What is March madness? To many it’s a bunch of basketball games, but to me today it was Pancho and Lefty running down Mosquito Lake Road.
It all started when I heard Anna, the guard cow, mooing her pretty little head off. She only does this when there’s trouble. Knowing this, I grabbed my camera and ran out on to the front porch. When what should I see, but Irish, Pancho and Lefty looking back at me.
I wondered how they got out. I ran back in the house and called my dad. He immediately came out and together we discovered Andy standing at a wide-open gate. Irish started trying to round them up, but he’s young and all he ended up doing was working Pancho and Lefty in to an absolute frenzy. We put him in the house. I tried to go along side them and move them toward the pasture. This was not working at all. The grass it seems is greener on this side of the fence and they were eating up a storm. My dad yelled for me to go get a bucket of grain. I did and I shook that think like it was a maraca, but nothing. They weren’t interested in the least.
We decided to let them calm down for a few minutes when suddenly Lefty decided he wanted no part of Fort Flashback and started heading down the driveway for Mosquito Lake Road with Poncho his trusty companion right by his side. Yes, he even walks on the left. Out they went and kept on going. I was screaming at the top of my lungs and shaking my oats like a crazy person and they didn’t even look back. I wondered for a brief moment if this meant they were on the lamb?
My dad went and got his CRV and I stood helplessly watching.
Just as we got in the car, contemplating what to do when we actually got close. We didn’t want to scare them off the hill or into a car or anywhere else.
They suddenly turned around and started running back at full tilt. Seriously, today was the day the cows came home. You hear about it, you say it, but now I’ve lived it. Why did they come home? We have no flipping idea. As I said this is March madness. I went to the barn and got a rope to tie around Lefty’s horns as Maryruth taught me. Eventually I got him rigged up. When he has this pink and purple striped rope wound from one horn to the other across his forehead he looks like a humungous hippie.
Luring him with cow cookies we walked down to the pasture and my dad opened the gate. One down.
Pancho was a little more difficult. He was very happy mowing the lawn behind the house near an old tractor we found on the property. My dad stood on one side so he could keep Pancho from running for the road again. I kept poking him with the cattle stick Little Chris Donaldson gave me. Pancho meandered up by my van
and then headed for the rhododendrons, which I know, are poisonous so we started waving our arms and forcing him down the hill toward the pasture. A while later we got him in the gate. My dad exhausted turned to me and said completely deadpan, “It’s a damn good thing UCLA wasn’t playing or you’d been doing this by yourself”. That’s my dad.
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