A story told by Aaron

      Did you know you could get a horse stuck?  I got a horse stuck once.  I was trying to corral a cow so that I could treat her for mastitis.  She was wild and high-headed.  I chased her alongside a wet swale that she kept crossing.  I was afraid to make my horse go through it, but there was no other way to detach that cow from the swale.  She was using it to her advantage.

I finally decided that a horse could go anywhere a cow could go.  I was wrong.  As the horse stepped on that spongy ground, the sod rippled in waves for several feet around.  The horse broke through.  I stepped off.  I didn’t think I was going to get the horse out again.  There was no way to get a tractor in there to help.

I took the saddle off, and put it up on dry ground.  The horse worked and worked for a long time, and was finally able to get itself out.  It was weak and shaky.

But that cow still needed tending to.  I finally got her corralled.  Since she was so wild, once I got her in the corral, I was able to chase her straight into the chute.  I milked out the infected quarter, and injected antibiotic into it.

That cow watched me.  She marked me as public enemy number one.  She learned to tell me from every other human.  I locked her calf away from her so that it wouldn’t suck the antibiotic out of her udder.

The next day I had to treat her again.  She was hesitant about going up the chute, but she didn’t want to be in the corral with me; so when I got in, she ran up the chute.  I caught her in the squeeze chute, got her calf, and let it nurse her.  Then I milked the rest of the milk out of the infected quarter, and injected antibiotic again.  The cow was furious, and hated me more.

The next day she wasn’t about to go up the chute at all, and considered charging me instead.  She was the only white cow in the herd, but she wasn’t white inside.  She was mean, and getting meaner.  She had one horn that went up, and one horn that stuck straight out.  She tried really hard to stand her ground and bluff me; but I swelled myself up to look big and mean, and scared her to go up the chute.

She knew her head was going to get caught at the end, so she put on a surge designed to propel her through the opening of the chute before the headgate could close.  The headgate was hydraulically controlled.  I knew I’d only get one chance to catch her, if I caught her at all, so I had to time things just right.  My timing was almost just perfect.  I brought her to an abrupt stop, but her momentum and the sudden closing of the chute broke off the horn that stuck straight out.  She really did hate me then.  I was her tormentor.

The next day she met me at the fence.  She wasn’t scared of me anymore.  She was out to get me.  She followed as I walked along the fence.  She was so intent on getting me that she kept her nose right on the fence, and I almost led her right into the chute.  I never had a cow hate me so bad.

I thought about how I might apply this story to life, and I realized that I ran into that cow two more times in my life.

The next time was when I was in training as a medical technologist.  I’d finished my schooling, so I already knew quite a lot, which was fortunate, because the technologist who was assigned to show me the ropes was the cow with the wild horns.  When I walked into the room, she was standing there with her nose to the fence.

I recognized her right away.  I took one look at her and wondered, “What did I do?”

She was working the night shift because she didn’t like anyone else to be around.

“All the stuff you need is over there,” she said by way of training.

She glared at me for several days hoping that I’d mess up so that she could report my ineptitude to our supervisor and get me fired.  I asked a coworker what my problem was.

“Your problem is that you were hired by Jeff,” the coworker said.  “She hates Jeff with a passion.”

My trainer, the cow, was required to show me blood banking.  She had her own sequence of doing things, and wanted me to do things exactly the same way.  She threw some unrelated things into the mix, and lit into me when I didn’t include those steps in the right places.  I asked her why it mattered.  She exploded.  I laughed at her, which probably didn’t help things any.  Figuratively speaking she put her head down and came at me with her horn.

The next time I met the cow was at Holy Rosary Hospital.  Her problem was that she had her eye on getting the manager’s position when it came open, but it was given to me instead.  She did everything she could to get me to fail.  But come to think of it, she had her horns out before I ever got the manager’s position.  In her case I don’t know what I did wrong to become the enemy.

I guess some cows are just made to be mean.