Mitch: 1, Cows: 1

Posted on February 15th, 2009 mitch  Print No comments

Growing up in the country gives a person all sorts of interesting experiences and one of mine was raising cattle.  My Dad, being a farmer, needed something to keep himself busy with during the winter months that also offered an alternate stream of income.  By the time I had reached my teens, we had a small herd of about sixty of cattle.  We didn't have any horses and since the pasture was only around 100 acres, it wasn't usually a huge deal to herd them up on foot.

Occasionally, things got a little out of hand, and cows being cows, they don't do what you want them to, so some days were longer than others.

On one occasion, after chasing the cows around the pasture for what seemed like the entire day, I came just about as close as I've ever come to personally exploring the concept of an afterlife.

I had been chasing a small bunch of cows, trying to get them back into the main herd so they could be moved toward the corral.  I was carrying a small chunk of wood which I waved excitedly to help encourage the cows to run in the direction I wanted them to go.  I'm not sure it helped much but it was better than just flailing my arms about.  Things were not going well that day and at some point, the cows I was chasing just sort of scattered and I was left with just a single cow.

We were standing on tops of ridges between two gullies, about 30 feet apart just staring at each other.  Both of us so tired of running that it was all we could do to breath.  I guess she had grown tired of the stupid two-legged-human-people running them all over creation and otherwise spoiling a perfectly good day that could have been better spent chewing grass.  Since I was nearest two-legged-human-people she could find, I became the logical target on which to vent her anger.  And let me tell you, she was angry.  Downright pissed off.  At me.

After staring at me for a while, she made up her mind.  Dropping her head and making that pissed-off-cow sound that pissed-off-cows make, she plunged into the gully and ran straight at me.  It was about that time that I realized that Don and Martha's little boy was about to die.  If not totally dead, then at the very least, mostly dead.

It's kind of hard to reason with something that eats grass for a living and is now hell-bent on running you over and to be quite honest, that whole dead thing didn't appeal to me very much. In fact, it rightly pissed me off. 

Down her side of the gully, here she came; all red-eyed and pissed off and about to get herself one of them two-legged-human-people. So there I stood; chunk of wood in my hand, watching the world in slow motion, and trying to decide what to do next.  Without really even thinking, I took a step back, dug my right foot into what would become a firm batter's stance, and in a move that would have brought a tear to Coach Williams' eye, made me a target of that splash of white that was her forehead.

The cow made her way through the gully and up onto my ridge.  When she was just a handful of feet away from me, I swung with all of my strength and screamed, "You son of a…" WHACK!  The chunk of wood hitting her squarely in the forehead and shattering into dust.  After that, she just became this black blur that buzzed past me and on into the next gully.  I guess she was a bit stunned by the blow since she sort of wobbled up to the top of the next ridge.

It would not surprise me in the least if my scream wasn't heard all the way into town. I was really expecting my Dad to say something about me cursing, but nothing ever became of it.

Alan, one of the guys who worked for my Dad, later told me, "Man, if you'd had a baseball bat we'd all be eating steak tonight." 

As indeed we would.

That was the last time I had problems with that cow.  Oh, and I wasn't dead ( fully or partially ).  To this day, almost twenty-five years later, I can still see the scene as clearly as if it had happened this afternoon.  The only thing I was really ever thankful for was the fact that she didn't have horns.  Otherwise, the story would have had an entirely different ending.

The End

Copyright (c) 2009 by Mitch Milam

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