Farm Fresh Blog

For an adrenaline jolt, coffee and Red Bull can't hold a candle to the sound of a bawling calf and a herd of cattle crashing through the brush in the dark. I'd just stepped out the door to pen the chickens for the night when the cry of a calf riveted me to the forest. It was not a mournful, "Where's my momma" cry but a panicked "It's got me!" bawl which was accompanied by brush and small trees snapping as adult cows bellowed and barreled toward the calf.

Abandoning the chickens, I hitched up my sagging jeans and raced to the gate toward the cries in the woods. This was the point where once again, I regret my fashion decisions. Just because pants are on sale at a ridiculously low price doesn't mean you should buy them if they are too big. Maybe I thought they'd shrink, or, since normally faced with stacks and stacks of jeans meant to fit only the bodies of prepubescent girls, perhaps I was merely drunk on the illusion that I may find jeans that fit a middle aged woman. As it was, I came home with pants that were a size, or two, too big.

Since a good part of my police career was spent chasing young men in saggy pants, I must say that after running through the dark toward a crying cow with jeans sliding down my ass, I have a greater respect for drug dealers that can scale the fences between apartment complexes and still keep their pants above their ankles.

I made it through the gate and paused to hitch up my britches again. With a rescue battalion of tanks and bulldozers that were mother cows stampeding in my direction, it didn't take long to re-think the wisdom of becoming collateral damage under the onslaught of panicked cattle. I had no idea what had the calf, but it was quickly barreling in my direction and bringing a herd of cows with it.

They reached the clearing behind the barnyard just as I was slipping back through the gate.  The cattle circled and stomped and I could barely make out a yellow calf thrashing on the ground in the center of milling cows by the fence.  In a desperate hope that whatever had the calf was more frightened of humans than enraged mother cows, I shouted into the night.

"HEY! HEY! HEY!"

I mean, really, what does one yell at a creature that isn't afraid of a herd of enraged cows?

Clearly my saggy pants and I needed reinforcements, so adopting the ghetto gait of the Troop Of Saggy Pants Soldiers, I managed to juggle a flashlight, a gun, and my beltloop to do a rolling lope back to the house.

Other Half was just sliding his masterpiece of shrimp kabobs into an opened oven when I burst through the door. He dashed outside as I grabbed a better flashlight. I joined him to find confused cattle still milling around the clearing, so we flashlighted the area in a search for mangled predators.

A rat ran. A bunny bounded off. One of the barn cats meowed back at me. The yellow calf blinked into the beam of my flashlight.

Nothing.

There was nothing to justify a full-scale City-Wide-Assist-The-Officer Cow. Since everyone was calm, I went through the fence and poked around the dark with the cattle. That's when I saw the red thing.

A thing.

A red thing.

What the hell was that? I flashlighted the thing and Other Half erupted into cursing normally reserved for goat adventures.

The red thing was the base of a mineral feeder.

It would appear that Yellow Calf must have gotten the base hung around her head, resulting in a wild dash through the forest in a vain attempt to outrun this thing that had her. Since the mineral feeder was a long way from the house, this was quite a jaunt. I'm not sure if she got it off when she hit the fence at the house, or if one of the other cows somehow managed to stomp it off of her. Regardless, the calf was okay and except for some dents, the mineral feeder was fine.

Since she is a heifer we plan to keep, I may name the calf "Steering Wheel" because she ran through the woods with a red steering wheel on her head.  Nevertheless, I cannot poke fun at her since she did a better job running that distance with a giant wheel on her head than I did loping across the barnyard in pants falling down my butt. Hopefully the calf will learn not to stick her head in strange things and I'll learn to wear a belt.