Apr
29
Written by:
Sherri
4/29/2010 2:44 PM
Every other Tuesday afternoon finds me, with some of the boys (they alternate who goes with me), driving home from a day in Denton...delivering eggs and picking up my wonderful organic produce (www.yourhealthsource.org). We were almost home this week when we passed a rancher's pasture with beef cattle. Nothing unusual until we saw a cow laid out on her side, legs sticking straight out, head thrown back on the ground, belly bloated and not moving...or so we thought. My first impression of her was that she was dead and had been put in a burn pile, since she was in a spot with tall dead grass and some shrubs. The only odd thing is that the other cattle in the pasture seemed oblivious to her. Jonathan and Joshua yelled out that I had to stop and tell somebody that their cow had died.
So we turned around and went back to the nearest house. The driveway was gated, so I waited until a lady walked down the driveway to us. In conversation I found out the pasture wasn't hers, but she knew whose it was and she would telephone them. Satisfied we had done our "good deed", we headed back home again...passing the pasture with the "dead" cow in it once again. Only this time, she wasn't on her side. She was STANDING UP....licking her NEWBORN CALF!!! Boy, was the joke on us! If we had just waited a few minutes we would have witnessed a miraculous birth of another living animal.
So, you can guess what we had to do...turn around again and go back to the lady in the house. I prayed she hadn't contacted the owners yet. We pulled up at the house and honked and honked, since the lady had indeed gone inside to phone. She finally came out and through a series of yelling into the wind (it gets AWFULLY windy here)...it was a very long driveway and she couldn't walk very fast... we finally communicated our mistake 
. Instead of a death, there was a birth! She said she hadn't gotten ahold of the owners yet. Whew! Mistake corrected, we proceeded home...again. This time, passing a new calf with tail flipping up and ears twitching, with the mama licking it. This is country life 
.
In trying to see God's purpose for this episode, hopefully we have learned what a cow in birth looks like! Considering we are approaching Buttercup's first birth at our farm, it's priceless knowledge.
Copyright ©2010 Sherri Maines