They look innocent enough. But give them an opportunity, and they wreak havoc.
Gate open? In they sneak, savaging the blueberry bushes before pruning rosebushes and fruit trees.
“Oy!”, you shout, and they scatter, smashing through garden beds and upending furniture as you chase them round and round the house.
And odd. When the black sheep died, it was two days before we located the corpse. Two hot days. He was over-ripe, and collecting the heavy corpse and burying it was an unforgettable experience. Not just for me though.
As I started digging a big enough hole the cows collected around me. They were still and watchful as I hauled the corpse off the trailer, rolled it into the pit and buried it. I kept looking up and behind me, to see what they were doing, but they were playing their cards closely.
I packed up and headed off for a scrub. (Pointless really…I couldn’t shake the smell out of my nostrils for days). As I left, the cows moved in….and trampled the grave. When I checked it a few hours later, they had packed it down by 10 centimeters.
The poor old bantams were regularly terrorized by the cows. Now we barricade the door, but previously they would gate-crash the bantams’ pen, upending their water and spilling their food. I would hear the ruckus and come out, and there would be a mad panic as two cows the size of a Volkswagen would logjam in the doorway as they made their getaway.
Crawl under the door to get into the shed and steal hay. Wait for visitors to open the gate and bolt. Climb on the pile of dirt the plumbers left. Take bites out of the trampoline. Wait until I prune the olive trees, and then break off branches.
But today took the cake.
We opened up the river paddock to them, as the normal top paddock is being mowed again as part of the blackberry eradication. Late in the day we went down to the river to check the pump, which has been giving me problems.
While I was doing that Sylvia went for a short walk, and bumped into one cow and two calves. Normally they hang around in a pack. Where were the rest?
Across the river came a bellow…the mother of the abandoned calf, letting him know where she was.
Yes, across the river, cavorting on a neighbour’s property.
I waded across in river sandals and bashed my way through an extensive blackberry patch, and they bolted, kicking their heels up and hilariously running along the neighbour’s electric fence. (Wisely, he had fenced off the river, so they were stuck in a narrow channel.) As I trudged after them they paused, waited until I got a bit closer, then took off again, no doubt sniggering as they ran. Two of these troublemakers are heavily pregnant, due in a couple of weeks.
I crawled under the fence and headed off on a diagonal, trudging through waist-high grass in rubber sandals trying not to think about snakes, and kept pace, but effectively moving further away. I eventually caught up and then started to get ahead of them. They worked out I was vectoring in to block them off, and stopped for a moment, and then wheeled and galloped back the way they had come.
By the time I got back to the river they had crossed and gone, no doubt kicking rubbish bins and breaking windows as they went.
No river paddock for you, ladies.