Death by cows (and an ornery red husky)
Do you have a four legged fur baby you love and adore? Don’t they just warm your heart? All cute and soft and full of personality.
So have they ever made you fear for your life?
“….wait, what?”
Hang with me. Many people have stories about almost dying. Here’s my weirdest one.
Death by Cows
Bauss, my four-year old husky, is “high energy” and requires an ungodly amount of exercise to remain manageable.
When we are feeling lazy, we take him to our family’s farm and make him run alongside the car while we drive down to a nearby pond. Once we get there, we’ll walk around for a little and then make him run back.
He loves it.
One day at the farm, Bauss and I were walking through some fields we’d never explored before. He picked up the scent of something more interesting and took off.
Great.
I turned the corner after him just in time to glimpse a streak of white and red zipping through an opening that lead down a ridge to another farmer’s property.
Double great.
Guys. When I finally caught up to him, this is what I saw: two dozen cows all lined up, their chests to the fence, fiercely eyeballing Bauss who was barking orders at them. He looked like a general rallying his troops for battle.
So, naturally, I pulled my phone out to video tape because it was just too darn cute. While recording, I inched closer…hoping to get a handle on his collar…slowly…softly…
Yep. He bolted.
He chased those cows around that field for hours. I was terrified they were going to trample him.
It was clear I wasn’t going to get this little turd on my own, so I recruited my husband, Joe, to help round him up. Upon his arrival, Bauss proceeded to herd the cows further into their pasture to only god knows where. All we knew was we couldn’t see or hear him anymore.
We looked at each other, sighed, and then ran after him.
I huffed and puffed over the bumpy ground, barely keeping up with Joe’s pace, praying I won’t sprain an ankle. Which of course, I did. But it honestly wasn’t very painful. I was mostly just relieved to have a valid excuse to stop and walk.
As Joe and I continued traveling in the direction Bauss and the cows ran off in, we finally heard his bark again. What a relief!
We still couldn’t see anything, though, so we climbed the fence into the cow pasture to get a better look. A hundred yards in, we came to a steep, cliff-like slope covered in blackberry bushes that overlooked a cow barn. It was clear the barking was coming from that barn.
At this point, Joe and I relaxed. It seemed the cows were content to stay in there all night so now we just had to think of a plan to get a hold of Bauss.
I knew being in the cow pasture probably wasn’t safe, but I thought we’d be fine where we were since there was this super steep hill separating us and the animals in the barn down below.
Yeeeah. Still wasn’t safe.
Bauss spooked the cows out of the barn. Instead of them escaping along the path below us, they found a side route leading to the top of the ridge right where we were standing.
I watched in slow motion as the two dozen cows stampeded up the side of the hill with their thunderous hooves. Halfway to the top, they caught wind of our scent, changed course, and sprinted straight at us.
In a matter of milliseconds they had us surrounded, our backs were to the thorn covered hill, and we had no way out.
All 24 cows slowed as they approached and I’m not kidding you, they got within a foot of us. That picture at the top of this article? Yeah. We were that close.
Freakin creepy.
They just stood there, staring deep into our souls with those vacant eyes, snorting and obviously agitated. My heart pounded in my throat and their musty breath was all I could smell.
And to make matters worse, Bauss was somewhere behind them, full of potential to spook those massive animals to trample us at any moment.
“They can sense your fear,” Joe cautioned, “Try to control your breathing and act confident.”
This was my exact response:
“I’m not fucking dying like this.”
I started desperately hacking my way through the blackberry bushes with shorts and a tank top on. All I could imagine was our bodies on the ground, slowly dying from cow after cow after cow stampeding over us, puncturing our lungs, crushing our skulls…
Too graphic?
YES I KNOW THAT’S WHY I WAS HACKING MY WAY OUT OF THERE.
Lucky for me, Joe had a better idea. He took a deep breath, calmed himself, and waved his hands high and wide saying, “Woah, woah.” After about 30 seconds of this, the cows started backing away like, “Oh, this guy’s legit. Carry on.”
I just stood there in the middle of the blackberry bushes like a dummy, bleeding down my legs, watching the cows clear.
Eventually, we exited the pen and left Bauss to hang with the cows. The next morning we found him lying next to the car we left behind, exhausted and absolutely filthy.
The end.
Have you ever been in a dangerous situation with an animal? Do you have an even weirder story about how you almost died? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.
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Originally published at ourweirdlives.com on February 28, 2017.
