An Unwanted Hole

For us, Sandy was an almost non-event. We had about an inch of rain total, gently falling over about 48 hours, which means our ground is well saturated and lovely.

Phil went to check on Snowman last night before bed. "Come. I don't think he'll make it through the night."

Snowman had fallen, and stared at us out of his left, bulging eye. It looked like dehydration, on top of whatever his initial issue was. We tubed about four gallons of water, molasses, garlic drench, electrolytes, aloe, and homeopathy into him. He had a squirting, smelly poop about halfway through, and we just wanted to leave him more hydrated than we found him. I covered him with hay for a blanket and waited until he was warm.

And so we left him to rest, unsure he'd make it through the night.

This morning he yet lived! His eye seemed less bulgy. We tubed him some more. Phil researched other options, and then he and the boys left to run all over town to find calcium that can be injected, and more electrolytes.

There is little information about downer bulls; downer cows usually go down due to birthing.

It took several stores and several hours of driving before they found all they wanted. Phil pulled in about 2:30 and went right to the barn. He walked in and Snowman vomited a gallon, had the runs, and lay still.

He never moved again.

I didn't really want to do a postmortem, but Phil wanted to know. With chemical gloves and his hunting knives, he cut open our bull.

What a waste. Beautiful orange fat all around, filled with nutrients from a summer of eating grass. Plenty of fat around the kidneys (and presumably the heart): he didn't starve to death. The four-part stomach, which I've never seen before. All enclosed in one large sack, the inner side of the four stomachs each look different. The rumen looks like it's covered in fine hair. One of the others has a delicate, scalloped look, almost like coral. Beautiful. Another looked almost like gills.

No puncture wounds, as far as we could tell, so not Hardware, at least, not in the stomach. (No magnet, either. Perhaps the magnet got stuck part of the way down? The book said that happens about one in six times. It would make sense that that would happen for us.)

But the rumen was full of grass, and had plenty of liquid. But the intestines looked entirely empty, without a hint of green along the length of them. Presumably a blockage, then. Surgery would have been the only possibility, and if Snowman had been two instead of seven, and the only bull instead of one of three, that may have been a prudent investment. But in this case, he had reached the end of his virile life (note that we've had no babies in six months, and that several cows who should have been bred show no signs of imminent delivery). We were hoping to eat him this winter, but he never got quite plump enough.

And now he never will.

Instead we have an unwanted hole in our orchard.

I loved that bull. I loved his gentlemanly demeanor; his patience; his grace. I loved his steady temperament, his enormousness, his horns.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that one of the best indicators that this world is fallen, that the Bible narrative is correct, is that death always strikes us as absurd, as horrible. After all, death will come to us all. Looking only at the natural world, death should be no more surprising or horrifying than any other regular event: the rising of the sun; the changing of the seasons.

But it's not. It's awful. It doesn't lose its horror even though we've dealt with it regularly for three years now. Things we love aren't supposed to stop breathing.