The sunrise was spectacular yesterday morning. The weather had been predicted to be a lovely 70 degrees throughout the day. The house was quiet. I had already gone for my morning bike ride and my oldest daughter and I were able to have a little time to chat before the day began.
Well, it was quiet until I received a phone call from my neighbor. She politely let me know that our heifer was out grazing in her backyard and that Daisy, said heifer, was being as cute as a button back there.
Let me give you a little background on Daisy. We purchased her along with a couple of steers back in November. They are here on the micro-ranch, to lead a well-provided for life until we take them to the butcher. Only one of the three allows you to touch him and that is Spencer, the Texas Longhorn. The other two were never around people since they came into existence so they can be skitish at times and very rarely allow you to touch them .... even if you are giving them the best bell pepper they have ever tasted!
(Daisy the day we brought her here)
Going back to that lovely phone call from my neighbor and Daisy hanging out in her backyard. This little scenario posed a couple of problems. The first, she could just run through all the orchards, that aren't ours, and trample any new trees that were put in. The second problem, she could run onto the road in front of our house that carries quite a bit of traffic and get hit.
(Daisy last week and behind her is the fence with barbed wire that she jumped.)
For the next hour, our family of 5, tried to guide her into the side gate by just moving her slowly by coercion of food. She nibbled a little and stood there at the very spot that she had jumped the fence.
The whole time we were trying to get her back in the yard, every animal that we owned was in an absolute ruckus. The steers were loudly calling for her. Salt, the BIG pig was dumping over her 55 gallon water bucket and was snorting. All 50 chickens were at the back fence cackling. The goats were in an uproar. The ducks were quacking like crazy....even the three little pigs were in the noise mix.
All I could do was pray. All Hot Rocks could do was pray because he was on one hours worth of sleep and had just gotten home from night shift. The two younger kids were in their pj's and I kept thinking about how I had told the retired rodeo guy that we bought them from "everyone needs a chance to be stupid"....just knowing that no matter how much research we had done we still wouldn't be prepared. Well....today was the day that statement was made true.
Then our prayer was answered. George showed up. He is this soft-spoken, hard-working man that tends the orchard behind us. He just drives up to do his normal days work and notices Daisy in the orchard and all of us in this wide imaginary circle around her. He gets out and grabs some rope from the back of his truck and makes this little lasso. He then places it on the ground and wraps the tail end of the rope around one of the railroad ties that we have as part of our fence. At the end of that little rope, he ties another one and then walks it off at an angle behind one of the trees. George lays the rope down for a second and runs over and grabs some weeds to put beside the snare. We are all quiet as we are watching what is going on and just trying to keep Daisy near. She slowly walks over and eats the weeds he had just laid down and one of her back hooves stepped in the snare and George yanked that rope and Daisy was caught. We couldn't believe our eyes. He held her and Hot Rocks grabbed a hold of of the rope also. Our oldest ran to get the harness rope that we had dropped.
Next thing we knew, Daisy was on the ground and George was putting the harness rope around her neck and over her horns. All this from a snare and a little rope. Daisy wasn't happy about this at all and boy, did she let us know but it didn't phase George at all. Hot Rocks pulled her to the side gate and then into our little pasture area and George just kept hitting her butt or moving her nose to keep her moving along.
I looked at George and said "Did you ever own cattle?" He told me, "Yes, in Mexico." He has been in the states for many years now and he handled our fence-jumping heifer like it wasn't a big deal at all and he does this kind of stuff all the time... I was thankful. Chalked it up under "Stupid" and told Hot Rocks if she does it again, she is outta here.
Sometimes when you are livin' the dream, you just want to roll over so you can wake up.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL
Posted by: Karrie Baker | February 23, 2012 at 08:08 PM