Cow Sense and Nonsensibility

It was a pleasant enough day for a stroll in the country, a day hike from the Town of Ryton to Hinksbottom village. For Randall it was an opportunity to evaluate Debbie as a potential spouse, to do so at leisure and in isolation from her friends. For Debbie it was an opportunity to try out her new gun. 

Randall was an odd looking fellow, resembling a praying mantis from a distance, picking out long ponderous strides, one for every two taken by Debbie. Debbie however was an ordinary looking woman, perhaps thirty years of age, easily lost in a crowd, though robust and hearty. They had been dating for several weeks, platonic, with no obvious route to flagrancy despite mutual interests of a technical nature.

They idled along dusty country lanes, smudged their way down mud-dirt tracks that had been churned-up and baked to the consistency of chocolate fudge in the summer sun. Along hedgerows they wandered, across heath, through fields of rapeseed, barley, and grass. Sheep grazing here, Friesians loafing there, bucolic in extremis, which called Randall to make sentimental effusions of the pastoral kind. Debbie, a military contractor, explained to Randall that satellite images reveal that cattle routinely face magnetic north or south when at rest. “Statistically-speaking, the same is true of roe deer”, she said. Randall, a telephone engineer, saw beauty in this.

They walked past a farmhouse, the barn doors were opened but the farmer was nowhere to be seen, working the land, they assumed. Across another heath, a wooden fence-style presented a challenge for towering Randall, so squat-Debbie offered a hand, which he accepted. There was electricity, and they should have kissed, because this was their magic moment, but they were diverted by the bellowing of a cow, another Friesian, its head stuck in a large tree in the middle of the field.  The bellowing was urgent and insistent, unlike Randall and Debbie’s romantic dalliance.

Debbie released Randall’s hand from her iron grip, and they walked over to the tree, to the cow, to inspect. The cow had its head stuck entirely through the tree, as through the eye of a giant needle. There as a fissure in the tree, which Randall believed to be a sycamore, but Debbie insisted was an elm.

“Didn’t the elm trees all die off from some kind of disease?” asked Randall.

“Dutch elm”, said Debbie, “This is an English elm”. She was emphatic, and Randall sensed a steely will in this small woman. He could live with that.

Their thoughts turned to the cow, and what to do about the poor beast. Its head was bigger than the aperture through which it had been thrust, and given that the cow had protruding horns, it was difficult to imagine how the head could be withdrawn, except by great force whilst twisting the boxy thing around, ninety degree, in an unnatural manner.  The trapped beast followed their movement as best it could, wild-eyed and frothing, stamped its hooves and snorted.

“It has horns, so it must be a bull”, exclaimed Randall, almost touching the cow on the head.

Debbie looked at the hind quarters, bent over, studying the cow’s undercarriage, “then it is evidently the beneficiary of gender reassignment surgery”.

Did she deadpan or is she deadpan, wondered Randall. It mattered.

Randall joined her at the rear of the beast and peered at the nether regions, not entirely sure of what he was looking at, being a city-dweller. He bobbed and weaved a bit, looking for something, and after careful consideration, he deferred to Debbie. “Have we got our terminology right”, he asked, “isn’t a bull a type of cow? Isn’t “cow” the generic term for a…”, he seemed a bit unsure where to go with this, “for a cow?” A useless tautology, he decided to move on. “What shall we do?”

A torturous discussion ensued, regarding their obligation as ramblers. Should they just leave the poor, distressed beast, or should they intervene. Randall observed that foreign correspondents in war zones are confronted by this kind of dilemma every day, what would they do? Debbie, as a defense contractor, knew the type.  She explained that they are promiscuous drunks, swashbuckling through life without empathy. They would probably just leave the cow to die, then write about the encounter but with dispassionate brevity, Hemingway dialed in. Randall's knowledge of dial-tones, articulated at length, shed no light on the matter. 

They agreed on a strategy. Debbie would push, Randall would pull. There was momentary confusion over assigned position and orientation. Randall would push, Debbie would pull.   Neither was very keen on touching the beast, so Randall put on a pair of woolen mittens, and Debbie extracted a bungy cord from her backpack and cinched it around the cow’s tail.  On the count of three they pushed and pulled, at first with vigor and then with vim, but the cow, still bellowing, would not be dislodged. They tried again, to no avail. Randall agreed to lope back to the farmhouse, to get help from the farmer; Debbie would tend to the cow, though how?

Thirty minutes later he returned with a chainsaw. “No farmer, but I’m sure he won’t mind if we borrow his chainsaw”.

Debbie was impressed, “you know how to use it?”

“Not exactly, but I’ve seen how they are used in movies”.

Debbie looked skeptical, “I have a better idea”, she rummaged around in her backpack, and from it extracted a large handgun, silver, of feminine styling.

“My god, a gun!”, exclaimed Randall, “do you know how to use it?”. It was his turn to be impressed.

“Not exactly, but I’ve seen them use in movies”. Still deadpan.

A strange debate followed. 

What if we cut down the tree, it falls over and kills the cow? Or kills one of us? Besides you’d have to stand on the cow’s back to get to the tree, which is precarious. If you cut the tree close to the ground, the tree will topple, the force might be so great that it could catapult the cow up into the air; its body might fly over that hill and all the way to Staffordshire, while we are left here holding the head in an entirely different county.

Yes, but what if you shoot the animal but miss? What if you fire at point-blank range and fragments of skull explode out like shrapnel, blind one or both of us? What if we kill the cow, leave it here to rot, and the authorities decide to investigate? Do you have a license for that firearm? 

“Excuse me!”

Randall and Debbie are momentarily stunned.

“Did you say something?” Randall, chainsaw in hand, looked at Debbie. Debbie, revolver in hand looked at Randall.

“Excuse me, but can I have some say in this?”, it was a mellifluous voice, between a tenor and bass, and it originated from the front-end of the cow.

This particular cow, Flo, was preternaturally intelligent, sensitive in nature and quite gifted in the arts. She was not afraid of death, neither the manner of death nor the eternal damnation, but she was very concerned about the timing. Not to say, of course, that she wouldn’t prefer a painless and dignified death, witnessed, if possible, by loved ones. Not to say that she wouldn’t delight once more, in a glimpse of the eternal, but why here and why now? Why these two humans as my witness? So, she intervened.

“Looky here, people”, said Flo. “I think we’re being a bit rash”.

Shocked doesn’t even begin to describe the state into which the two humans were thrown. Randall, aghast, stepped back, tripped over a tree root, and nearly landed on the chainsaw. Debbie, pistol held aloft, squeezed the trigger involuntarily, and fired a shot into the tree. A small branch snapped off and fell harmlessly to earth, green spikey capsules revealing that the tree was of the horse chestnut variety.

“I mean, it’s not like this presents a clear and immediate danger to you. The only entity at risk is me, the cow, and I say let’s not be so hasty”, added Flo.

“The cow can talk!”, said Randall, jaw agape.

“What hath God wrought?”, cried Debbie, wobbly, scared, she reached back to her Baptist upbringing, found solace in brimstone and fire, “It’s an abomination!".

“Whoa there, let’s ease up a bit on the rhetoric and the biblical mumbo”, said Flo, “An aberration, perhaps, but I am not an abomination, no more than you are, dear woman… Debbie? Have I got that right? Debbie”.

“It’s a talking cow” said Randall, “it can talk. It uttered something that sounded like your name”. He pointed at Flo, wild-eyed.

“Oh, that’s such a trope!”, said Flo, “please let’s get over the talking cow thing, move on to the substance of what I am saying”.

There was a moment of reflection. Debbie apologized for her overreaction, felt ashamed, and committed to do better in the future. Randall, his command over reality somewhat restored, apologized too, not least for threatening decapitation. There was a moment of kumbaya. Flo was forgiving.

“The solution is counter-intuitive”, said Flo, “it requires not that you pull my head from the aperture, but that you push my body through. It is not just a fissure or an aperture, it is a mysterious portal, it will flex”.

“But we are here”, Randal said, as he walked towards Flo’s rump. He gave her a mittened pat, “and we are there”, he walked to the other side of the tree and faced Flo. “We are on both sides of the portal, communing with you, the one contiguous uninterrupted cow”. This stumped Flo, who mumbled something about how two alternative realities might be exactly alike, not very convincing. Debbie high-fived Randall and gave him a look that suggested that he might get lucky with her.

“Anyhoo, if you push instead of pull, I think we can resolve this predicament to everyone’s satisfaction”, said Flo, a little bit irritated with Randall, “but for the lack of purchase”, Flo pressed toward the tree and her hooves slipped on the dirt, “I could squeeze through without your help”. There was notable motion and progress, Flo’s shoulders were pushing the portal wider; it looked entirely possible for her to pass through the eye of this needle.

Randall and Debbie agreed to help, and within minutes, huffing and puffing, pushing, and shoving, Flo burst through the portal. 

Dark clouds rapidly formed in the sky, there was thunder, there was lightning, there was a whirlwind, there was hail and the ground beneath their feet rumbled, as if the earth was quaking, and then, just as suddenly, these other-worldly forces abated and dissipated. It was, once again a beautiful summer evening in the English countryside, Randall and Debbie were safe, they were standing, he with the chainsaw at his feet, she with the gun tucked into her belt. But Flo… Flo was gone.

By the tree, the portal closed, stood a stern looking fellow with a large forehead, wispy hair, penetrating eyes, a wide mouth in glum repose, the inner Flo revealed. He was dressed in the Victorian manner, hunched slightly, a purple cravat pocked out from his tightly buttoned frock coat, “Que peut importe l’éternité de la damnation à celui qui a connu, ne serait-ce qu’une seconde, l’infini délice ?”, said the man, formerly known as Flo.   There was a bungee cord hanging from his coattails.

Debbie was momentarily transfixed by the beauty of the words and the glory of the day. It was late afternoon now, the soft diffuse light made everything vivid and super-present, and her heart swelled with love, peace and joy.

“I’d better return the chainsaw”, said Randall.