Frosty the Lost Cow

Things were pretty quiet, morning coffee...the sound of birds chirping, a donkey braying out in the woods.

Then it got rather noisy.

The hound dogs starting braying like crazy.  Opal and Fred snorted and trotted back and forth in their small pasture.

We heard the bellering of a cow.  I mean not just the moo moo sort of thing either.  A long mournful all out gosh awful noise of a cow looking for something.

Down our driveway came a black angus type cow.  She was on the move.  Our coffee sat on the table as my husband moved outside to see what was going on.

The cow had orange insecticide tags in her ears, but no numbers or other markings.

I began with the phone calls.

We ruled out the immediate neighbors and our 'phone tree' kept working until someone recalled some fellas looking for a black cow driving up and down one of the gravel roads.

One neighbor tracked down the fellas looking for the 'lost' cow and gave him our phone number and directions to our place.

Meanwhile the cow 'Frosty' [named as such because her ears had been badly frost bitten at some point in her life], settled down next to our little Dexter heifers and began to eat.

Frosty, as it turns out, had come from another town about 15 miles away and had been taken to a farm about 3 miles away as the crow flies.  Over night she escaped the farm where she was to be bred...then was found by the sheriff's department on the highway.  She was then put in a corral for safekeeping at a horse farm about 2 miles away.

Frosty escaped the horse farm and made her way I suppose either by road or through fields and the woods to our place.

The owner was extremely relieved to have found his  'cow'. 

I guess this is just an example of how hard rural folk will work to find out who owns an animal.  Everyone on my ridge and surrounding area worked hard on the phones and by vehicle to track down Frosty's owner.

It was a fine day.