Oh, the wonder of cows

As in, they make me wonder WHY I even bother with them!  

Grace is always waiting nearby at milking time, 6:30 A.M. and P.M.  She isn't necessarily beside the barn every time, but she has always been within calling distance for the six months I've been bringing her in twice daily.  

This morning, no Gracie.  I called and called.  I walked out in the pasture to the point, which is about as far back as my knees want to go these days.  It didn't help that the fog was so thick you could have cut it with a knife, so that even with the flashlight I could only see about six feet in front of me.  It isn't like Gracie not to come when I call, because she knows she will receive some sweet feed when she comes.  

I decided to step inside the house and wait it out.  My knees weren't going to allow me to walk much more anyhow, and I knew the cow would eventually show up, bawling her whispery bellow as always, with the other two behind her.  I was pretty calm until an hour had gone by; it is totally uncharacteristic of a milk cow to stay away from the barn at milking time.  At 7 o'clock the rain started pouring down.  I woke Cliff up so I'd have a shoulder to cry on, and he grumbled and mumbled as he drank his coffee and ate his cereal.  "They must have gotten out," I said.  "I'll bet a limb has fallen on the fence again and knocked it down.  They're probably over on the Westerman property with Steve's cows."

Any time I have missing cows, that's usually where we find them, because they tend to go where other cows are... and oftentimes one of them is looking for a bull, although that wouldn't have been the case this time.  Steve has always been very patient with us when we call and tell him our cows are with his.  He's a nice, easy-going man.

However!!!!  Two-and-one-half hours after milking time, with rain pouring down, I looked out the front door and spotted the cows in our pen where neighbor David used to keep his horse.  Once they are in there, there's no direct route to the barn:  They have to go round-about to get out of that pen, come around through the pasture, and walk into the pen by the barn.  

I donned the most water-proof nylon coat I own and Cliff said, "You're going out to chore in the rain?"

"That's how I've done it all my life," I said.  Of course I don't literally milk in the rain, because I milk inside the barn.  But I did get pretty wet walking out there.  I had to meet the cows halfway down the hill because the poor souls had forgotten how to get out of the pen they were in.  *sigh*

It's OK.  I'm so relieved all is well that I'm not even mad at them.

Lazarus

Thanks to Daylight Saving Time, I am STILL doing my chores in the dark every morning.  There are lights in the barn, thank goodness, but I have to take the flashlight out to locate the cow and calves, and also just to find my way to the barn.  The only thing more difficult than doing chores in the dark would be doing chores in the dark when it's raining.  Not that I'm complaining, because we sorely need the rain (an inch so far) that we're getting as I make this entry.

It wouldn't be so bad if I was still letting the calves do the milking for me, but since the cow's teats still have scabs on them from Henry (the calf with an underbite) nursing her, I'm milking her twice a day.

Thank goodness Grace was waiting near the barn when I was ready to milk, so I didn't have to walk all over several acres in the rain calling her.  But there is something very unpleasant about milking a wet cow.  Water drips down onto the person milking, and also into the bucket.  Since I wasn't saving any milk for the house, at least the water in the milk wasn't a big deal.  The calves don't care.

We bought a very expensive Holstein bull calf earlier this week:  My plans are to keep Henry, the calf with the dental problem, on the bottle or bucket, and eventually wean him early.  Then I'll let the new guy and Hope nurse the cow.  I was going to simply call the new calf "The Holstein", since he is the only one of that breed on the place and I figured we'd end up calling him that all the time anyhow.  But this morning he named himself.

When I entered the calf lot with a milk bucket, a nursing bucket, and a flashlight in hand, I saw the two older calves out in the rain, wishing they could get through the fence to Grace.  I figured one-week-old Holstein was in the calf stall, warm and dry.  I put my buckets in my "milking parlor" and then went to check on him.  Well, my heart stopped when I saw him laid out on his side, eyes half-closed and no indication that he was breathing.  I nudged him with the toe of my boot.  No response.  $425 dollars laying dead on the straw.  

"Oh come on, don't be dead!" I pleaded, nudging him a little harder with my toe.  He was limp as a dishrag.  I felt his body, and he was warm.  His nose was wet.  "OK, he can't have been dead long," I thought.  "I'll see if I can revive him somehow."  

When I started trying to get him to a more upright position, though, he began to wake up, and struggled to his feet, not gracefully, but quickly.  There was nothing wrong with him after all.  Baby Holsteins have such a huge frame, it seems as though they need a little time to get used to their massive bodies, and they sleep most of the time for a few days.  It seems to take them longer to get used to just walking around.  They are much clumsier than my fine-boned little Jerseys:  They will try to kick up their heels and fall down in an ungainly heap.

However, I have raised at least 200 bottle calves in my time, and I have never seen a living calf appear to be as dead as this one.

So his name is now Lazarus, because he was resurrected from the dead this morning (so it seemed).  Once he was on his feet, he immediately began looking for a nipple and even began bawling to let me know he was starving.