Tuesday, November 19, 2013

cows and quiet

Our cows are missing.  They do this sometimes but never for so long (this is third day) and we've always been able to find them OR they came home and we even have HAY for them . . . sigh.  So I'm a little sick with worry, imaginings.  This is how I do it: with fear, with "we won't be able to do this again", with catastrophe especially as rifle season is next week.  And still hopefully it won't be any of that.  But that is my secret life.

So I went for a VERY long walk in the woods.  "Woods" being National Forest.  "Long" being like 3 1/2 hours of solid walking.  And tracking.  And listening.  And trying to figure.  So at this point I know some more places they have been, and some places they haven't been as of this afternoon.

But what I was really thinking about was how quiet it is.  The noise tells me there is a chickadee, there is a grouse, there is a crow, there is a deer moving almost silently.  At one point there was a distant chainsaw and every time it started up is sounded like "mooooo".  But it wasn't.  That was the only external to the forest sound tho.  No planes today.  And so much silence.  So much absolutely quiet.  I was thinking about how we generally live pretty quietly ourselves and yet this was so much more.  I was thinking about how it would drive so many batsh*t crazy to find themselves alone with only the noise in their heads.

Me, I loved it.  And as much as I was hoping to round a bend and find the cows and drive them home, I thoroughly enjoyed the tracking too.  The left palm was always open to feel it -- I noticed that.  The temperature varied wildly too -- in one spot, I'd be wishing I could take off my coat (bright pink a better choice than blue flannel for muzzle loader season) and then around the bend I'd be zipping it up to my neck and donning the wool hat and winter gloves.  Then soon enough, around a bend so that I wasn't strictly on the north side of the slope or the wind quietened, and I would be ripping the hat off my head and stuffing it into a pocket.

When I came out onto the road and walked the more public path home, I did not like it so much.  Two boys talking loudly at each other where George and Tina's old place burned down.  A truck pulling out of Coy and Roy's with a dog yapping after it.  Same dog approaching me eventually but easily turned with zero eye contact and gentle speaking.  The mailman -- he was the good part.  A white truck with old tires in the back driving past me then turning -- but he had not dumped them at the turnaround when I got there.  Finally sounds from our closest neighbor's house where he is trying to make a one house suburbia -- the one sodium vapor light was not enough so now he has two, and all sorts of spot light things on every corner of his house and building as though, as though.  But the our land, ours.  Safe.

Cows, please come home.  There's hay.  I know you want a bull.  But there's hay.

3 comments:

CG said...

My hips are sore this morning from walking so far in my muck boots. I got up and thought, "gee, Blaze wasn't *that* bad last night was he? Oh yeah, the walking." Jamie went out this morning and found them standing in one of the creek crossings. They came right on home. Oh, there's hay. MoMo likes adventure tho. We thought we were going to have to leave the husband home looking for them but he made it to library day! Now a strand of wire or two more up tomorrow at a crossing place.

Madcap said...

Very glad to hear that the cows came home!

Ann said...

Me, too! Sounds like you had an adventure too!