Kat Dancing

Well....

Was woken Thursday morning by the herdsman's wife, who said he'd called from the parlor to say he wasn't feeling well, and could I please come milk? When I got up there she was putting milkers on.

'Is it his allergies?' I said. The herdsman is allergic to about half of creation.

'I don't know,' she said.

So I milked- which took a while, by myself- and fed calves, and did a pasture walk, as the weather was bearable for the first time in a week, and went back, and piddled around entering the pasture data on the computer, and went out to fetch the cows for milking...

And thought 'That's funny, I don't remember a big rock there....'

And realized it wasn't a rock, it was a cow. And ran.

She wasn't yet dead, so I screamed for the vet. The one at the back of the field, however, was. I thought it was bloat, which was why I called the vet, and so did he when he first got there, but eventually it was decided that the bloat was an effect, not a cause, and that what she actually had was milk fever (calcium deficiency). We bottled her in the vein and she was able to sit up, albeit groggily.

Whew.

So the farmer and the vet went back to look at the dead one and I went up to milk. The cows had been standing, not very patiently, in the yard waiting for me. One of them was at the back moving jerkily and foaming at the mouth. So *she* had to be gotten in and bottled with magnesium for staggers, and of course she was a right sod about it- one of the most evilly vicious cows in the herd, naturally. She kept trying to butt the living hell out of me and the farmer, flinging her head around and snorting like we were deliberately doing the whole thing to annoy her. Maybe she thought we were. I don't know.

Another cow went down with staggers during milking (another sod, I might add; when we tried to put magnesium bullets- slow-release pills- down her throat she showed the most amazing ability to spit them out) and the cows were in a truly evil mood. We'd finally finished milking and I was starting the wash down when the farmer, who'd gone up to check a valve, came back.

'You know how we were saying there didn't seem to be enough cows tonight?' he said.

There were seven of them, and they'd somehow hopped the two gaps between them and the rest of the farm without knocking anything down or leaving any trace that they'd gone; they were round as barrels and smug. We ran the water out, stopped all the pumps, drained the system, broke down the milkers, milked the sods, and then had to do it all over again.

I went home, got myself a drink- which I felt I richly deserved- and sat down to enjoy it, but I only got halfway through. I woke up at eleven on the floor and had to peel my contacts off my eyeballs and crawl to bed.

Another case of staggers in the morning, plus poor 933 went down with it in the parlor and we nearly had her in the pit with us. She blocked off one side of the milking parlor and we had to milk off the other side only for about 3 groups. Also the weather was incredibly foul, and the herdsman was in the hospital, and the bastards got out three times. I finally got through milking, washed down, took the cows out, tried to make the irrigator run as the slurry pit was full (this is not a job you want to do in a high wind (and if you don't know what 'slurry' is a euphimism for, well, let's just say I needed a shower afterwards)), had to give up after half an hour of being on the wrong side of the wind because the pump, which is cheap, kept giving out. See? You, too, can pointlessly economize and have to spend half an hour of frustration and misery every time you want to do a simple job. Fed the calves, went back out to set up the next break for the cows, came back in and collapsed for about an hour before I had to go back out and milk again.

Nothing died during milking. Nothing even tried. I was happy about that.

Then I went down to the village because the herdsman's wife had invited me to dinner because- yay!- this was my last day of work. The herdsman was out of hospital, though still very groggy. We had a nice dinner and watched Harry Potter, which I quite liked in spite of- or perhaps because of- the herdsman's three small children giving me a running commentary. Alan Rickman was probably my favorite. He is such a cool quasi-bad guy. But the casting was really excellent all through, to be honest.

Got back at midnight; went to bed.

I woke up this morning with four realizations, in this order:

a) I didn't have to milk.
b) My two friends were coming today and I hadn't made the caravan habitable for humans yet or set up any of the stuff we're supposed to do yet.
c) I was leaving in two days and I hadn't gotten the revisions on my novel done that I swore I would do.
d0 I was leaving in two days and I hadn't packed so much as a pair of underwear.

Er. Panic?

My alarm went off at six, as usual, only I'd been out at the pub 'til twelve, so I slapped it and muttered, 'Five more minutes.' That's what I was still doing at seven when the sounds of a truck came through my caravan window and I sat bolt upright. I had completely forgotten, last night as well as this morning, that the guy was coming to pick up the bull calves today.

'Excrement!' I said- well, not actually, but approximately.

I have rarely dressed so quickly in my life.

The lorry guy was very understanding, once he got through laughing, and I had time to get my contacts in and straighten my clothing a bit before I trudged up through the inevitable howling rainstorm and its sister sea of mud to the milking parlor. The herdsman greeted me with a grim smile. 'Have a nice night?'

'What happened?' I said.

It turns out that a cow had gone down with staggers, very badly, something I missed because I'd gotten off milking early to go out to dinner. There'd also been two power cuts, meaning all the milkers hit the floor and the cows do what irritated cows do, a fearsome prospect indeed when there's twenty to one side, twenty to the other, and all forty bums are pointing at you. I hadn't quite finished apologizing for something that wasn't my fault when all of the cows, who had been walking down to their field, suddenly turned back up.

'What are you sods doing here?' we said. They bawled at us for a while while we finished up. I don't know what they wanted; they weren't hungry, and, okay, they were probably cold and wet, but so were we. So was the whole bloody country. What they thought we could do about it is beyond me.

'Get rid of them,' the herdsman told me when we'd finished AIing, so I hopped on the bike. They milled irritably for a bit, but were just starting to move nicely when I heard a twang and saw a large white cow go shooting sideways into the field by the track.

By the time I had made a flying dismount from the bike half the herd was in there.

Ten minutes of shouting, running, and cursing later, we got them out. By this time the rain was coming down in great sheets and it was difficult to take a breath without some sort of scuba mask. I ran the bastards down to their field, locked them in, fed my calves, came back-

One cow on the wrong side of the fence.

This is considerably worse than the whole lot, because cows in a group can be convinced to move intelligently. One cow, however, has no brains whatsoever. She wants only to hug the fence where her mates are, ignoring the fact that you are patiently, and eventually not so patiently, trying to manuever her towards a gap that will allow her to actually rejoin the rest of the herd. She'll tease you, of course, getting within inches, sniffing coyly at the gap, all but going through before suddenly wheeling and running off in the other direction. The rest of the herd, in the meantime, is all too happy to come charging through at the least provication, and so you have to carefully guard it.

We utterly failed to get the cow in the proper place and, after considerable bad language, went home for breakfast. We came back at eleven to try and vaccinate the calves. This proved to be disaster. We pried them out of their field with little more than three bolts up and down the hedge and were just convincing them that the gateway wasn't going to eat them when there was a twang from the direction of the cattle and a sudden thundering of hooves. We looked. The milking herd, crowding up in one corner to watch us shift the calves, had broken through the fence and were gallavanting all over the next field down, kicking their heels and bawling.

We looked at each other. It started raining harder.

'Sod it,' said the herdsman. 'Leave 'em.'

So we got the calves into the barn, once they'd had their fun developing acute barn-o-phobia and making sure we had our proper dose of exercise, and then the farmer and I started vaccinating while the herdsman went off to salvage what he could of the cow fence. The calves, by this time, were really getting the hang of this game and routinely went over, under, or through anything trying to keep them standing still, with one of three results:

a) It was me. I got stomped.
b) It was something I was holding onto, and got jerked out of my hands.
c) It was actually too small a gap for them, and so we had to spend ages getting them unstuck.

By the time we loaded them in the lorry we were bad-tempered, worse-smelling, and limping from the impact of many tiny sharp hooves. We did notice that it was something of a tight fit but we were in no mood to care. This was very wrong of us, but, truly, I still don't understand how the buggers managed to do what they did. I've never seen anything like it. Okay, so maybe one or two animals would slip or fall in the lorry during a ride, but it was only fifeteen minutes, and I have never opened the lorry door to see, not heads, but a pile of tangled bodies and waving legs. They looked like they'd been playing Twister in a tornado. From the pile occasionally drifted up a whuffle of heavy breathing or a terrified 'maaa.' The farmer and I waded in, sorting bodies, expecting every minute to find a sad little corpse with a broken neck or, worse, a bawling, doe-eyed calf with a broken leg or a damaged eye or some other horrible wound, but miraculously, there wasn't a single injury. The calves lurched out of the lorry onto the grass, looked around, and set off on a galloping tour, apparently none the worse for wear. We had a relieved whimper or two, got back in the truck, and agreed that it was now, most definately, quite indisputably, lunchtime.

I wasn't quite finished lunch when the herdsman stuck his head in the door. 'You know,' he said, 'we've all been thinking, and we decided to get a present for you.'

I looked at him suspiciously.

'985's calved,' he said.

'Oh, God. I'll be right out....'

Damn it, tomorrow had better be better.

Temptation, that serpent whispering in the ear, comes in many guises. To some it whispers, 'Eat the apple. God will forgive you.' To others it says, 'She is beautiful; she is meant for you; what does it matter if she's married?' And for some it looks out across one hundred and eighty damp, filthy cattle, standing ankle-deep in mud under a steady downpour, tails half-cocked and ready to fire the cow equivelent of napalm onto anyone so unwise as to inconvenience them, and it says 'Sod it. Who'll notice if we don't milk 'em?'

I resisted temptation. Take that, thou serpent. However, I suspect I'm coming down with a cold, so the evil bastard may be getting the last laugh.

Excavation of the caravan continues: a new form of intelligent life which had been growing in the pots and pans and had gotten all the way to developing philosophers and telephone sanitizers died a sad, watery, and fresh-spring scented death. Also, my Tarot cards have turned back up. The booklet that came with them says that they should be wrapped in silk and kept under your pillow for a few weeks in order to pick up your 'vibes'. Being shoved back into their cardboard box and left to perculate in my accumulated filth is probably non-kosher, but, on the whole, they're probably getting more honest vibes that way.

Now I must go shower. I will be in the presence of actual human beings (as opposed to other farmers) tonight, for the first time in over a week, and the cattle napalm squadrons have been especially busy today.

It was the herdsman's weekend off so I had to tell him how things had gone while he was away.

'Nothing died,' I said. I always like to start these reports off on a positive note. 'We got the silage in on Saturday.'

'Didyou help cover it?'

'Yup.'

'Nasty job, that,' said the herdsman, with the relish of someone who has had aforesaid nasty job occur on his weekend off.

'Yup,' I said. It is a nasty job. First off there's the massive sheets of black plastic to spread over the silage, which is about like making a bed, assuming your bed is about twenty foot long, ten foot wide, and ten foot tall, your sheets are thick, heavy plastic, and there's a high wind. Also, there's the tires. Silage sheets are, by some obscure tradition, held down by old car tires; which are generally cheap and durable and do the job, so I suppose it's a good tradition. The problem is they're only used for that for a smallish part of the year. For the rest of the year they lurk in a rubber pile of evil in some obscure corner of the farm, collecting rainwater, dead insects, maggots, and, if you're really lucky, snakes and rats, until that inevitable day when you have to start picking them up and flinging them on the silage sheets. By the end everyone was covered in foul water and that pecular blackish-green slime that only old car tires seem to be able to produce.

'One of the cows went down with grass staggers-' this is magnesium deficiency, which in its early stages causes cattle to stagger as though drunk. Then they lie down and shake and can't get up. Then they go into convulsions and die. 'I gave her a bottle of mag under the skin and she seems to be okay. But I think we're running out of grass.'

The herdsman nodded with grim satisfaction. He's been predicting we would for weeks, and he does so enjoy being right.

'There we are,' he said. 'We'll have to move the dry cows again; they're too close to the parlour. Why did you put them there?'

'It was pissing down yesterday,' I said. I am a good farmer, but I still don't trek cows out to the far edges of the farm when it's raining sideways unless I absolutely have to.

'There we are.'

As I am leaving in a week, I feel it is probably time to clean the caravan- that's trailer to you Americans- that I've been living in for the past four months. I can't remember what color the carpet is. Protective clothing may be in order.

The weather's improved from the weekend, and although we all agree that this 'sunshine' thing is some sort of primitive myth, we have tentatively left off working on the Ark. Getting all hundred and eighty cows on that thing was going to be a bugger anyway.

I suppose an introduction is in order.

So: my name is Kat Feete. I grew up in southwestern Virginia on my family's dairy farm, Meadow Creek Dairy. There wasn't a hell of a lot to do there- aside from work- and so I developed various other ways of passing the time, mostly reading science fiction and fantasy, writing science fiction and fantasy, mucking about on the Internet, and thinking of ways to avoid work.

When I was seventeen I went off to college in Asheville, which was quite the experience, as I had been homeschooled from sixth grade on and had not been exposed to the whole peer group thing. It had its moments, but on the whole it hasn't really taken. I spent two and a half years there, then did a year of school in Palmerston North, New Zealand, then took a bit of time off from school to work on a farm in Wales. I had discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that I rather liked work after all. Also, solvency is fun.

Somewhere in there I wrote a science fiction novel. It is under revision and with luck will go to publishers once I am back in the same country as the publishers. On the whole it's not bad.

I am just about finished in Wales now, about to start on a month's worth of vacation time, and it occurred to me that I am having a very weird and wonderful life and there is a real shortage of people to talk to about it. So, somewhat belatedly, I decided to keep a journal.

I am tall, thin, and blonde, a set of words that gives rather the wrong impression. Stop thinking Hollywood actor and start thinking glorified fencepost with hair.

I tend to smile a lot for no particular reason.

I like most things, except sheep. I hate sheep.

And now you know everything important about me. Shall we move on?