My last entry said that the rest of the day was pretty uneventful, but the day was still young. I cleaned up, and that afternoon, we went back to the gully where the cow had met her demise. I still wanted to read the number on the ear, so I brought my rope. I have told you before that I am no artisan with a lariat, but I surpassed myself this time. It took me embarrassingly long to rope a cow that could not evade or run. To my credit, I will say that there were some very awkward branches preventing me from making a normal throw, but by underhand pitching, I could throw the loop over between the horn and the limbs. I actually got the rope on the horn once or twice, but it slipped off as I tried to take up slack. At one point I looked down on my hand and saw that a maggot had hitched a ride on my rope and was now crawling on me. Finally, I got the rope around her whole head, pulled it up a little bit and managed to read the number. Simple, task complete. You are probably now wondering what I had been wondering up to that point. How to get the rope off.
I decided that I would have to pull her out. She was still too heavy to get her out by hand, so I got a ratchet strap out of the truck. Tied a bowline, hooked on to the end of the rope (the draw for the gully was too long to get close with the truck) and got her up into the draw. One final pull was too much, though and I broke the strap. This dead cow is now beating me if we are keeping score in terms of straps as I had lost a tow strap in the gully earlier in the day. Now, comes the rough part. I had to force myself close enough to the animal to work the loop off with a hoe. I did not want to touch the thing for sure and yanking it around after it had been dead for 24 hours only caused an unholy and vicious stench and vile liquid to emerge from the carcass. I could only manage to get close enough with a hoe to work the lariat for a few seconds at a time. In the movie “Rob Roy” the hero manages to evade capture by forcing open a very similar cow, removing the innards and taking refuge inside. Yes, indeed, there would have been some very happy British Soldiers that day if it were me. Even if my love of freedom compelled me to force my way inside the carcass, the Soldiers would have surely noticed the intense hacking and retching sounds that the old dead cow was making.
Not much else of note has happened in the last week, ranchwise. We took a day trip to Schlitterbahn as God had blessed us with some free tickets. Saturday morning I was at the church for a work day, but got out of there as soon as I could when I learned that the burn ban had been lifted until this morning. We had several weeks worth of house trash in cans, and some old brush piles from when we had the house put in a year ago. It was hot outside, but we did our best to burn as much as we could in our burn box. We didn’t get it all, but I did manage to push the bigger logs over to the burn box with the Kubota. That along with some mowing we had done really made an improvement in our front yard. Furthermore, Anna just came in from planting some rose bushes as well. I’ll put up a picture soon.
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