Bullishness

Most of the cows are just about to calve, and soon the pasture will serve as nursery to 2 or 3 dozen calves with aunties babysitting and cousins gamboling on the hillsides.

One cow, though, is in heat. A cow in heat has misted herself with her best perfume, donned her most alluring set of spots, and when she swings her hips she turns a bull into 2000 pounds of sheer stumbling idiocy and headlong determination to "attend" to that cow wherever she goes.

Problem: We have 6 bulls on the place. To be accurate, only 2 of them have hit the 1-ton mark. The other four are around a year old and at 300 or 400 pounds each just THINK they are really big and impressive. They should have been steers by now (they shudder to think), but in the backward world of Farming with Floyd, such a thing would never happen.

So, this poor (?) cow has an entourage of 6 bulls, or 2 bulls and 4 young whippersnappers, chasing her around the property for days at a time. You might think we could put the bulls in a corral. You should see what a bull can do to a corral when he decides he doesn't want to be there anymore. You might think we could put the cow in a different pasture. Well, maybe if it were a mile or so away.

As it is the cow plays hard-to-get for several days and the men and boys in chase expend most of their energy showing each other up and telling fabled stories of former conquests before any of them is actually beckoned into the thicket (I wish they were so discreet).

As it is, there remains a strange parade ever-marching, criss-crossing the fields, stopping here and there for a minor tussel among the boys, where one loses a horn and another finds out he's not so big as he thought he was... but he forgets all that soon enough, when a sleek, spotted bovine thing of beauty goes waltzing by...