Wild Cow Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

to get up to the feed trough and eat, and she walked the fence and bawled two straight days and nights. The third morning when I came down to feed, things were noticeably quiet, and when I glanced over the lot, I realized that the little dark-red heifer was gone. The gates were still fastened and there were no breaks in the plank fence and no sign of how she got out. I made a few inquiries around the Silas Kemp Wagonyard and over at Dorsey Grain Company behind the feed lot, but nobody had seen my heifer.
    The way you hunt stray cattle or stray horses if you know the lay of the land is to go to the spot that you think you would go if you were a stray heifer.
    When I finished feedin’, I started ridin’ out Town Creek up the railroad right of way that ran parallel to the creek and out through the west end of town. There was always plenty of fresh spring water in the creek and green grass up and down the banks and this by late summer would be an ideal place for a stray heifer. My hunch wasn’t too bad wrong because I picked up her track where she had drank, but she wasn’t stoppin’ to graze—she was travelin’ west, and when she hit the fence line in the west end of town where there wasn’t any more open land, she had drifted along the fence south to a public road that went west to the town of Garner.
    I met Henry Clark comin’ to town in a wagon. We visited a few minutes, and he told me that the heifer passed his house about daylight, when he was out at the barn by the road tendin’ to his stock. This was the first man that had seen my heifer and the distance he lived from town meant that she had gotten out about three or four o’clock in the morning.
    I picked up her track along the side of the road and her tracks showed she was steppin’ out pretty fast and still not stoppin’ to graze. Public country roads many times followed fence lines with the curve of a pasture or a field, and this road made a big, wide curve about three quarters of a mile and then turned back to the same generally westerly direction. The red heifer was goin’ west and had her mind made up about it. Her tracks showed very plainly where she had come to the curve in the road and jumped the fence.
    I took the staples a-loose and pushed the wire down and stepped my horse over the wire. I let the wire backup and tied it to the post—no real damage done—and followed her tracks, thinkin’ that she might be turnin’ back towards a creek that ran back towards the north. As I followed her tracks up to the road on the other side of the wide curve she had jumped back over the fence where the road had turned due west, and I let the fence down in the same manner as the first one and picked up her tracks in the soft dirt of the gravel road.
    A little before noon I rode in to Mr. Vance’s store at Garner. I knew Mr. Vance well; he was a fine old country merchant and a gentleman of the old school who was interested in his community and the welfare of his neighbors.
    I got a cold Coke out of the icebox, bought a box of cookies, and was talkin’ to Mr. Vance and tellin’ him about my heifer when a cute little cotton-headed girl maybe five years old came runnin’ in at the back door of the store. She didn’t talk plain enough to say “Mr. Vance” but she said something that sounded like it, and her face was all a-beam and her bright blue eyes were wide and joyful as she blared out, “Mr. Bance, Reddy Calf com’d home!”
    Mr. Vance shot a quick glance at me and went to talking to the little girl and pattin’ her on the head and tellin’ her very gently that he was sure glad that her Reddy Calf had come home. With this she dashed out the back door and ran across the lot to a rather run-down little old house that the front porch was almost level with the ground.
    Another cotton-headed girl maybe ten years old was feedin’ Reddy Calf cornbread out of a pan and a babygirl maybe two years old was sittin’ on top of Reddy Calf, and the one that had