Cows. Just Cows.

There's not much I can say here that will properly set up the story. But just remember a very important fact that everyone should be mindful. All the time.

Nature is no heckin joke.

Cows. Are. Terrifying.

Most livestock are. Especially livestock that weigh more than 400 kilograms (about 5 to 7 large adult men, for those of you who do not prefer the metric system). Especially the ones who travel in herds or otherwise exhibit herd mentality. Especially those that live in large open spaces where they can build up speed and trample damn near anything, given half a chance, considering their herd behaviours.

Which is to say … Cows. Cows are terrifying. And they were already terrifying before I witnessed the events of the bigger part of this story. But to get to that, we have to start with some other history.

My friend Tomas, who features a lot in my earlier stories, was the grandson of a man who kept cattle. Mr. Matthews wasn’t in possession of massive holdings by any means, but there was enough land for enough cattle that he made a fine bit of money off of it. It was enough land you could stand at the fence line and barely see the house. And it was enough cows that a goodly chunk of that land was a veritable minefield of cow leavings.

When visiting Tomas, if we were at his momma’s house, we could hop the fence just outside the front door and be in that pasture. Cutting across the pasture was the shortest distance to get to the big house, and every so often we had to do exactly that. Though a few times we chose to go around the long way, which was to walk along the street and then up the driveway, for reasons that will become clear in short order.

Now, most days, the cows in that pasture were pretty docile. Walking across was fairly straightforward with essentially no hazards beyond stepping in something that makes your shoe smell … special.

But I had heard horror stories. Plenty of them. Cows running rampant. Cows hurting people. Folks getting stomped on or otherwise squished. Not on the Matthews property, mind you. Never there. But folks talked. I was raised in the Country and things were prone to happen.

One day in particular, Tomas and I went adventuring, as we were commonly found to do in those days. We would wander the woods. Or the things along his country road. Or the various little pockets of mysterious things scattered about. And this time in particular, we had been up the road a ways and found ourselves returning to his house along the same.

What we found as we turned down the drive was a cow. This wasn’t particularly shocking in itself, given what I just said about being able to hop the fence and be in the same pasture as the cows. What was shocking was the condition we found that cow in. So allow me to paint something of a graphic view of what we found.

We’ll start with the fence. The fence around the Matthews land was just your standard barbed wire kept taut with sturdy wooden posts at regular intervals. Some of the posts were a bit old and occasionally needed replaced, but largely they served their purpose well. We knew all the spots to go above, below, or through that fence safely, and we had never once considered passing in the spot where we found the cow that day.

The cow was herself neck first between the top two strands of wire and had clearly been struggling. One of its front legs had managed to get tangled up in the lower strands of wire. It was stuck. At least for the moment. But at least a couple of those strands had already pulled off of the post that was supposed to be diligently holding the wire in place. At least one of them had snapped proper.

I learned two important things about cows that day.

The first is that we don’t put up barbed wire to stop them. We put it up to frustrate them. Because without a great amount of misfortune, the barbs aren’t quite enough to actually hurt them, just to cause some discomfort and possibly a small amount of distress. Usually that’s enough to turn them away from the fence and avoid it in perpetuity.

The second is that when a cow somehow finds herself in a spot where she can’t pull back from the fence, she absolutely will push through it given enough time. And because of that, such a fence is barely keeping the herd at bay. One bad day is all it would take for things to get ugly. Very ugly.

So as I said.

Cows. Are. Fucking. Terrifying.