It’s important during calving season to keep your imagination in check. The weather determines how many nighttime checks the bred heifers get this time of year. When we started and it was so bitter cold, we were checking every two hours. Now that it’s warming up and drying up I’m trying to go out a couple times a night. This month I’ve seen all phases of the moon and when it’s not cloudy, I watch Orion go from shooting his arrow right at Hershey from the southwestern sky around midnight, to being gone over the horizon around three or four am. I enjoy the vastness of the universe and the completely different world the darkness holds. Seldom do I let my imagination run away like I did looking for the cow last summer…..until last night.
The 4 am check was entirely different than at midnight. Ground fog had rolled in and the moon was up and bright. I could see the dark outlines of the cows laying around me and the little black balls beside them in the mist. I walked the entire length of the calving pen thinking this had to be what Transylvania looked like. Bram Stoker must have been checking cows at night when he had his inspiration for Dracula. I started telling myself, “No, no, no, think of something else.” So I decided it was Huey Lewis and the News Doin’ It All For My Baby video. Much better.
I was standing just beyond the last cow, scanning the south fence with my light, when all heck broke loose right behind me. A calf, about 20 feet behind me to my right let out a war whoop and ran right past me bellowing like it was about to be eaten. Cows were up and screaming for their calves and it was pandemonium. I made the progression from coyote, to cougar, to werewolf, to velociraptor that quick.
I spun around and there in the middle of it all, caught dead to rights in my spotlight, was the guiltiest looking little wiener dog I’d ever seen. His ears were pinned back and his eyes were bulging out. He looked at me and said, “Sorry?” Apparently, on his nightly quest for after birth, which has turned him into more of a brat than a wiener, he bumped into the sleeping calf unleashing the preceding chain of events. I guess it just proves, thank goodness, that my life is more of a Huey Lewis song than a Bram Stoker novel. Whew!
Farmer Dan's Food For Thought 