We’d just spent about three-and-a-half tedious hours in yet another interminable meeting of the county fair board. It was approaching 11 p.m., yet we still had to make time for the obligatory after-meeting meeting. It probably seems silly to spend half an hour standing in the cold and dark shooting the bull with the very same people with whom you’ve just spent the previous couple of hours arguing over such grand and minute issues, such as firing the stock contractor or replacing the ink cartridge in the office printer. But the after-meeting meeting is a nice way to wind down – a respite from the tension that can sometimes show up in a cold meeting room full of worn-out, overworked, and underpaid volunteers and committee members.
In keeping with tradition and, well, what most of us know, the talk usually circles around to calving season, haying season, crazy cows or stupid dogs. Livestock-related topics are always welcome. Somehow, we got rolling about my Old MacDonald’s Farm of an outfit, specifically the many and varied critters on my place that seem to be suffering from one or several mental impediments, with partial or complete senility being the most common symptom.
I have a dog – not an old dog, mind you – who, for some unknown reason, refuses to jump up on the bed of the flatbed. He’s perfectly able. I’ve seen him do it to escape the wrath of a cow that was blowing snot up his tail, but he is in no way willing under less stressful conditions. He’ll trot up with the other dogs when I whistle, but instead of jumping up or even making a halfhearted effort, he just sits at my feet looking up at me, waiting for me to pick him up and set him on the back of the truck. He’s always tail-wagglingly giddy if I toss him up there, but if I refuse, he has no qualms about trotting back to his dirty saddle blanket under the old chute.
Once I’d unloaded my frustrations about the defective dog, I really got on a roll. I complained about the mare who opens gates and leads the whole remuda on midnight runs around the valley. Next, I complained about the chickens that eat the dog food and the cat that sneaks into the chicken coop and eats the eggs. I didn’t even get to the story about my daughter’s goat that thought it was a dog or the baby duck her brother kidnapped from the brood that crossed the road in front of him every morning on his way to school. Finally, one of my after-meeting meeting co-participants incredulously interjected, “What the hell kind of asylum are you running out there in the Basin, anyway?”
Well, I didn’t have a real good answer, but I told him I’d do some research and get back to him.
A couple of days later, I was loading hay to feed the cows. I was coming to the end of the stack, and as I lifted up one of the bales of oats and triticale, I saw a cat dart out from the stack and past the tractor. When I looked at the spot from where I’d just lifted the bale, I could see two newborn kittens squirming around on a corner of a bale. I’m not sure how I avoided squashing them, but they seemed to still be fully functioning, or as fully functioning as a newborn cat can be, anyway.
I figured if I just left them, the mother would return and pack them off to a more suitable spot. I was almost right. When I returned for the next load, the dipstick of a mama cat had moved the babies to a spot further back into the stack, which didn’t help me at all. Furthermore, my old dog, Goose, who tolerates cats, except when they’re in the baby stages, had discovered the cat nest and had already gotten hold of one of the kittens, which didn’t survive. (Hmm … a dog named Goose? I’m beginning to see that some of my critters’ mental issues may revolve around a crisis of identity.)
I cussed the old dog and sent her back to the truck. Even though I’m not a real cat lover, I like to have a few of them around to eliminate rodent invasions, a job at which they are quite competent. Cats at our place eat dog food with the dogs. Other than that, they’re on their own. My relative indifference to the comfortable lifestyles of my cats notwithstanding, I now had a cat problem. I have just enough feline tenderness in my heart that I didn’t really want to squish the mama cat and her baby with a 1-ton bale of oat hay, nor did I wish for the dogs to have their way with the remaining kitten.
Under these battle conditions, we rigged up an old pallet and a piece of plywood that would keep the mutts out but allow the mama cat in to take care of her baby. An impenetrable fortress of hay and scrap wood was now a cat’s castle. Since I was now at the tail end of the stack, however, I couldn’t even retrieve one more bale without disrupting the delicate balance of nature that I’d just created. So, either 15 tons of hay was going to have to stay put, or I’d have to evict the single-parent feline family that had already suffered through a pretty rough day. I still had part of another stack I could feed from, but it was disappearing faster than the grass was growing, and turnout day was just a bit farther down the road than I could see. Mother Nature and I were once again embroiled in an epic struggle and a race against time. I may have to sell off some pairs or shell out for some $300 hay. What a conundrum I find myself in.
Or … I could just move the cats.
