When I turned 50 years old we bought a small hobby farm. It was a lifelong dream come true for me. My husband not so much, but he was willing to give it a go. We had two horses at a boarding barn, and the thought of having them at home was a driving factor. We had 5 acres on a sloping hillside, a nice barn that met our homesteading needs perfectly, and a simple house near the top of the property with a beautiful view.
I have many stories about adjusting to farm life, but those are for another time. This story is about cows. Actually it's mainly about one love sick cow. We called him Romeo.
We first forayed into bovine ownership with a couple of Jersey bulls that were bottle babies. Big and Rich were delivered to us at about a week old. Skinny and scrawny, scared and bawling. We bottle fed them, doctored them, and had the vet help us turn them into steers, as we had no experience with that, in the beginning of our farm experience. They not only survived, but thrived. Next came Gladys. We decided, after some research, that a small cow breed was the perfect choice for a small property. I previously had been to a property where Dexter cows were raised, and I fell in love with them. They are a hardy breed of small cows perfect for milking or for beef. We purchased a two year old Dexter cow that had already given birth to one healthy Dexter and was expecting another in a few months. We brought her home and named her Gladys. She was a red cow with a set of short curved horns and a very serious expression. Gladys immediately became pasture boss, protecting and disciplining our young Jersey boys.
We shared a long driveway with a county commissioner. He owned the large property behind and above us, but out of our sight. His home was at the very top of a small mountain, which had been cleared by early pioneers into one large open space surrounded by trees but with an incredible view of the Willamette valley stretching as far as the coast range. He had a herd of about 20 beef cows that roamed the mountain and clearing near his house. We would often see them from our kitchen window at the back of the house. His fence butted up against our property at the rear. Some of his fencing was questionable, and my husband and son were both recruited at different times to help find a stray that had wandered away from his herd.
The commissioner's Angus bull was getting old and slowing down. Commish decided it was time for some new blood. His old bull was dispatched to the butcher, and he brought home a young black and white Hereford Angus mix. His young bull had a bevy of bovine beauties all to himself. They flirted and sashayed around him, doing their best to entice him. He wasn't interested. His attentions were elsewhere. He had spied our cow Gladys and become infatuated. She was not in season, and had no reason to be interested in him. She was busy with her own little herd, the Jersey boys and her own little Dexter son named Barney that she had given birth to on our property. She and Barney had been allowed to spend some time on Commish's property, so she was expecting again, courtesy of his previous bull, and was back in her own territory, tending to her own little brood, and knitting booties.
By now we had named Commish's bull Romeo. He would stand on his side of the fence for hours, staring and mooning over Gladys, who barely knew he existed. Finally, she would get annoyed when he kept calling out to her, and would shake her horns angrily at him, sometimes pawing the ground in irritation. He would wander away dejectedly, head down, hooves shuffling in the dirt.
I had to leave for my job at O dark thirty in the morning. Before I left for work I would slip on my muck boots and head out to the barn to feed horses and cows and open the chicken coop so the hens could free range when it got light. One dark rainy morning I stepped out of the front door onto the porch and heard heavy breathing. I froze, terrified that there was some creep just outside of the shine of the porch light. I was alone on the farm, as my husband was on the road, working. As my eyes adjusted, I realized that it was Romeo standing in my yard. He had found a way over or through the fence of his pasture. I was relieved it was just a bull and not a human, but I was annoyed at being startled like that. I yelled and stomped my feet and watched Romeo head back up the driveway to his own property and jump over a low spot in the fence back into his own pasture. Commish patched that part of the fence that evening, after I let him know.
This became a routine over the next few months. I would find Romeo in the yard at various times of the day or night, staring at Gladys while she ignored him or shook her horns at him in irritation. Sometimes Commish or his wife spotted him and made quite a display of returning him to their property with buckets of grain or a cattle prod. I chuckled at how hard they worked at it. Romeo and I had come to an understanding. I would shake my fist, stomp my foot, and yell at him firmly to "Go Home Romeo!" He would run home, always finding a spot to jump back over the fence, despite Commish's efforts to patch the low spots. At one point I was driving up the driveway after work and Commish happened to be behind me in his car. There was Romeo in my yard. I rolled down my window and did not even get out of the car, shook my fist at Romeo and off he ran, jumping over the fence back home. Commish's jaw was slack with surprise. One Saturday afternoon I had erected a temporary fence to let the horses graze in the yard, and that darn Romeo knocked it down to get closer to Gladys. My mare chased Romeo home and came back on her own to graze. The next day I was making pancakes and bacon in the morning, while my husband was in the shower. He stepped out of the bathroom to see the griddle with pancakes and bacon cooking, but I was not to be seen. He opened the front door, to find me heading back in, wearing a fuzzy pink robe and slippers, holding a spatula in my hand. "What in the world are you doing?" he asked. "Oh, just chasing a bull home," came my response. He just shook his head. The pancakes didn't burn. I had this bull thing down to a science.
The final straw came when I stepped out to head to work one morning and stepped into a fresh cow pie in my work shoes. Romeo had pushed the envelope this time, coming up onto my porch. I had a word with Commish, saying that something had to be done. His bull was growing bigger and leaving large divots in my yard, and the cow pie on the porch was the final straw. He agreed, saying that once a bull gets out of a fence it's almost impossible to keep one in. Neither of us could figure out why Romeo was so infatuated with Gladys when she had no interest in Romeo. I guess it was because she played hard to get. Sadly, I found out later that Romeo went to the butcher instead of the auction. Commish felt that Romeo didn't have the drive to be a herd bull, so it was best to send him to freezer camp. Commish brought home a nice red bull that strutted and swaggered, surrounded by his new herd of buxom bovines, and didn't even give Gladys a glance. If Gladys missed the adoration of Romeo, she never let on.
