Too Much Excitement

We were in a lull between rain storms, and Jeanne and I were walking with her dogs to the mailbox. The air was a bit chilly but conditions were perfect for puddle splashing and post-storm investigation, and the sky had excellent rainbow potential.

Charlie happened to be driving by and he paused to say hello to us. We were right near the place where the carcass of a dead cow was beginning to draw a lively convention of turkey vultures.

"So have you seen the dead cow?" we asked.

"No, but I'm starting to smell it," he said. "I have seen the leg, though.”

"Yeah, it's hard to miss the leg. It's been in several locations up and down the road."

"Lot goin' on around here..."

I guess you could say that's a Ranch conversation. We do our best to keep up with all the excitement.

As if that wasn’t enough adventure for the week, I was on the deck enjoying my morning cup of coffee the next day when I noticed a bull chomping at the grass by the orchard. I don’t know how he had gotten onto the parcel, but he seemed to be making the best of it, tramping noisily among the trees beneath dangles of fragrant and unseasonable macadamia blossoms, nibbling at the tender green shoots of various things attempting to grow, and stepping gingerly along a rocky channel to within a few feet of the house, where he stood for a while and returned my gaze. He was a rather large bull with a yellow tag on his ear that said 349, and a pink scar on his flank presumably from a brand not-quite-healed, and he was fully equipped, gender-wise. I felt uneasy.

I called John McCarty, the head of the Cattle Co-Op, to see what he would advise. (I mentioned the dead cow as an aside, but John already knew about that.)

“I’m gonna have to come over and get the bull outta there,” he said.

“Is he dangerous?” I asked.

“Not at all, unless you make him nervous. Just stay out of his way.”

Quite happy to stay out of his way, I stealthily crept down to the garage to tend to other business. When I looked up, I saw that he had wandered to the cattle guard and was delicately placing a hoof on the first rung, eager to get out to where a bevy of bovine black beauties and their babies had gathered together, mooing anxiously as though calling him. His foot slipped, and he had the agility and presence of mind to step backward from the cattle guard and return to the parcel, but now he’d lost his equanimity and seemed agitated.

In fact, there appeared to be a great deal of fretful cow communication going on back and forth between parties on either side of the cattle guard, maybe variations on the themes of worry and frustration. Sure, 349 was a big guy, but he suddenly seemed vulnerable and stressed. One might even say nervous. I loitered in the garage and regretted having worn a red fleece jacket, surely not a politically correct color among bulls. I hoped he would not take offense.

Fortunately John arrived with a flatbed truck and two handsome border collies poised as patiently as bookends but yearning for a job. This, however, was not a chasing matter. All that John needed was a shovel and a wire cutter. He found the best place to make an opening in the fence, coaxed 349 to the other side, sealed things up, and was on his way. Cowboys are my heroes, or at least this one was, on this occasion.

Anyway, I dutifully checked the whole fence line to see if a gate was open someplace through which our visitor might have entered, and of course I ended up slogging around in the mud and building up a six-inch platform of clay beneath each shoe and staggering down the hill like Frankenstein trying not to slide. I concluded that the bull had probably come in through the front entrance like a gentleman. Yeah, he’d made it across the cattle guard going in, but lost his nerve when he lost his footing while attempting the slippery exit. That's my theory anyway.

So, that's the Ranch for you. I hope you're not swooning from all this excitement, but don't think that was the last of all the big happenings I have to report. Gosh, I haven't even told you yet about the wonders of the low low tide or the way my paper whites and irises have erupted or how those macadamia blossoms fill the air with a fragrance that is almost cloying, almost too intimate, like scented lingerie,  and the irony is they have come too soon and the first cold night may ruin their hopes of progeny.

And I forgot to talk about last week's crazy moon and the mysterious package someone left for me at the gate that I am not allowed to open until Christmas and it's sitting right in front of me, calling. More important, I neglected to mention that it has been an epic week for clouds.

Meanwhile, the cow leg has continued its travels along the side of the road, now picked clean but for the hide above the hoof, and a bushy-tailed coyote was seen leaping from the carcass that is already beginning to resemble an open cage of bones. And the cows are still standing around by the creek ruminating, and 349 is looking right this way to the other side of that scary crossing where the grass is always greener and he seems to have some memory but can't quite pull it up.