with more precision than a first-class butcher. He raised beef and knew exactly where every organ should be. One cow's entire reproductive tract was gone, and the edges of the wound looked slightly charred. Other organs had been neatly put back in the wrong places. The second cow was missing a stomach, her uterus and her tongue, and the vet later found that her brain had been removed, though her head had no marks. The calf was missing its eyes, with charred sockets, along with its testicles and a kidney. His horse refused to go near the place.
The police took hours to arrive and suggested teenagers, then a mother lion teaching her cubs. He pointed out the precision, the missing blood, the charring and the complete lack of any tracks except the cattle's own. A vet confirmed there was no blood left in the bodies and couldn't reproduce the charred look on a cow that had died naturally. A rancher friend said something similar had happened to his family in Wyoming in the early 1900s.
Five or six months later it happened again, this time to more than a dozen head, laid out in fresh snow with some of their hind legs cut cleanly off and missing. After that it went on for years, sometimes a few times a week and sometimes not for months, from two or three animals at a time to twenty-three at once. Hired men patrolled at night and never reported seeing anything. In the early 1960s it began happening close to the house. He lost hunting dogs, and in 1964 he found a horse dead and mutilated the same way inside its stall. In all he lost close to two hundred cattle, a few dogs and a couple of horses.
When he started talking to other ranchers, he found he was far from alone. They had simply stopped reporting it, because there was no one to blame. One neighbour butchered a mutilated cow for meat, and his whole family came down with rashes, swollen hands and feet and crushing headaches for two weeks that doctors couldn't explain.
He sold the ranch in the late 1960s and tried to forget. Then, years later, he was watching the TV series In Search Of when an episode came on about cattle mutilations: ranchers describing exactly what he'd seen, and one saying he saw strange lights in the sky the nights his cattle died. He thought it was nonsense at first. After reading everything he could find, he came to believe it was the only explanation left.