Twenty-One Percent

Phil went to town to play poker last night. Five bucks for four hours of fun with friends—he had a good time. He got up early and went to hay the cows while the ground was still frozen. All was well.

Back home, he went down to continue to grout the walls. The first batch seemed awfully runny, but it wasn't until he was finished that he realized he had only added half the cement he should have. There was no way to scoop ten vertical feet of wet grout out of a small cell with rebar up the middle. What to do? Be thankful it wasn't at either a corner or the center of a long wall, and trust that the Lord works despite our humanity.

Isaiah wasn't as helpful today as he had been yesterday. I heard Phil yell, "Isaiah, where are you?" He and Joe were on a pallet in the air, and Isaiah had been distracted by snowballs in a bag or something equally enticing. He did come back and let his family members down, but the focus of yesterday had vanished today.

I walked as far as the asparagus patch (so, maybe 50 yards), which felt like a triumph. No signs of asparagus yet. Isaiah and I watched the bees, with full pollen pockets. The air was buzzing, the energy palpable. I picked a small handful of what I think was garden sorrel, and a bit of kale. I am starving for fresh greens!

So all was well until I got a call from Phil, with the final bit of battery before his phone died. I could tell from his voice that not all was well.

Phil had gone over to water the cows and found Beatrice dead.

Beatrice, named for the Dutch queen; first calf born on the farm, delivered without difficulty on the one day we were incommunicado at Colonial Williamsburg. Beatrice, Phil's favorite cow, both in personality and body conformation.

She was in the middle of delivery and had flopped onto the electric wire. Presumably, the electric shock had killed her. But it was a single strand wire and she wasn't twisted in it, just resting on it. Normally, a cow would have no difficulty bounding away from a single strand. A cow in labor would seek the perimeter to avoid companionship, so that makes sense.

Phil thinks the delivery itself killed her: just bits of hooves showed. He figures she was too exhausted and just gave up, somehow flopping onto the wire. It could be. Inability to birth would have been a death sentence, electric line or no: pulling a calf doesn't work well.

In some ways, though, I hope he's wrong. We have two other heifers set to give birth in the next few weeks. Should Beatrice have died due to inability to birth, we might have two more deaths coming.

This wasn't a scenario any of the range ranchers mentioned. Once again, the reality proves worse than anything we read about.

Of the nineteen cows we've had here on the farm, we've had four deaths, all accidental. Twenty-one percent. No meat from all those animals.

It was not a good find for Phil.