Cattle drive

Jen and I spent yesterday morning helping our farmer friend bring some cattle down from the moors for the winter.

Even though cows are fairly big, the moors in question are considerably bigger, so it took us over two hours just to find the cattle. They had split into two groups, so, while Jen and the farmer drove the larger group two miles back through the bogs to the farm, I decided to go after the smaller group on my own. But when I returned to the hilltop where I had seen them grazing about half an hour earlier, they had buggered off. I couldn't find them anywhere.

Then I remembered a Ray Mears TV programme from a couple of weeks back, and I had a cunning plan: I decided to return to the spot where the cattle had been grazing and try to follow their tracks. And you'll never guess: it only bloody worked! There were hundreds of hoof-prints on the hillside, but I reasoned that the freshest ones would be the ones that hadn't filled with water, so I followed the tracks about a quarter of a mile and found the cattle hiding below a ridge. Tonto, eat your heart out!

Then there was only the small matter of getting the nine cattle to walk the two miles or so to the farm. As I was doing this, I decided to invent some names for what I had now started to think of as my cows. Here are the rather clever names I came up with (with apologies to Peter McGrath):

  • Black Bastard
  • Other Black Bastard
  • Brown Bastard
  • Brown-and-White Bastard
  • Black Bastard's Calf
  • Other Black Bastard's Calf
  • Brown Bastard's Calf
  • Brown-and-White Bastard's Calf
  • Lame Bastard

The way I saw it, these cattle are closely related, so they should all have the same surname.

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Filed under: Nonsense

Richard Carter

A fat, bearded chap with a Charles Darwin fixation.

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