It was a
perfect evening for picking more sand plums and as I liberally applied the
mosquito repellant, husband Bob cautioned me to watch out for snakes in the
tall grass. I think we’ve only seen one
in the plum thickets in all the years we’ve picked, but he especially hates
snakes. He will deliberately swerve to
hit one on the dirt roads, then back up and run over him again just to make
sure!
I slipped
my cell phone in my pocket and loaded a couple buckets in my good blue
pick-up. First mistake.
I waved
bye to Bob who was leaving on a tractor pulling a hay trailer to the other side
of the river for an early start in the morning.
A few
minutes later thunderheads made a lovely backdrop for the grazing cows and the
green hills below as I crossed the cattleguard in the pasture and I snapped a
pic with my phone. Wonderful inventions
aren’t they?
At my
favorite plum thicket I soon had ½ a bucket full, there were no bugs biting,
and I was priding myself on my evening’s activity choice when I heard something
ahead. I was not alone in there! Deer? Snakes? No, up ahead of me were 2 cows and one of them
was trying to calve in the middle of those thorny bushes.
This was strange because a cow usually goes off alone to calve, but then I noticed their ear tags; consecutive numbers. We get most of our cows from the same big ranch in Colorado and we’ve observed part of this phenomenon before.
Two cows
consecutively numbered will have been randomly loaded and come off the semi at
our place 12 hours later side by side.
They pretty much stay close for years.
They graze together, drink together, get bred and calve at almost the
same time, and come through our working chute next to each other nearly every
year. But this was a new wrinkle;
camaraderie in calving too?
I thought
about calling Bob to come back and look at Mama 318 before he got too far away,
but I could see a foot coming and in the right position, so I figured all was
well. Second error.
I
decided to move out of her view and wait 20 minutes and come back to
check. Third bad decision.
When I
returned, the other cow had gone over the hill to graze but 318 was down and in
trouble. Since I hadn’t driven a work
pick-up, I had no gloves, or rope to try and snag a foot and pull. I called Bob
but by now he was too far away. He
called our German helpers but they were both at night church 30 miles away and
the neighbors nearest me were also gone. He just said “do what you can and call
me.”
When I
got down close enough to grab the calf foot and try to find the other one, the
cow suddenly got up and trotted out of the thicket. While weighing the possibility of walking her
down to the pens, the baby’s head came with tongue hanging out and I knew I
couldn’t stress them any further.
About
five minutes later she delivered the baby, immediately got up and began licking
her baby vigorously but it was too late.
It doesn’t
matter how many cows you have or how many births you’ve participated in, it is
still sad to lose one. She was a good,
big, and gentle mama and she’d done all she could.
I left
her then to her instinctive cleaning. Probably
when we return in the morning she will have stood over him all night keeping
the buzzards and coyotes away. It is a heart wrenching sight.
And I wouldn’t
be surprised if, as I drove away, number 319 came back to check on her
sister and they kept the night vigil together.
