You might enjoy this story. I find it to be charged with excitement, drama and the powerful attraction that exists between mother and child.
Earlier this week, a parade of nine beautiful, newly installed Hereford cows walked up across my east pasture. Not much can happen out there but what I see it from my chair here by my computer.
Several were mooing. They were bemoaning the loss of their year-old calves for the first day and were trying to call them home. But the calves had been moved a mile and a half up the road to another pasture. Farmer Polky, who manages these magnificent animals, knew that if he put them in my west pasture right across the road they would hear their mothers and, making a desperate bid for freedom, knock down the tiny electric fence and cross the road.
There was nothing mean about weaning the calves. Breaking up old families was necessary so that new ones might be more easily established. Ohh’Malley, the very patient resident bull, has been waiting in the wings for a month now. He was the first visitor to our pasture this year and had stationed himself close to my window. Which was as close as he was going to get to select members of Farmer Polky’s herd until “it was time” later in the month of June. So we’ve gotten to know him rather well.
I learned that cows can smell their friends six miles away, so he was also as close as he could get to Polky’s promised land only 1,500 feet down the road.
In the afternoon Farmer Polky appeared on the farm with three helpers. He had a cellphone in his hand. My first impression was that the back fence was down and that the cows were headed for home. I later learned that he was in communication with several helpers who were zipping up and down local roads in trucks and on motorcycles. They were looking for calves.
Here’s the long and short of it.
Knowing that he could outsmart cows, as we said earlier Farmer Polky moved seven year-old calves a mile and a half up the road to his cousin’s pasture. However, even at that distance, the calves heard the maternal mooing and jumped the fence. Although they could have easily followed the road, they followed the moos that took them in the woods by the Poor Farm and brought them out on 73 by Crow’s lace mill. This is the back end of my farm, and they continued through my forest until they came upon their mothers, who were waiting for them way down by the back fence.
When I was a kid and were skating on Daddy Jo’s ice pond, my mother, a mile down the road, would stand out on the lawn, throw back her head and go, “Oooooooooowwwwwwooo.” The kids would laugh and say, “There’s the sireen” (sic) and my sister and I would take off our skates and go home. But the calves were 600 feet above that ice pond, and my pasture is three-tenths of a mile below where my mother was standing. So they must have wicked good hearing to move them to jump a hot-wire fence.
The mother cows knew what many children learn before they are 3 years old. If you’ve been in many grocery stores you know this is true: If you make unpleasant noises long enough, you will get what you want.
For old retired people who don’t go anywhere and don’t do anything, you’d think that would be enough excitement for one day. But earlier that morning, before we witnessed what will go down in the books as “the cow crisis of ’23,” I was interviewed by a woman with an MA in working with mentally ill criminals. I hope she got what she wanted.
And later in the day I coerced one of Maine’s foremost contractors, who will now be able to buy Lady Gaga’s estate in Palm Springs, to paint seven sides of my house.
I have made it extremely difficult for neighbors in Tenants Harbor and Port Clyde to know what to look at when they zip by – the work being done on my house or the handsome herd of Polky cows in my east pasture.
My rhubarb picker has piles of rhubarb on my chrome farm stand out by the road.
When was the last time you had such a nice day?
The humble Farmer can be heard Friday nights at 7 on WHPW (97.3 FM) and visited at:
www.thehumblefarmer.com/
MainePrivateRadio.html
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