Ice Cow 2000
In the middle of the night, I woke to the sound of something huge right outside my bedroom window, crashing and splintering the ice on the water garden. I struggled out of the covers, and peered out the window, attempting to adjust my sleep filled eyes to the stark moonlight, trying to focus. A humongous, white cow was just emerging from the icy water and clambering up the far bank. This was a full grown Charolais cow! She had her heavy self and four very sharp hooves, digging around in my hand dug, rubber lined, fish pond. This was not good. I do not keep any cows these days, only a few sheep, horses and chickens. I let them wander around loose on the lawn sometimes to graze, and they will take an occasional drink from the pond, but they don’t ever step down into it. Well, I have seen a chicken or two get wetter than they planned, but they don’t weigh much. They don’t swim well and there is a lot of squawking involved. It is not normal for someone’s cow to be loose in my yard. I sure hope the stupid lummox hasn’t punctured the pond liner. It was designed to handle the weight of a deer hoof but a deer is about nine hundred pounds lighter than a cow. It won’t be possible to repair it until spring and the fish, plants and frogs, down under the mud, will die if the water leaks out now.
This winter has been unusually cold and the water buckets out in the barn keep freezing up solid- every single day lately. We don’t usually get temperatures below zero before January, but it has been down to minus four degrees Fahrenheit already, and has not gone above freezing during the day for three weeks now. I had to buy a plug in stock tank heater, and run an extension cord from the feed room, to try and keep the water open for drinking. There must have been something wrong with the electrical grounding, though, and now I can’t use it. The youngest horse, Cambriana, kept snagging the heater out of the tank with her teeth and throwing it out of the way before she would drink. It was bizarre. I couldn’t figure out why she was doing that. Finally, I put my fingers in the barely warmed water and felt the slightest electrical charge through my hand. Since I was wearing rubber barn boots, and horses are grounded directly through their hoofs, she probably felt more of a zap than I did. So, I’m back to flipping the buckets upside down, kicking the ice out, and hauling two five gallon buckets of water at a time from the house.
This is a real pain when the snow is deep and drifts across the path I shoveled the day before. I do appreciate having a clean, snowy barnyard instead of a sloppy, muddy one though, so the cold is good for something. When it finally thaws out this spring, I am bound and determined to finally dig a trench out to the barn and bury a water line and electric line out to the barn. Somehow it never seems like such a priority in the warmer weather, when I can easily run a hose out there, and I have been putting it off too long.
Cows can do an amazing amount of damage in a short period of time to shrubs, perennials and lawns, even with the ground frozen. I do not want her hanging around and wrecking more than she has already. My shrubs and fruit trees might look pretty tasty to an herbivore with a boring diet of dried up hay. Since it is way too early to call anybody, I go out to the mudroom, pull on my winter coveralls and snow boots over my flannel pajamas, and head outside to shoo the beast out of the yard. It is really cold outside, the kind of cold that instantly freezes your nose hairs, and I waste no time. I step out the basement door with my arms waving and give her a shout,
“ GIT! Get out of here you stupid cow! Git! You are going to freeze your butt off getting all wet like that. Get on out of here! Git! Git on home! Get out of here! Shoo! Go On!”
Finally, she goes lumbering off through the front woods and I quickly get back inside to warm up by the woodstove. Before heading upstairs to bed I stoke up the stove with some more locust logs and wait for it to take off. At least the house will be nice and warm in the morning.
After I climb back in bed I lay there hoping the pond is not starting to leak. I think up different ways to save my fish and plants if the water level drops drastically over night, mentally locating plastic tubs I can use as temporary aquariums. I listen for the sound of the water pump running dry, even as I drift back to sleep. The pump, which sits down in the water, under the ice, keeps a three- tiered, gurgling, waterfall running twenty four seven. It makes for a soothing sound, good to sleep to, and also quite effective at screening out my neighbors’ barking dogs. The water flows fast enough to keep it from freezing up, and will run through the coldest winter, creating wonderful ice sculptures down each fall. The sound changes according to how much ice forms, but it almost always keeps a small area at the base of the falls open and the wildlife takes full advantage of it. It is a great place to set up the deer camera and watch raccoons, skunks, deer, foxes, oppossums and birds drink.
When I woke up and had breakfast I followed the cows tracks out through the front woods. There were boot prints right behind them and a pick-up truck parked out on the opposite lane, so I figured her owner knew about her escape and was on top of it. I did not think too much more about it until almost dark when I went out to do the evening chores, and there she was again, on the front lawn, just passing through. So I called all my neighbors with cattle and asked if they were missing one from their herd. No one would claim her. My nearest neighbor said,
“It couldn’t be mine. I’ve got American wire and it won’t get holes in it.”
Ha, Ha. So I called the guy further down the road whose fence actually has two huge holes in it, from when two different vehicles went through it the other day during the snow, and whose cows are known to be impossible to catch. He actually came over and took a look at her and announced,
“Nope, mine are all Hereford crosses. Don’t have any fancy Charolais ones. Pretty though, ain’t she? I could take her if you don’t find her people.”
The cow wandered off again, and I went to bed thinking that if she showed up again I would pen her up in my front paddock and start calling her my own personal freezer beef.
The next morning I heard the sound of men and tractors across the road and went to investigate and say howdy over the fence. The man with the “American wire” fence was loading a freshly killed Red Angus cow unto the back of a pickup. She had broken her leg on the slippery ground and had to be put down. When I asked him about the loose Charolais cow, he said,
“She couldn’t be mine. We tried to get her in with the others yesterday and she would not cooperate. One of my cows would have been easy to get in.”
This reasoning did not make a lot of sense. Cows are notoriously stubborn and the grass is probably greener on this side, if you can just manage to find it under the snow. Later, however, his wife told me that they did manage to get her in with a bucket of grain, so she must be theirs after all. I guess they have no idea what their own cows look like. You’d think they would all have ear tags or tattoos or something. I mean, they are worth a lot of money when you go to sell them.
Meanwhile, there is no longer a cow cruising through the yard, and things have settled down. So far the pond is still holding water, so it looks like I will not need to repair it after all. However, my freezer still has some room left in it for the next unclaimed beef that wanders in.
Wendy lee Maddox, at Edgewisewoods.com
