The trouble with cows

You can talk to them and talk to them until you’re moo in the face, yet cows insist on playing the same old pranks.

One night last week, my husband and I were driving home on Nelson Road. It had been raining and was growing increasingly foggy.

“Was that a cow?” my husband asked.

“Yes,” I replied. “A whole field full of them. They’re called farms.”

“It looked like it was on the wrong side of the fence,” he said, exasperated. Some people just don’t appreciate my sense of humor.

In a nano-second I had turned around and headed back to where he’d seen her. Sure enough, there she was, lying beside the road. I stopped the car in the middle of the road and turned my hazards on. I was afraid she’d been hurt.

In 1984, my husband and I happened upon an accident in southern Onondaga County. A speeding skier, anxious to reach the slopes, had hit and critically injured a cow. We were at the scene when State Troopers put the suffering animal down. I’ll never forget it.

This is the fourth stray cow we’ve encountered since that accident. We managed to get the other three home safely, and I was hell-bent on getting this one back where she belonged, too, if it took me ‘til the cows came home. Or got up the next morning, as the case might have been.

In all honesty, part of me marvels at this phenomenon. How do they do it?

“Well, let me see, I’ll just hide behind this fence post, and Farmer Jones won’t notice when I slip out past him as he opens the gate.” I mean, these delinquent bovine must be sneakier than housecats, for Pete’s sake.

“Do you think she’s been hit?” I asked, trying to figure out how someone could hit a cow and be able to leave the scene.

“I think she’s lying down because she’ll keep warmer that way,” he said.

I was terrified she might wander into the road, and I recalled an incident involving some friends about a decade ago. On a foggy morning, one of their cows wandered away. She wound up some miles away in the middle of a hilly road miles from home. A school bus crested the hill and didn’t have time to stop for her. Nobody on the bus was hurt, but the animal was killed outright.

Predicting what was going to happen, the driver jumped out of the bus and tried to signal cars coming from behind her to slow down. In the end, there was a multiple-car pile-up as the cars flying over the hill slammed into first the bus, then one another, then the bus driver (who sustained minor injuries when she was grazed by a swerving vehicle).

Some of the drivers who hit the bus and/or each other, about a dozen in all, put their little heads together and sued our farming friends. Their combined homeowners and business insurances didn’t come close to covering the property damages sustained in the accident, and they wound up losing more than two-thirds of the farming property that had been in their family for generations.

Deja vu.

“Which house do you suppose belongs to this barn and field?” I asked my husband, there being houses right next door to the property, as well as directly across the street. None of them had any lights on. We opted for the house across the street. I headed for the barn after seeing a dim light burning far back in its cavernous maw and walked in as far as my vision allowed. I could hear a radio playing softly in the distance. B104.7, in fact. Wouldn’t it figure cows listen to country music?

My husband started honking the car horn after nobody responded to his beating on the door.
“Hello?!” I yelled again, much louder this time.

A cacophony of mooing and stomping hooves answered this last inquiry. Having completed several advanced college mathematics courses, I quickly did the math: one loose cow + open barn door = possible other loose cows.

Suspecting an imminent stampede, I ran like hell back across the street. Better to get hit by a speeding car in the fog, I figured.

“What’s wrong?” my husband asked.

“Country music. I had to get away.”

Lights finally came on in the main house, and a not-very-happy-looking young man came to the door. Moments (and a half-dozen passing speeding vehicles) later, the cow’s owner and an assistant had Bessie flanked and heading to her appropriate location, and without anybody buying (or selling) his or her farm.

“And by the way,” the farmer said as he walked off. “That was no cow. It was my bull.”

Reprinted courtesy Eagle Newspapers, Syracuse, New York.