As I scurry about opening hydrants to get the day’s seedling pasture watering started, I spy something that stops me cold for a second: what looks like a puppy obviously dead, out in the field edge quite far from the road.   Once the irrigation chore is got into motion, it cannot be stopped without dire consequences and I can tell from the angle of the limbs that the poor fella will be no less dead if I concentrate on getting the irrigation properly going.  In some little while I hesitantly approach it, only to see that it isn’t  something that had ever been animate: it’s a stuffed toy!  How, oh how, did this end up there?  I find something else to do on purpose and so stall returning until I’m nagged too much by curiosity, and with a mixture of fascination and creepiness I walk up to it with a long stick, and turn it over.  Will it blow up?  Did it fall from a plane?  Was it dropped by a Mexican child who had to let it go and is right now suffering from the loss of this friend … or suffering far worse things?  It’s not a puppy.  It’s a cow, and not just any cow, but a purple cow!  Well, actually a white Holstein with large lavender spots.  I name it Ogden.  I just can’t bring myself to touch it for most of the day, it’s all so disturbing.  Finally I come back and carry Ogden to the fence along The Lane and leave it still within the pasture, and plan to pick it up from there later.  Our cow Mycha, however, in the meantime had noticed there’s something new there, and when I come back later I find her with her head pushed as far as she can stretch it right through the barbed wire fence, with Ogden’s head inside her mouth, and she’s chewing him like cud.  “Damn it, heyyyyy! Get out of there!” I bark … Mycha has chewed off both of Ogden’s little Holstein horns, nearly severed the left ear, and eaten off his right eye though he is rather cleaner from all the slobber.

I take Ogden home and sit him upright on a shelf in the window of the new Cowboy Caravan, despite the risk of his coming alive at Midnight.  If he does he’ll be able to function pretty normally, after Pat made him new horns and got one ear reattached …