Monday, March 5, 2012

Hell in the Henhouse (blood in the yard)

Post Script to this land is your land: Went to bed Friday night thinking things were well.

Saturday morning had me singing Hell in the Henhouse (soon to be released song written by Matt King and Ray Wylie Hubbard).

It started when a worker friend arrived and left his grandson out in the yard. The boy knocks on the door. Next thing I know, Leah is screaming at Polly, a Queensland blue heeler. Polly has bitten a goat in the hock region and the goat can't get up. My guess is that the boy tried to shoo the goat and she helped the only way she knows how, by attacking the goat. I felt obliged to beat Polly nonetheless. The goat regained her feet and tended to her baby, albeit with a limp and a few bloody bite marks on a hind leg.

After enjoying coffee with Leah, I leave the house, milk pail and can full of warm water in hand, ready to milk cows.

A otherwise healthy looking but dead goat awaits near the feed room, the second unexplainable death in a week. I drag the poor thing off and cut it in pieces for the dogs.

Then someone comes up the drive saying one of our cows has a calf that got under the fence; black headed buzzards are about to kill the thing. Luckily, I arrive in time to thrwart their breakfast plans.

The cell phone rings.

Hay customers arrive.

The cell rings again.

Another truck pulls up to tell me buzzards are trying to kill one of my calves.

The irrigation machine I left running last night has not moved, but instead sprayed thousands of gallons of water in one spot, flooding that area while the rest of the circuit it should have traveled remains dry.

By the time I get around to the cows, the water in the pail is cold and the cows are looking at me like, Where the hell you been?


Sometimes more is not better.

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