Once Upon A Cowpat by Graham Hutchins

Author:Graham Hutchins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction/General
ISBN: Once Upon A Cowpat
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd
Published: 2008-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

13

A load of bull and mad cows

The relationship between man and beast in mustering is prescribed. The musterer, usually, has the upper hand. Animals in less controlled environments sometimes reverse the roles, or have the opportunity to do so, and send humans scuttling.

Once a couple of Australian tourists interrupted their gentle amble through the dairy lands of Manawatu to collect a bounty of field mushrooms. A roadside paddock was pockmarked with healthy clumps of the white-topped delicacy and before too long the Australians were over the fence and heading for the mushrooms, jabbering loudly.

‘You realise we might be trespassing, mate,’ one said to the other.

‘Stone the crows, Blue. Kiwi farmers don’t spit the dummy unless you leave their gates open.’

‘Can you see any bulls, Blue?’

The paddock seemed bereft of livestock. The tourists, secure in the knowledge that they were in a land without dingoes, poisonous snakes, nasty spiders, or strange lizards that, even if they didn’t inflict a fatal bite, could render you liable to break out in sores for six years, advanced on the mushrooms. There were no Kiwi cassowary birds to attack you if you so much as looked them in the eye.

The tourists, reassured by the benign New Zealand rural environment, picked a beer crate’s worth of mushrooms, still jab­bering loudly. They came to a gentle rise in the paddock, an undulation that was barely discernible from the road. In the interests of filling a second crate they mounted the rise to find a veritable inland sea of mushrooms. And a bull.

The jabbering died a death. The colour drained from the tourists’ faces. The bull lying down in the lee of the rise was a monster. It was the size of a small truck. The tourists were a long way from the fence. To their credit they didn’t panic, although most of their blood would have been in their boots. Very slowly they began edging backwards away from the massive Jersey inseminator. The bull woke up and cast a huge, wary bull’s eye at the invaders. It was more a weary, sleepy eye and soon the bull returned to his slumbers, generally smelling the wild flowers and very much appreciating the warm late-afternoon sun.

After edging backwards for a few metres more, the Australians turned on their heels and ran like the clappers towards the fence. They reckoned they could hear the thundering of hooves behind them, but that was just their own heavy footfalls and pounding hearts. They half-dived, half-scrambled over the fence, ripping garments on the barbed wire, and collapsed in heaving heaps on the verge.

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