Cow Sitting

In our 6 months here, we’d never seen Our Friend the Farmer take a day off, so we were happy to hear that he was going off to Seattle for the day to watch his Seattle Sea Hawks.   The Farmer’s herd of cattle had recently been moved to the hay-field behind our barns.  The hay-field is just that, a hay field.  The cattle are moved there to eat the bits of hay still growing, thereby keeping the mice from taking up permanent residence.  However, the fencing is not actually set up for cattle.  Prior to his leaving, Our Friend the Farmer called My Loving Spouse asking him to keep an eye on the cattle and appointing him ‘Bull Goose’.  Honestly, neither of us know what being the ‘Bull Goose’ means, but we (and especially I) took the job of ‘cow sitting’ very seriously.

“How many cows does he have?”  I asked My Loving Spouse.

“I don’t know”.

“Well, how do we know if we’ve lost any, if we don’t know how many we are watching?…  Where does the field go?”  I asked.

“I don’t really know.”

Clearly, the ‘Bull Goose’ was under informed.

We might not have actually known what our job was, but we still intended to do it well.  On our way back from church we drove by the hay field as best we could and looked at the cows.  On the way to an errand we went the back way, so we could drive by the hay field and look at the cows.  On the way back from the errand we looked at the cows and some of them seemed…. well, out of place, or they might have been out of place, since we weren’t really sure still what place they were suppose to be in or not be in.

These cows were not getting loose on our watch!  My Loving Spouse and I turned around and proceed to drive down the canal road.  The canal road is an elevated dirt strip with canal on one side and fields on the other.  It is very narrow and a bit curvy.  We parked the truck at the gate and proceeded to investigate the cow action on foot.

We found about a dozen ‘loose’ cows just beyond the gate, being led astray by one very big old cow.  The trouble maker-lead-astray-er cow was a lot bigger up close.  Luckily this big old girl did not try our cow wrangling skills, but turned around as we walked closer and closer.  The cows moved back toward the field in a flurry as My Loving Spouse whistled for our imaginary cattle dog and I barked at them a few times for good measure.  We got the last of the trouble maker cows back into the field using one of the cow wrangling skills learned from Our Friend the Farmer, we threw rocks at them.  As our arms and our aim is not what it use to be, it took longer than expected, as did backing the truck down the narrow canal road.

All in all, it was a good day, the Sea Hawks won and the cows are still in their ‘place’ (I think), but the next time I cow sit, I really want to know, exactly what I’m suppose to be doing….and what’s the ‘Bull Goose’.