Nothing gets your blood rushing more, especially in the middle of the night, than to be woken up with “The cows are out!” It might come from various places but the reaction is always the same: get up, throw some clothes on, grab some shoes that you can run in, and hit the dirt. Everybody, and I mean everybody, has a job to do when the cows are out and it needs to be done right now this minute.
We had that happen tonight. Jimmy and I had been asleep for awhile. John was just settling in going to bed. He heard the dogs going crazy, he looked out the window and saw red tail-lights up at the stop sign, and then he saw a cow’s tail swatting in the headlights. He grabbed some clothes, grabbed some shoes, came in and told us that there were cows out, brought the dogs into the house, and hit the door. Nobody told me to get up. I could have turned over and went back to sleep. But I knew better. Cows are out and it is dark outside and who knows what needs to be done. I needed to make sure that the dogs wouldn’t get out of the house. I put the pups in the bathroom and made Blu stay in the kitchen. He wanted to help. His kind of help we didn’t need. When I hit the door after grabbing clothes and tennis shoes, I was instructed to get in the car, pull in the middle of the road with my brights and flashers on, and wait. I appreciated that job tonight. I could see Jimmy standing in the middle of the road with no flashlight, no reflective gear on. I thought, man, if a car comes by he’d be a goner. But he was orchestrating. John had gotten on the other side of the cows, which is really a tricky spot to be in. Usually if you walk towards them they start walking the other way. You have got to walk around them, acting like you don’t see them, and when you get to the other side then you can start to herd them back in. John had that job. He had on one of those forehead flashlights and aside from my brights that was the only light on this dark night. Jimmy watched John herd the cows into Linda Mae’s yard, into the side yard, and then he started walking up the road to the driveway. I didn’t know where they were going to put the cows back in so I sat in the road for a minute until I was sure that the cows were up the driveway. I then turned around and headed up the driveway. I thought about leaving the car running with the brights on but I saw Jimmy back by the cow lot so I felt secure in that they had gotten the cows close enough if not all the way into being secure. There were three of them. But by that time the rest of the cows had all come up to see what all of the commotion was about. The horses were up there as well. If they ever decided to rebel against us they could so take us out. But as it was, we had a flimsy cattle panel between them and us and a lot of baling wire.
While we were standing there waiting for John to ride around the tobacco patch to make sure there weren’t anymore out I got to thinking about all of the times that the cows have been out since I have lived here and how it’ll get your blood pumping. Having been raised in the city, there is absolutely nothing that prepares you for that event. Everyone moves, fast.
I remember a time when I was newly married when the cows got out and got into the garden. This was back when Jimmy put out a huge garden and his mom and sister still lived in the house. There were a couple of cows out but there was one who got into the garden and wasn’t going to get out. It was like she was grocery shopping. She started in the beans and was working her way to the corn. Somehow, it was all my fault that she was trampling the squash and cucumbers. I didn’t know what to do. I think that was the time that I learned to wave my arms up and down like I was flying and go “shooooo” a lot. Yeah, it was that funny to look at. I guess that’s why it worked. Either that or the cows were scared to death of these people flapping their arms.
Another time I remember when we had a bunch of heifers out. We always kept the heifers across the road. When they would calve in we would bring them across the road to milk them. They didn’t know what to do. First, they didn’t want to go anywhere near the gate. Then, once we got them out of the gate, they didn’t know where to go. It was like you needed to grab them by the collar and lead them, except we didn’t put a collar on them. So they would get in the road and they realized that they were free and wanted to explore. One of the things Jimmy would do that I always thought was cruel, but effective, was pick up their calf and carry it across the road. The heifers would go wild. They didn’t want him anywhere near their calf. They certainly didn’t want him holding their calf. But they would follow him anywhere he went since he had their baby. This one time there were about 5 or 6 heifers crossing the road at the same time. The cows had already come across, and were up waiting to go into the cow lot. These heifers decided to take a walk up Hwy 339. I swear they were at a neighbor’s house before we finally got in front of them and turned them around. I think that was the time I was out there by myself. Every time I would take off running they would take off running and they thought it was a race. I was ready to kill them. We finally got them all back where they belonged but it took forever to get them into the lot. They just weren’t interested.
There was the time that we were in the middle of renovating the house and the cows decided to take a detour into the house to see what was going on. I really do wish I had a camera because it was the funniest thing I had ever seen. Jimmy was ready to kill me, and the cows, for getting into the house, but I thought it was hilarious.
Oh, and there was the time when we were breeding horses that they got out. Yeah, I’ll take a cow getting out anytime compared to a horse. Those things can run. And they don’t act like cows so you have to go about herding them back in a whole lot different than cows. You can fool a cow by getting a 5 gallon bucket with about a cup of feed in there and shaking that bucket. A cow is sure there is so much feed in that bucket that he’ll follow you anywhere. A horse has no interest in the bucket.
As I get older, I have gotten better with what my job is in getting the cows back in. It’s either that, or Jimmy has decided I’m not much help and he just doesn’t ask me to do anything much anymore. I do remember having to call the nephews to come up and help us get the cows in. They could do it in about a minute. Getting them out of bed took longer than that though.
One thing that I’ve always appreciated is people stopping and telling us that our cows are out. That has saved us a lot of aggravation and heartache. I do remember the time though that somebody stopped and told us that we had cows out, and they were, all up and down our road. The problem was, they weren’t our cows, and we didn’t know who they belonged to. But we went and got a bucket of feed and brought them into the side field. About noon we noticed somebody driving real slow up and down the highway. When they pulled into our driveway we found out that our neighbor down the road got some cows. They brought a trailer later that day and took them home. They had known they were out, they just couldn’t find them anywhere. They got into their truck and decided to ride up and down to see if they were in somebody’s field. We told them they owed us a steak dinner.
Oh, by the way, although he wouldn’t admit it, Jimmy left the gate open.