Yesterday morning my eyes popped open and I breathed in a sign of elated contentment. My hubs was out of town most of the week, helping dear friends with a situation, and after spending many crazy days doing all the things without the presence of my crotchety Pineapple in residence, well, I was just as happy as a cat in a canary hatchery to have my Sweet home.
Every morning I start off my day by slipping my plaid muck boots on and stumbling around the farm feeding everyone breakfast while looking like a bag lady as my husband says. Let me pause here a minute to be pretend annoyed by that comment, I mean, I'm sure there are people who feed their farm critters in multicolor peace sign fleece pjs and while wearing a purple fleece bucket hat, right?
Anyway, I hadn't even moved an inch before both of our phones started buzzing. It was the back neighbors. My hubs answered and Betty inquired if we were missing any cows. I hopped out of bed and strolled out to the barnyard. Yep, we were missing cattle.
Now, our farm used to be located in a very sparsely populated, rural chunk of North Idaho. Over the last couple of years humans have discovered Idaho exists and is not full of racists and crazy people. Um, they are still here, but let's just say that they are now outnumbered by the huge wave of new folks moving in. So what that means for our farm is that it has become...surrounded.
The south side of our property is bordered by state land. Our west line is bordered by a plethora of freshly surveyed five acre country estates for folks moving from the city. I didn't realize how much the landscape had changed until I had to go searching for my cattle yesterday. Yippee.
I started my journey at a hole in the fence. There was a freshly smashed exit into the pine patch beyond. The hubs and I both had a bucket of grain in our hands and matching annoyed looks on our faces. Here's why:
I love my children. They really are amazing kids who I can rely on to be responsible. They get good grades, don't act like sphincters most of the time, can drive anything, help folks out, and overall are becoming awesome, competent human beings.
That said, even they have their human moments, and as I walked to the barn, I saw that the wheelbarrow hadn't moved, which meant that my daughter never fed the cattle nearly enough hay last night, and one of them is pregnant. Which of course meant that was why I was hunting errant bovines through forest. Grr.
Honestly, I wasn't too angry, just slightly irritated about the situation. I didn't want to lose my moos, and I didn't want anyone hurt if they tried to cross the very busy main road through the trees that is now a dang freeway of cars thanks to all the imports moving in.
My husband was a bit more, well...enraged. As this same situation has happened before. Our animals are very well cared for, a fact you can tell by looking at them, and the only time they try any sort of escape is if they are HUNGRY. We both detest our livestock having to go through discomfort because of neglectful human decisions.
So, two hours later, after stomping around through the trees, hollering Here Chloe, getting cut up by ill-kempt forests, getting yelled at and then an offer for cattle finding help from one of our neighbors, tracking the herd north, then south where they got scared by a dog and ran into a fence that someone actually takes care of, driving down the main road with our flashers on looking for where they might have gone, talking, texting, messaging, and profusely apologizing to our neighbors, we found ourselves back at the farm empty cattle handed and getting a cup of coffee, because oh yes, it went from sixty to twenty-eight degrees over night and we were freezing cold.
At this juncture I decided to get out of my navy blue, white, and red paisley pajamas and to put on a bra because that seemed like the courteous thing to do, and after chugging a warm cup of coffee, the hubs and I jumped into our big truck Rufus and drove out the the west fence line where they had escaped. At that point we had established the general twenty acre area the moos had to be in based on our tracking and info-mining session of finger numbing coldness. A particularly vicious pine tree on the state land had exacted a search and rescue price from my quads and I thought it looked pretty cool to have fancy blood welts through my pants. The hubs had a matching set. We were in the best of moods for real.
We both knew the general area where the bovines were. The main problem is that due to all our new mass of neighbors, it is just so dang noisy now, and we couldn't hear ANYTHING. If you listen you can hear cows make noise when they move, and my cows, if they can hear me, will call back and we have this cool family reunion thing that happens. But thanks to all the fricken noise, that was not going to be a thing, so I was going to have to grid search walk until I stumbled on them.
Thanks to my awesome neighbor, I knew where they had been last sighted, and so I wove my way through the trees and blowdowns, calling out Chloe's name. I was also feeling a bit more confident this time as our neighbors all pretty much knew why there was some crazy looking bucket wielding people wandering around on their land. I'm not joking about this, you can get shot here for stuff like that. Hence the importance of knowing your neighbors.
Anyway, I paused for a second and looked upward. I let out a breath and asked kindly for just a small little break, a mini-moo blessing so to speak. When I looked ahead through the clearing in front of me, there stood my moos.
It was an almost Christmas miracle! Those dorks were noshing on Betty's lush backyard, not stressed in anyway. I yelled for the hubs and walked up to my escapees.
"Really?" I said, as I stroked Chloe's nose. She just belched and tossed her head a bit.
"Follow Dad," I barked, and clicked my teeth. They must have had enough of an adventure because they formed a line and followed my husband back to our farm without any antics.
Because that's the thing. Happy, content animals rarely go anywhere. The few times my animals have been out was due to someone not feeding them correctly or a freakish experience (like an animal attack) and usually they just go to my window and yell at me until I come see what the heck is going on. I'm just glad my bovines are back home where they belong.
And this morning they were still home, because I stuck those naughty creatures in their winter penitentiary...I mean pen.
