THE PARLOR is a new series on The Milk House that embraces the lighter side of rural life. You can find a new piece by a different author the first Saturday of every month.
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My neighbor, Bob, hauled her home for me. I met up with him at the sale barn before I even saw the big, yellow cow and her Charolais-cross calf.
“Hi, Bob.” He was leaning on the rail of a pen, checking out some Black Angus bull calves in a holding block behind the sale ring. As buyers, we generally made it a point to wander the back pens to see what was going up for auction and check out anything we might want to bid on.
“Hi, Laura. Looking for anything special today?”
“Just the usual. I weaned my last two bottle calves a few days ago and they’re doing pretty good.” I kicked some manure off my boot. “If I find something, can you haul it for me?”
Bob lived just up the road and often hauled for me. “Sure. Just give me the nod.”
“Looking for a new bull?” I asked him.
“Always on the lookout.”
“Well, don’t spend all your boat winnings today.” Bob was known to love the gambling boats, and we often teased him about it.
He chuckled. “You bet I won’t.”
I moved on up the alleyway between pens, heading for the calf enclosures to look for a heifer calf to bottle feed. Bottle feeding ensures a tame cow, far easier for me and Maggie, my shepherd, to handle. Once you bottle-feed a calf a few times, you have a friend for life. I seldom brought anything onto the place that was not bottle-fed.
The calf pens were empty, so I wandered on out and took my seat in the bidding bleachers hoping for a late haul. Sometimes newborns are not unloaded until the last moment for multiple reasons…some good…some bad. The most humane reason is a seller may not want to subject the calf to the stress of the sale-barn any longer than necessary. I have known sellers like that. The more common reason being a calf that did not get started well and would not withstand close inspection from a potential buyer who knew anything about newborns. These were the saddest and I often bought them. They took more of an investment of time and money but were frequently calves out of registered herds that had been overlooked when a herd was moved or rejected by a mother for some reason. For me, they were almost always a good buy.
No late calves came in that day. I was getting up to leave when they opened the door to the sale ring and this big yellow cow with calf at side came barreling through. The ring attendants leapt behind the security barriers. Total silence swept the bleachers. The bidding began. No bids. The auctioneer tried harder. No bids. He entered an auction bid of $500 to motivate a bid.
I couldn’t believe it! The calf was worth that. Maye it was my lucky day!
The auctioneer lowered the bid to $450.
Still no bids.
The cow was part Santa Gertrudis and it showed in her sweep of horns and aggressive posture. The Santa Gertrudis cattle breed developed from a cross with an ancient Brahmin herd bred for its capacity to thrive on hot, dry pasture and the ability and single-minded determination to protect themselves and their calves. They were known to be high-strung.
She seemed unusually alert, but I squelched my misgivings about the breed.
I raised my buyer number card. “Four hundred,” I said in my firmest sale-barn voice.
A murmur swept the bleachers.
“Sold, to the little lady, Number 36.”
Silence followed me as I left the bleachers to make my pay and arrange with Bob for hauling. I was in a hurry to get home and prepare the front lot for the new residents. I wondered how my herd of docile Black Angus would accept this “foreigner.” I had never bought a mature cow.
All that afternoon I waited for the grumbling sound of Bob’s cattle trailer on the gravel drive. When it came, I snatched my work gloves and met him at the gate to the “new buy” pen. I always kept stock isolated for a few days to get acclimated and to observe anything that looked like a sickness. Bob knew the drill.
“She’s a little wild, Laura.”
I had the gate to the pen open and he slipped the slide bar to open the side door of his trailer. The cow came out with a roar, the calf at her side. They lunged into the pen and I quickly shut and latched the gate.
“She ran two of the loaders up the wall at the sale barn when we were loading, Laura, but she’ll settle down in a day or two.”
Bob was an optimist.
I left the cow and calf alone that evening, to get used to their surroundings and make for a calmer response to their changing world. The next day was Sunday and I had all day off from my job in the city.
Plenty of time to get acquainted and become friends with my new cow and calf.
Sunday morning I went to the new-buy pen with a nice bundle of brome/alfalfa hay under my arm. Standing alert in the center of the half-acre lot, the cow waited until I had the gate latched behind me and I was about twenty feet from her and the calf. I was ready to make nice. I offered the hay. She wasn’t buying it.
She came at me on a dead run, head swinging, horns circling the air.
I hadn’t sailed over a gate that high since I was a kid, but you can do anything when you are motivated. I was highly motivated. The horns rattled at the metal panels six inches from the last body part I managed to get over.
I learned very quickly the inclination to protect was the total sum of this cow’s nature. Over the next few months it was “live and let live” on the best of days. At the sight of any living creature the cow would go into an aggressive posture that turned immediately into a lunge with a loud, guttural bawl and swinging horns.
She was a killer cow.
Even the dogs withdrew in fearful submission.
Maggie, my wonder dog and previous protector and partner in all things cattle, managed to stay in the rear when we had to hay and feed the yellow cow and her calf. Behind me, doing her best to be invisible, she would roll her eyes at me and huddle against my leg.
After almost two weeks, with a little trickery and manipulation of gates, both cow and calf were moved into the pasture with the herd. All went well…except that the pasture was no longer mine. It was the yellow cow’s.
For the next six months this was life on the farm. No more morning jaunts to the pond. No more checking the fence line. Every evening when I got home from work Maggie met me, not with her happy verve, but slinking: a beaten creature whose status was destroyed by one mean old cow. She blamed me, and rightly so.
Melvin, the hayman, came in June, as he had done for years, to cut and bale the thirty acres of brome and clover that carried us through the winter most years. He took half and I got half. I stopped him at the gate and told him about the yellow cow.
“Do not, under any circumstances, get off the tractor, Melvin.”
“Got a mean one, did ya’”? He managed to grin and stuff a pinch of tobacco under his lower lip at the same time. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“I mean it, Melvin. This is more than a mean one. Don’t get on the ground out there.”
He gave me his most manly farmer’s wave of the hand and took his rumbling hay rig through the gate. I closed it behind him.
Even ordinary cows are curious creatures, and it didn’t take the herd long to come ambling over the east ridge to check out the loud noise and the hay rig. The yellow cow led. She wasn’t ambling. Halfway across the pasture, head high, legs pumping in an aggressive trot, she caught up with Melvin and his machine.
Melvin was not a man to take direction from a woman. I watched as the hay rig came to a stop. I shaded my eyes against the sun and peered at the small speck that was Melvin and the dark mass that was the herd. The yellow cow was now the only thing moving. And Melvin. He was getting down, slowly and confidently.
“Oh no, Melvin. Don’t do it. For God’s sake, don’t do it.” The rattle of horns against the metal hay baler floated across the pasture. The slow and confident Melvin changed in a flash. He flew to the tractor seat. I swear he flew.
We never spoke of it. I learned long ago that men have tender egos, particularly men who work in agriculture, so I never mentioned it.
I was just glad that Melvin could fly.
Learn more about Laura on our Contributors’ Page.
Looking for more rural stories? Check out Best Rural Novels: A List of 10 to Get Started.
(Photo: Stef Lewandowski/ flickr.com/ CC BY-ND 2.0)
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