The Cow Whisperer

It was just another drive home from church on a sunny (but cold) Sunday afternoon.

I was driving, and we had just turned on to the side road that would lead us to the road that runs by our cul-de-sac. Suddenly, traffic slowed in front of us, as the Webmaster and I beheld a extremely rare sight.

There were two cows walking across the street.

Now, while we live in the suburbs of Seattle, the area that we live in still has a number of farms – some of them working ones, others just a few acres of hobby farms. So we see cows often. Just not, you know, walking across the street on a Sunday afternoon. Which the kids were instantly excited about.

The cars in front of us were trying to get around the cows, but it wasn’t easy. These two red and white heifers (the Webmaster later told me that they were bull heifers with their horns cut down) were pretty skittish about the cars, so they were pacing unpredictably across the road. It looked like they had come down a private gravel driveway, but there was no way to tell instantly where they had gotten out.

Once we were the car closest to them, the Webmaster said, “I’m going to get out and see if I can herd them back up that gravel driveway.”

“Please be careful,” I said, with images of a two-cow stampede and my husband in the middle of it in my head.

Fortunately, the cows responded to the Webmaster’s approach, and he chased/herded them back up the drive to a grassy knoll overlooking the road. After we got home, the Webmaster drove back and the police were already there, trying to figure out where those poor cows belonged.

Ane was very impressed with her father. As she watched him shoo the cows back up to the grassy hill, she said, with awe in her voice, “Wow. I didn’t know that Daddy could speak cow!”

This entry was posted on Monday, January 19th, 2009 at 1:02 am and is filed under Children, Husbands, Life in the Pacific Northwest.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed and Both comments and pings are currently closed.