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.