The Old Man trudged thru the grazed and trampled pasture to the cow lying there, not moving. He’d spotted her from the barn several hundred yards away and watched with hand-shaded eyes. She was injured and his experience told him what likely had happened to her.
It was hot, miserably hot for this time of year. Spring ended early this year, again, and the rains stopped well before they should have. The blazing sun came even before he’d planted the summer pasture. He scolded himself for not completing that task yet. The cows were still grazing it from the fall planting, but he should have known to get the seed in before now. It was a concern, to be sure. The seed might not germinate, and if it did, it might quickly die from lack of moisture. This was the second year in a row that drought conditions came early. Last year, his pasture well ran dry before the end of July.
He brooded over those thoughts as he walked to her. He was wary of the bull who was following him, pawing, bellowing, and eyeing him, his eyes rolling, sometimes looking down, sometimes sideways, rarely directly staring at him. He wanted to be sure the bull didn’t become too protective of the inert cow and didn’t charge at him when he wasn’t looking.
He came to the cow, his fears realized. It was Bess, his favorite Jersey, who had given him a string of calves, all heifers. She was his best milk cow for over 7 years now, giving a creamy, high fat-content milk that made delicious yellow butter. He slathered that thick on the sourdough bread his wife made as soon as it came out of the oven and he could slice it without it becoming gummy. Now, six months into this lactation cycle, she was beginning to give less milk, but it was a richer and creamier milk. The half-gallon jars he strained it into after her once-a-day milking separated into half milk/half cream after an overnight sit in the refrigerator.
She was down but did not seem to be in much pain. It’s sometimes hard to tell with animals, especially cows, because they don’t always act as if they’re injured. Often, they just go off by themselves and wait until they recover and then rejoin the herd. But Bess wasn’t going anywhere. She could move her front half, but her back half was broken, not moving, and sloped in an impossible way, like those fastback muscle cars of the 1960s and 70s that he loved so much.
He looked at the bull who was nearby, pacing. He’d seen this happen before, more often in pastures where multiple bulls ranged with cows. Bulls get too heavy after a certain age, and ones as big as this Guernsey could grow to well over 2000 pounds. They also get more dangerous and more threatening when the cows in the herd are in heat. He’d seen his bull nosing around Bess earlier in the day, and likely what happened was that he tried to mount her, was too big and too aggressive, and she broke.
“This was my fault,” he thought guiltily. He always blamed himself when something went wrong with his animals, and he was right to do so. It was his fault; he should have separated them once he saw the bull was too large for a small-framed Jersey. But, he hadn’t, partly because he wanted the quality calves she produced and to continue her lactation and partly because it was a chore he was too busy to complete. “I never have enough time—isn’t that always the way it is?” he thought, knowing he was lying to himself.
He did what he could to make her comfortable. The animals had eaten down the pasture where she laid, but there were a few stems of clover and some vetch she could reach that had not been grazed from what he had planted in the fall. He watched her for a few minutes, talking softly to her and scratching her forehead. She was still, but occasionally she would try to lift, with only her front legs obeying and her back legs not moving. It reminded him of the time he found a days-old piglet that weighed less than ten pounds stepped on by its father, a boar weighing at least 800 pounds. That crushed its spine. It pulled itself around on only two front legs, the back end dragging in the dirt like a tail, trying heroically to keep up with the other 12 piglets as they ran around in their pasture. Its sheer determination cut him to the quick, making him cry like a baby, barely able to sight the gun as he killed it. It took him days to get over that killing. His admiration for the simple animalistic will to live and his frustration at the cosmic injustice took him some time to resolve.
Euthanizing his animals was not easy. Still, he had a small reputation for it, since the neighbors often called him to help if they had an animal they needed to put down. He wasn’t sure why. They knew he put down his own animals instead of calling a vet. They also knew he’d spent over two decades as a soldier and that he was good with weapons. It was true, he’d practiced so much that he rarely missed his target and he had mastered that flinch that comes when you pull the trigger that can mean the difference between a merciful death and a painful one for an animal. But, these same neighbors had been farmers all their lives, they were hunters, and were just as good with a gun as he was. Undoubtedly, it was because they knew he wouldn’t say no and because it’s a lot easier to kill someone else’s animal than to kill your own.
He went back to the barn, never turning his back on the bull. He found an old tub and a bucket, trooped back to Bess and put the tub down where she could reach it. He went to the water trough that was in the corner of the barnyard, filled his bucket, then walked back and poured the water into the tub. Bess dipped her nose in it, not really drinking, just touching it like cows do sometimes.
“Well, old girl,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”
She didn’t move, except to shake her head to get the flies off that were fierce in this heat. She couldn’t swat them with her tail. It wouldn’t move either, and her only defense was the shoulder muscle shiver that cows use to flick the flies off and shaking her head when they got in her eyes.
He started the long hike to the house. He had a .22 caliber pistol in the barn, fine for rats or squirrels, but that wouldn’t do for this killing. He’d have to get something bigger. His .45 caliber pistol was a better choice. That gun was big enough to do the job and it had a laser on it, even though he wouldn’t need it at the range he would be shooting. He would have to change out magazines. He kept his loaded with hollow point rounds, ideal for personal protection, but they were not very effective in this situation. He recalled the very first bovine he had killed, a steer they intended to process for the beef, that he shot with hollow points. Maybe it was the angle he shot from, maybe they didn’t have enough power. They bounced off the skull of the steer, three rounds, and the steer looked at him dumbly before it turned and trotted away. He’d need ball ammo with a little more zip to it to ensure a merciful kill.
Arriving at the house, he wondered if he should call a neighbor to help. “No,” he thought, “this is my job to do.” Besides, the nearest neighbor that he knew would be home lived about 30 minutes away. He gathered up the things he would need, reloaded the magazine with the right bullets, and headed back to the pasture.
He thought about what he should do with her once he shot her. It would be a shame to waste this animal, and in the old days there would have been no question of harvesting her. She was not a beef cow, but what meat was on her could be ground, she had fat that could be rendered to tallow, her organ meats and tongue would have been just as good as a beef cow. The tail and the ribs would still be usable even if she had been broken down.
“I’m not dealing with that in this heat,” he thought, excusing away his guilt. His wife and girls were away; he wasn’t about to do it by himself. It would be miserable work, and emotional, and would certainly interfere with his other chores. It was a job best done in cooler months.
He could call a local renderer who would come to get her and use her productively, turning her into dog food and bone meal and selling the hide to a leatherer.
“Not in this life,” he thought.
“Maybe a neighbor?” He shook those thoughts away. She wasn’t going anywhere. He would either bury her or compost her, but he preferred to bury her. She’d been a good cow; she deserved a burial. The pasture she was in had been woods just 5 or 6 years earlier and he had cleared it, planted it each year in both the fall and summer, and grazed the cattle on it to get some nutrition into the soil again. The cows had laid down tons of manure, had trampled a lot of grass back into it. It was coming in very nicely now. He’d bury her in it, and she would become part of the same pasture that had fed her for the last few years. That thought satisfied him.
“I’ll bury her right where she lies,” he said aloud.
The Old Man crossed through the gate back into the pasture. The bull was even more agitated than he had been. He sensed something was wrong; the Old Man was never in the pasture this much. The Old Man walked cautiously to the cow, but the bull was pacing on the wrong side. He needed to be at the head of the cow, with the cow as an obstacle between him and the bull, just to be safe and be able to focus his attention on what needed to be an exact shot.
“Get on, bull,” he hollered. “Git!” He walked towards the bull, waving his arms, trying to chase him to a position further away and well behind where the cow lay. The bull pawed back, tossing dirt, bellowing a high-pitched noise, and rolling its eyes. Finally, after several minutes of hollering and waving he was able to get the bull to back up to a safe distance. He walked back to Bess and turned his attention to her.
“Ah Girl,” he said, crouching down in front of her, “you’ve been a good cow, Bess.”
She tossed her head, chasing flies off, and slinging some saliva from the cud she was chewing. He stroked her forehead, bunching up what he could of her hair. He was finding the imaginary spot at the intersection of two lines drawn from the base of each horn to the outside of the eye on the opposite side of her head. That was the ideal spot for a quick, painless death, and he wanted to be sure he hit exactly there. It would be so much easier if it wasn’t so hot, if there weren’t so many flies, and if she would just be still. If his shot was off by just a few inches, if she moved at the wrong time, he could cause a lot of pain and she would suffer.
He thought again about calling a vet, but the nearest large animal vet was hours away and the cost of the vet having to come to the farm as well as the cost of the injection that would kill her made that idea unrealistic.
“Do this, Old Man” he said aloud, and he bunched the hair up once more to mark the spot. He knew now where the ideal spot was and would know even at the short distance he would be from her. He couldn’t be too close. That would be dangerous for them both. He couldn’t place the barrel of the handgun against her skull.
He stood and backed up about ten feet. He waited for her to shake her head again as he sighted down the length of the pistol, aligning the front and rear sights in a perfect three dot pattern centered on her forehead. She shook her head, once, then again and then went still.
“Bess,” he said, in a firm voice. She looked at him; she knew her name. He squeezed the trigger and the handgun jumped in his hand. She dropped at once, her head sinking to the ground. He couldn’t see the bullet hole, but he knew he’d hit the spot. Slowly, blood started oozing from her mouth. She was dead, but he put two more rounds into the same location to be sure.
“Damn it,” he swore.
He holstered his gun, turned, and walked back towards the barn, to the backhoe he would use to bury her. He didn’t bother to look back for the bull, instead hoping angrily that it would charge him and crush him like it had his cow.
He knew he deserved it.
Damn, good story. Realistic. It's nice to see another farmer on here. I've seen a couple others, but no community. It's interesting to me how you deal with the situation. I've always just kind of buried it down somewhere inside. I kind of just go blank when something happens so I can go on and deal with it. I think your way is better, but don't beat yourself up too bad about it, I know that's a rough thing to say, but we deal with living things that an office worker or a forklift driver doesn't have to deal with. When you've got livestock, you've got dead stock. I'll bet even nurses forget to add an IV or something a time or two. We raise sheep and cattle. I was cleaning up some feedbunks today and the old feed was filled with larvae and grubs and thought, Boy, you need chickens. Or turkeys. My dream is to fatten turkeys on acorns for people for Thanksgiving.
Wonderfully told story. This captures how one feels at these moments in farm life!