Dear Diary,
The heifers are back. The heifers are back!! Most of the land along our road used to be farm land. Now, there is just a tree farm and a lot of pasture land. One family owns several hundred acres of pasture. None of them live here anymore, but one brother still has a dairy farm a few miles away. A couple years ago he decided to turn a small group of heifers out to pasture here. (A heifer is a young female cow that hasn’t had a calf yet. ) Well in this group of seven, there were four that got loose – a lot.
On one morning walk that summer, Mom had noticed that all seven were by a gate when we were going down the road away from our house. On our way back, she saw that there were only the three “good” heifers left by the gate. So, Mom decide she would have me track the missing foursome. Mom and I do many things, but tracking‘s not one of them. But I got the idea- going back and forth across the road, following where the heifers had been. (They had left some pretty obvious evidence.) We got to the path into our pond – I hesitated – I was trying to tell Mom that they had gone in there but had come back out. So I kept going down the road. When we got to our driveway, I turned to go up. Mom said she was disappointed – she thought I wasn’t following a trail after all; that I was just going home. She thought that we hadn’t helped at all to find them.
Our driveway is fairly long and curves at the top. We were about to make the turn, when we came face to face with the four young cows standing there deciding which garden to eat first. Maybe I am a tracking dog! And I am a true cattle dog. But could we get the heifers back where they belonged? Luckily, Dad was still home, so with a man in a car and a dog and a woman on foot, we did manage to get the group back into their pasture. (They didn’t stay in for long. Eventually, the neighbor got tired of phone calls and took them all back to his farm.)
But he’s trying it again this year. I’m glad. We’ll have to wait and see what this group is like.
Every cattle dog needs cattle
Signed, Tucker (your blog host)
To read more about me go to The Sensible Dog.
PS
Many people get confused by the Aussie name. We are really not sheep dogs from Australia.
http://www.asca.org/About+Aussies/Working+Description
