Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [24]
Once a man came to load one of our cows for the sale barn, and before Dad could get out there, the man had whipped it until there was blood on its back. Before the man was out of the yard, Dad was on the phone to the shipper. Don’t ever send that man again, he said. Another cattle jockey came in the barn carrying an electric cattle prod. “You won’t need that,” Dad said. The man said something about how good it worked. “You won’t need that,” Dad said, a little more deliberately this time, and the man returned the prod to the truck. If a cow was being stubborn, we were allowed to smack her on the flank with an open hand, but that was more for the sound effect than anything. We could also tap them with a broom handle on the spinal ridge where the tail attached, or twist the tail—although often as not the tail-twist made them slam on the brakes.
I recall striking only one cow in anger. All told, I tried to hit her three times, but the last time I whiffed. Her name was Belinda, and she was a “rooter.” If you turned your back on her while cleaning the manger, she’d “root” you from behind, jamming the rock-hard brow ridge of her skull under your coccyx and boosting you headfirst into the wall. Sometimes it hurt and sometimes it didn’t, but it always got your full undivided attention, and it consistently tripped my rage trigger. Once I was busting hay bales, and she rooted me right off my feet. I whipped around, balled up a fist, and punched her right between the eyes, hard as I could.
Are you familiar with the real estate between a cow’s eyeballs? For the purposes of simulation, drape a thin rug over a concrete block and then hit it bare-fisted as hard as you can. The vibrations reached clear up to my ears, and the numbness persisted for twenty minutes. As I huddled against the wall, cradling my useless arm and wondering how best to splint it, the cow regarded me placidly. My best pile driver, and it had less effect than the touchdown of an anemic horsefly. The next time she tagged me, I was sweeping up the manger. Wiser now, I whipped around and smacked her over the skull with the broom handle. Same net effect—she just blinked at me—but more trouble, because the handle snapped, and I’d have to explain that to Dad. Later when he asked me why I used a whole roll of black electrician’s tape on the broom handle I told him Belinda knocked me over and I fell on the broom handle. I think he knew, and just let it go, because that cow was flat crazy. Some cows would take a shot at you now and then, but she was one of the rare ones who would actually come after you. One summer evening all the cows came in for milking except Belinda. I grabbed the big rubber mallet Dad used to knock the feed loose from the side of the bin and went out looking for her. Rather than run off when she saw me, she waited until I got near, lowered her head to freight-train position, and came thundering at me.
For the first minute or so, I fared pretty well. I’d run in a straight line until I could feel the thud of her hooves, then I’d cut a real tight turn. While she slowed down to change directions, I sprinted clear again. With every juke I kept trying to work my way closer to the fence and safety, and before long we had zigzagged our way to within about twenty yards of the woven wire, but I was getting winded, and that cow hadn’t lost a step. Finally, when I cut two corners not quite tight enough and she tagged me with a half-root, I realized I had to make a break for it. I still had the rubber mallet, but if I squared off to whack her, I risked getting trampled. Instead, I decided to fling it at her head