Read Online Chewing the Cud by Dick King-Smith - Free Book Online
Authors: Dick King-Smith
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later. It was Gladwyn's day off, and Myrle had walked out with me when I went to fetch the cows in. She stopped to pick some wildflowers from a bank, and I went over the hill.
When next I saw Myrle, she was on the other side of a fence, rather white about the face and very angry.
“That bloody Midnight!”
“Why, what happened?”
“The moment she saw me, she put her head down and started to paw up the ground, and then she gave a horrible kind of roar and came straight for me.”
“Good God, what did you do?”
“What d'you think? Got through this fence, of course. She's mad.”
“Gladwyn did say she had a funny look in her eye.”
“You should listen to what Gladwyn says in future.”
“Yes. She'll have to go.”
They all did, in the end of course, one way or another, Midnight and Polly and Thompson and Kicker and Cissie and Buttercup the boss and all the rest of them. A dairy cow's life is not often as long as it might be. The vet, the butcher, the slaughterman, they're all waiting, and seldom does anyone die in her bed. But the look of each and every one of them is clear in my mind.
One other bovine character who stands out in memories of Woodlands Farm was Ben-the-bull, so called to distinguish him from a friend called Ben. Ben-the-bull was an Aberdeen Angus just like those black beauties that had roamed the downs at Tytherington. Though you should never trust a bull, he was in fact very quiet and biddable. However, one never-to-be-forgotten day, Ben-the-bull escaped.
I had never been able to bring myself to run Ben out with the cows. Woodlands Farm was a very different matter from Tytherington, and it had a public footpath going right across it. Moreover, however quiet he seemed, bulls will be bulls, and I worried on the children's behalf.
So customarily he lived quite happily out in the orchard on a length of running chain and was brought into the yard for service (though we didn't pull any curtains).
On this occasion he had been for some reason tied up in the cowshed, with that same heavy metal that had once held Mobbs's bull. But, unlike Mobbs's bull, Ben had no horns, and when the cows had been milked and turned out, he had decided to go walkabout. He had slipped his thick neck out and, though all the doors of the cowshed had been left wide open, had decided for some good reason of his own upon a different means of exit. He set his brow against the wooden wall and pushed.
I know that this is what happened because at that precise moment I chanced to come out into the yard to see his head emerging through the cowshed wall, just as a circus dog jumps through a paper hoop. With a splintering crash his body followed while pieces of stout timber and planking flew in all directions. He lumbered off into the nearest field, called the Railway Ground, which had a heavy green-fodder crop of oats and vetches, and stood there belly-deep in the stuff, a few yards inside the gate.
Before I could move, Gladwyn arrived back from his breakfast, cycling into the yard. Catching sight of Ben staring owlishly at him, he did not dismount but with wild cries of Welsh anger rode straight into the field as ifto ram the great black barrel of a bull and fell off.
Alarmed by the sudden and noisy appearance of this human torpedo, Ben started off up the hill at a ponderous gallop, smashing his way through the tangle of oats and vetches, while Gladwyn, cursing horribly, struggled through them in a vain attempt to cut him off.
I was laughing so much that I couldn't do anything but managed to dash the tears from my eyes in time to witness a wonderful scene. I have only to shut them to summon it up now.
Ben had reached the public footpath, and he turned to gallop along it, directly across my field of vision. And because the path ran along the crown of the farm, making a near horizon, the picture was in stark silhouette against the morning sky.
Fit and furious and free now of the entangling crop, Gladwyn closed rapidly on the
When next I saw Myrle, she was on the other side of a fence, rather white about the face and very angry.
“That bloody Midnight!”
“Why, what happened?”
“The moment she saw me, she put her head down and started to paw up the ground, and then she gave a horrible kind of roar and came straight for me.”
“Good God, what did you do?”
“What d'you think? Got through this fence, of course. She's mad.”
“Gladwyn did say she had a funny look in her eye.”
“You should listen to what Gladwyn says in future.”
“Yes. She'll have to go.”
They all did, in the end of course, one way or another, Midnight and Polly and Thompson and Kicker and Cissie and Buttercup the boss and all the rest of them. A dairy cow's life is not often as long as it might be. The vet, the butcher, the slaughterman, they're all waiting, and seldom does anyone die in her bed. But the look of each and every one of them is clear in my mind.
One other bovine character who stands out in memories of Woodlands Farm was Ben-the-bull, so called to distinguish him from a friend called Ben. Ben-the-bull was an Aberdeen Angus just like those black beauties that had roamed the downs at Tytherington. Though you should never trust a bull, he was in fact very quiet and biddable. However, one never-to-be-forgotten day, Ben-the-bull escaped.
I had never been able to bring myself to run Ben out with the cows. Woodlands Farm was a very different matter from Tytherington, and it had a public footpath going right across it. Moreover, however quiet he seemed, bulls will be bulls, and I worried on the children's behalf.
So customarily he lived quite happily out in the orchard on a length of running chain and was brought into the yard for service (though we didn't pull any curtains).
On this occasion he had been for some reason tied up in the cowshed, with that same heavy metal that had once held Mobbs's bull. But, unlike Mobbs's bull, Ben had no horns, and when the cows had been milked and turned out, he had decided to go walkabout. He had slipped his thick neck out and, though all the doors of the cowshed had been left wide open, had decided for some good reason of his own upon a different means of exit. He set his brow against the wooden wall and pushed.
I know that this is what happened because at that precise moment I chanced to come out into the yard to see his head emerging through the cowshed wall, just as a circus dog jumps through a paper hoop. With a splintering crash his body followed while pieces of stout timber and planking flew in all directions. He lumbered off into the nearest field, called the Railway Ground, which had a heavy green-fodder crop of oats and vetches, and stood there belly-deep in the stuff, a few yards inside the gate.
Before I could move, Gladwyn arrived back from his breakfast, cycling into the yard. Catching sight of Ben staring owlishly at him, he did not dismount but with wild cries of Welsh anger rode straight into the field as ifto ram the great black barrel of a bull and fell off.
Alarmed by the sudden and noisy appearance of this human torpedo, Ben started off up the hill at a ponderous gallop, smashing his way through the tangle of oats and vetches, while Gladwyn, cursing horribly, struggled through them in a vain attempt to cut him off.
I was laughing so much that I couldn't do anything but managed to dash the tears from my eyes in time to witness a wonderful scene. I have only to shut them to summon it up now.
Ben had reached the public footpath, and he turned to gallop along it, directly across my field of vision. And because the path ran along the crown of the farm, making a near horizon, the picture was in stark silhouette against the morning sky.
Fit and furious and free now of the entangling crop, Gladwyn closed rapidly on the
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