Cow tales

Garry has a few cow tales this past week or so...and I am finally getting around to telling them. Tonight Garry and I  were going to the magazine (store) to buy ice cream and we followed the cows down the street, since our dry cows and heifers had just turned in the gate as we were going out. When we got up to the cross street, one of the young heifers was causing a problem, yelling and trying to go up it when she wasn't supposed to, the reason became visable when one of the herders chased her little friend back out of the lane by the church, she had gone the wrong way. The cows coming home is a bit of an event every evening, people sit out by the road waiting for their cows to come home, the people from the other streets come down the crross streets to meet their cows and separate them from the herd and follow them home. Most of the older cows will turn in to their homeyard without any assistance after the first week or so in the spring, but the young ones can get into trouble sometimes.

Genya milking the cows

This year the ladies always get our cows in the evening, and often put them out in the morning to join the herd as they go down the street. We have rotating milkers, it seems. Right now Yana is gone, her mother Genya is milking with another middle aged lady, who Garry says seems happy, she hums as she works. Unlike the other people in the village, who send out the same cows everyday, milking or not, we only send out some older heifers and dry cows. Since the cows who are not milking changes, we send out ten cows everyday, but the ones we sent out in April are not the same ones that go out now. The guys herding yelled at Yana one day when one of the "new" dry cows was difficult to keep with the herd the first day she went out. Maxim had a word with him the next day, when Yana was reluctant to chase the cows out to the road to wait for the rest the next morning. Last week Infeshah (our moldy cow as Garry calls her since she is a peculiar color) went out for her first day after going dry, so Garry helped chase the herd out and stayed for a while until she settled down and stayed with the rest of the cows.

That's Infeshah coming back from her first day out 

While they were chasing the cows down the street that morning a small sporty car came up behind the herd, and the driver acted like an idiot, trying to get through the herd with his car. Some cars, move slowly through, some hang back and wait, and some seem to be trying to hit a cow to express their need to show how the cows are slowing down their day, horn blowing, and vroooming the engine. This guy having worked his way through the cows, put the pedal to the metal, without considering or maybe knowing that there is a curve at the top of the street. Garry said the car went too wide, and tipped over the side of the road, rolling the car all the way over, landing on its wheels in the deep ditch. He said they ran to see if the driver was hurt, but the guy got out of the car, yelling and then got behind the wheel and after a few tries, drove out of the ditch and off...

One day last week Garry and I were coming back from Dnepro in the afternoon, and he drove out to one of our corn fields to cut some cornstalks. He has been cutting about 15 stalks everyday to feed to his two sick cows. One cow has been doing poorly for a while and someone came up with the idea of tying her out in the yard, so for the last couple weeks she has been tied up in different spots in the yard, sometimes eating off the grass/weeds in parts of the yard. One day she had strawberries when someone put her too close to the patch.

The other sick cow, the red one, had twins a few weeks ago, and had gotten really sick after with infection (she didn't pass the afterbirth.) One day Garry decided to put her outside last week, and convinced she was dying, he didn't bother to tie her up. She walked into the garden, ate a number of corn plant, the tops off some beets, tripped over Garry's drip lines. Since Garry now knew she liked corn, he started cutting her some field corn everyday. Thursday morning Garry went outside and discovered that she had eaten off more sweet corn, later  he went down to the magazine to see if they had gotten any rope in when I asked why she didn't get tied up over the first incident, and came back with a chain.

our grazed garden 

 Anyway it was about 6 pm when we drove out to the cornfield, and there seemed to be some problem because the herders of the day (the owners take turns) bring the cows back from pasture about 7 pm and there were about 25 or 30 cows just at the top of our street, one standing on the road, some eating grass, there was one young lady with them, and she had not noticed that some - including Infeshah, our odd-colored cow, who went dry recently- had wandered into someone's field, so Garry got out of the car to chase them out of what seemed to be a radish field, which now has footprints marring it and even some munching of plants, oddly they seemed to be eating more weeds than plants. Garry was wondering how the herd had gotten separated into two groups.

Maxim had a explaination the next morning, it turns out that after lunch that day, the herders decided to have a bit of vodka, and then they fell asleep. When they woke up they had a big problem! Everyone was upset when the a bunch of cows came wandering into yards over an hour early, when no one was expecting them.