Nina and I knew that moving to a small, rural community would force us to make a few adjustments in our lives, but we never imagined that we would so quickly become bona fide cowboys!
Our little ranch house sits on three quarters of an acre of land and is surrounded on three sides by cattle pasture.
We get much amusement at watching "our" cows and we have made friends with them by feeding them oatmeal cookies.
Every once in a while one of them manages to somehow get over the fence and end up in our backyard. I call up the owner and he comes up to round up the escapee and move her back into her own pasture. This morning we awoke to find not just a cow in our yard, but that she had brought along her young calf as well.
I went inside to call the J.R., the owner, while Nina fed a few cookies to Mama Cow. The baby, meanwhile, apparently exhausted by her big adventure slept in the grass.
I got J.R. on his cell phone, but he was on his way to a doctor appointment and asked if I thought we could herd the cows back into their own yard. "Sure," I replied with only a small amount of confidence. "I'll see what I can do."
Without even bothering to Google "how to herd cattle back into their pasture," Nina and I went out in our pajamas to try our hand at becoming cowboys. We alternated between a strategy of coaxing the cows along with cookies and walking behind them, encouraging them to move in the other direction--towards the gate. Neither of these worked all that well, but finally Mama Cow, becoming increasingly annoyed at two fools following her around, found a low spot in the fence and managed to crawl back into the safety of her pasture. But the fence was too high for the baby to climb over and he was stranded on our side of the fence.
By this time, the mother was getting agitated and the poor little baby was scared to death. We continued to coax the little one along the inside of the fence, with Mama following along on the other side.
Eventually we got the little one back through the gate where he was reunited, happily, with his waiting Mom. Meanwhile the two buckaroos headed back to the ranch house for some grub.
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