Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [25]
And missed her completely.
Oh, my goodness, I remember thinking.
Sure now that she was emitting cartoon smoke from both nostrils, I made one last valiant sprint straight for the fence. She was at my heels and gaining when I launched into a full-out dive. Grazing the top row of barbed wire, I performed a credible tuck-and-roll and hit the soft ground on the other side. After a nice little rest, I went off to find Dad, and not long after that, Belinda went to market.
Back in the day, most farmers kept a bull on the farm for the obvious purpose. We all knew a few stories of goring, trampling, and death. What Dad had instead was a cabinet mounted just inside the milk-house door. The cabinet door—which folded down to serve as a miniature desk—was imprinted with a silhouette of a fine bull, the words EVERY SIRE PROVEN GREAT, and the logo ABS, for American Breeders Service. Within the cabinet were a few stubby pencils, a few bright tags that read BREED THIS COW, and the American Breeders Service bull catalog.
The ABS catalog was basically Playgirl for cows. It was filled with page after page of photographs of the ultimate bulls. These were the Greek gods of the bovine world. They were posed with their front hooves on a small mound of clean sawdust, and their tails hung long and were fluffed to a voluminous switch. The bulls were ornately named. One of the stars of my childhood was Fultonway Ivanhoe Belshazzar—one-third landed gentry, one-third literature, and one-third Old Testament. I always thought it would be fun to be the guy coming up with names for the bulls. I figure you’d want something relevant but exotic, say, Golden Turkish Alfalfa Rocket.
When a cow was in heat (we learned early to listen for the urgent, high-pitched mooing and cows “riding” each other), we kids would go through the catalog page by page, studying each portrait closely. In addition to the photographs, each bull’s page included a chart delineating their specific genetic attributes relevant to the qualities they caused to arise in their female off-spring—which, after all, was where the farmer’s prime interest lay. Among the categories you might review were body depth, foot angle, thurl width, rump angle, teat placement, and udder cleft. We’d pore over the photographs, review all the data, and then finally pick our favorite. Dad, we’d say, this one here—Spanky Tango Cremora Blaster—he’s the one!
Knowing now what I didn’t know then about my parents’ financial situation, I have come to realize Dad probably just went to the back of the catalog, to the discount section (“Bull in a Bucket”), and ordered the cheapest product available. And then, sometime within the next eight hours, the artificial inseminator would arrive, and he would walk into the barn and commit astounding acts.
When you’re a kid growing up on a rural Wisconsin dairy farm with no television, the artificial inseminator is a combination science exhibit and freak show on wheels.
We never missed it.
The inseminator (we called him “the breeder man”) would roll into the yard in his pickup truck, and in the back he would have this stainless steel canister about the size of a beer pony. The canister was filled with liquid nitrogen, which kept the semen frozen at–321 degrees Fahrenheit. The ampoules were suspended on a rack. When he popped the lid on the canister, mysterious wisps of fog would boil up and spill down the sides, evaporating halfway down to the truck bed. Sometimes he would allow us to dip a length of string into the nitrogen. When we pulled it out, it was frozen solid and could be snapped like a twig.
After extracting the semen, the inseminator placed it into a short syringe, which he then attached to a long, slender pipette. Next—and I’m not