Like a cow on a wire

Last night - the night before Hallowe'en - I decided to drive to town on the icy roads to get Heather's esteemed opinion on my CV/resume.

Mysteriously, the truck wouldn't start...not a peep, not a stutter...only silence. So I had to take the car.

I could see the dark shapes of the cattle all lined up against the barbed wire in the corner of the field made by the lane running along one side and the Little Red Deer Road on the other. This was the section of fence I'd helped my brother look after a week ago. In the afternoon, they'd been bellering and complaining at our house windows, telling us they didn't like the snow, there was no more grass to eat and they wanted to go into a barn.

But they're not our cows. They're Jake's, from down the road. So now in the black evening, they were silently standing against the barbed wire closest to their owner's home.

'Stupid cows,' I said, driving past.

But one of them seemed wrong. Was it standing too close to the road? I could call and tattle when i got to town, but then if i was wrong then everyone would be mad, and Dad would be embarrassed and they'd all say i was seeing stuff. I turned around and pointed my lights at it. Yep. It was definitely in the ditch on the wrong side of the fence. But the other 30 or so were still on the right side of the fence. How did he get out without the others?

I drove home again to tell Dad. Then i went back into Heather's for mmm mmmm yummy paralyzers. When i got home three hours later, Mom and Dad said Jake wasn't home but someone else had driven in about 9pm to say there was a cow out. So Mom had scraped the ice off the old truck (remember the new one was mysteriously not working), gassed it up in the minus-16-with-windchill air and driven up the lane to look herself. All the cows were standing innocently inside the fence. No escapee in evidence.

Then when Jake finally got home he drove around and around the pasture and couldn't find any of the cows at all. They were all hiding. Or sulking perhaps. Those childish cows.

So where are those cows, huh? And was there really one out, or was it just a ghost cow? One of their wild ancestors come to lead them out of the snow-covered pasture and back to their barn.

They're all back at the house windows this morning, bellering and demanding we stop starving them. If only the ghost cow could teach them how to eat the grass poking up through the snow.

Back to the land

Today, a snowstorm. Yesterday, so sunny I wanted to take my shirt off while i sat on the deck having a cigarette and listening to the cows bellow.

The days are passing slow and disappearing quickly so that suddenly after 3 weeks of nothing but satellite detective programs and magazines proselytizing the inner peace that comes from organizing your cupboards properly, I am bored, want something to do but feel sunk too deep in the fluffy cushions to get started.

My main accomplishments so far have been washing the walls so the painters could come, and washing fly shit off the windows so the neighbours can come for the wedding shower. Even better, my brother has been letting me take turns at being a farmer. The day after Thanksgiving, he let my cousin and I seal the gap around the bottom of the new granary with tar. Then last week we went out to fix fences together. The barbed wire is coiled around a giant spool and, propped against a couple of bits of wood, balances on the edges of the truck box. When you find a rotten or broken bit of wire, you make a loop in it and then loop the new bit through like links in a chain. Then take a staple and nail the bit of wire to the fence.

Yesterday i got to help my brother fix the combine. I undid all the bolts on the front bit with teeth that cuts up the straw and then helped put the belt back on the pulley. I had to stand on a giant spool to be tall enough to see the bolts, but i still remembered the age-old rule, 'tighty-righty, lefty-loosey'. I broke my nail tightening a bolt and said, 'Goddamn,' just like a real farmer.

Chad, the hunter, came by while we were fixing it to ask permission to go hunting on my brother's land. He wore a ballcap, hockey hair and a company jacket. Said he might be out the first few days of November in his company truck.

'Oh, the same company my friend works at,' I said. He only grunted at me, not very interested in who my friend might be or in making conversation. I'm clearly only a girl without the authority to grant hunting permission. After awhile Chad, the hunter, went away.

We finished tightening all the bolts that were going to stay and putting all the extras in the arm of the tractor for next year, hopefully when he'll remember which ones went where. I suggested painting different coloured dots on the bolts and the matching holes with nail polish so you could match them up better. My brother said that was a really good idea, but really not possible, because other farmers or mechanics might see it.