CATTLE

Life is not safe.  It is always fraught with perils.  At lovely, quiet pastoral moments, terrifying situations can simply creep up on you.  It happened to our big puppy, Nickleby and me today.  There is an old cattle track along Loch Corrib, here near Ballycurrin.  I’ve walked that track several times.  After half a mile or so, there is a gate.  Beyond the gate there is a big pasture, divided by a hedgerow and some big trees.  On the lakeside of that hedgerow and trees, there is a lovely hill overlooking the lake.  Sometimes, there is a small herd of cattle, mostly bullocks (which is what the Irish call castrated male cattle) grazing near the shore.  If we see the cattle, we generally turn back, but if they are in the field to the other side of the trees, I’ve usually gone on to climb the hill.  Today, we came to that gate and saw the cattle on the other side of the hedgerow, so we untied the gate and headed through the field and up the hill.

There was a gentle breeze blowing and from the top of the hill you can see miles of the lake spread out below.  It’s a beautiful spot.  After we stood there for a while, I saw a small peninsula a quarter mile on past the hill and decided that we would walk to the end of the peninsula before turning back for home.  And so we headed down the hill and across another bit of the field.

We found a lovely little glade at the end of the peninsula, lined with trees, surrounded on three sides by water and we sat on a rock and gazed at the quiet beauty of Loch Corrib which never fails to move me.  Then we turned and headed for home.

As we came off the peninsula, I saw in the distance, a bullock coming over the next hill.  It seems there wasn’t a fence through that hedgerow as I had thought and as we got to the other end of it, the other field simply opened into the one we were in.  I tried to get Nick to hurry across the fifty yards or so of broken field before we could head back along the lake shore.  But that bullock was heading straight towards us.  As we started to run, another and then another of those cattle came down the hill.  They were clearly curious about Nick, as Newfoundlands or other big dogs are seldom seen in this part of Ireland and certainly not by this particular herd of cattle.  As more and more cows came over the hill, we started to run for it.  They began to run for us.

Maybe Nick could have gotten away if he had run, but I had snapped the leash on him to keep him away from the cattle.  I kept him close to keep him from being trampled.  But now, here we were pinned against the shoreline with nowhere to run and a herd of, now twenty bullocks heading towards us.  As they closed in, there was nowhere to go but to jump onto some rocks just off shore.  And so we found ourselves, me sitting on a large rock, three feet from the shore, with Nick at my feet.  The entire herd came to the edge of the water, extending their big noses to sniff the dog.  He went nose to nose with several off them.  We were surrounded.  Twenty bullocks trying to get their noses close to the dog, grunting and snuffling, just a couple of feet away.  The tumble of rocks at the edge of the water upon which they wouldn’t step was the only barrier between us.

I couldn’t think of a thing to do in the situation.  We were marooned on a two-foot long rock, three feet from shore with twenty noses stretching towards us.  There was no place to run to where they couldn’t easily run us down.

It was one of those rare moments in my life when I had no idea of any kind what to do.  I was at a total loss.  So we sat there.  I figured, in time, the herd would drift away.  Twenty minutes past and, sure enough, half of the herd wandered off a few dozen feet and started chewing more grass.  But there was this absolutely stubborn core of ten or so that would not budge or lose interest, and so there we sat.

Finally, in frustration, remembering my boyhood among the cows of New Jersey (that’s not a joke) I decided to scare them away.  I banged my walking stick of the rocks, shouting and making menacing, grunting sounds.  Many of the cows began to back away.  Heartened, I stepped off of my sanctuary rock, moved to the shore and banged and grunted some more.  While Irish bullocks are certainly not as easily intimidated as New Jersey dairy cows, I seemed to be making some rough progress when, pushing its way through from the back of our little herd came the actual bull.  He was huge.  His chest was far wider than the boulder that I had been standing on.  He had a brass ring through his nose.  The look in his eye was one of the scariest things I have ever seen.  I jumped back to the safety of my rock and pulled the dog close to me.  The bull came right to the waters edge and sniffed the dog—nose to nose.  I was terrified that the bull would keep coming and splash through our little three-foot moat of protection, but he, like the bullocks, stopped at the water’s edge.

I have since learned that bulls allowed to run with herds of cattle are responsible for many deaths each year in Ireland.  The practice of letting them in with the herd is frowned upon but commonplace.  My menacing behavior now, it seemed clear, had aroused his protective instincts.  He certainly seemed to regard us as a threat.

And so we sat again, marooned three feet from shore, with what seemed like a thousand pounds of pure killer sticking his snuffling nose to within a few inches of us.  That nose was almost as wide as Nick’s head (and Nick is no small dog). Once again, no good option seemed to present itself.  This bull didn’t seem even slightly inclined to lose interest in us.  I could almost have cried.

The turning point in this tale was a little accident.  In trying to get comfortable on my rocky perch, I slipped.  My foot, shoe and all, went plunging into the water.  Now, with a shoe already ruined, I plunged the other one into the lake as well.  I realized that we could possibly wade our way to safety.  Of course the field stretched a good half-mile along the lake.  That’s a long wade over rough rocks in thigh deep water, but there seemed no alternative.  I pulled the dog in with me and dragged him through the rocky water along the shore.  The bull and his entire entourage followed every step of the way.  Nickleby was having a lot of trouble.  The water was too deep for him to walk.  He still refuses (even though Newfoundland’s are supposed to be skilled water dogs) to swim.  So I just dragged him on his leash through the water.  He swam a little and clamored over a lot of rocks.  Eventually, the collar around his neck stretched enough in the water that he pulled his head right out of it.

He ran onto the shore just feet in front of the following bull.  I yelled desperately for him to come back, but I was standing in four feet of water and he seemed more ready to face the bull.  He’s never been good about coming when called and I called with every tone of voice I could think off, to no avail.  That is, until the bull charged at him and he leapt into the water and tried to climb into my arms.  I put the collar back on and we continued our arduous rocky trek.  Luckily, the ground along the lake got rockier still as we travelled down the shoreline.  The herd began to have trouble walking on the big stones.  Eventually, even the bull stopped following.  We gradually worked our way into the shallows and onto the shore, moving as fast as we could. 

That rocky ground only extended for about a hundred feet and the cattle only had to go around it and we would have been just as stranded on the other side, running to the gate that was two dozen yards from the safety of the lake.  But, thank God, people are right about cows—they’re just not that smart.  As we reached the far side of the rocky stretch, they just stood and watched us as we fled towards the gate.  Had that bull figured out that he only had to walk a few extra yards to get around the rocky area, we would have been in real trouble.  But there he stood, pawing the ground (I’ve since read that that is not a good sign) in frustration at our escape.  Celebrating the narrow (and rare) victory of brains over brawn, we ran to the gate.

Nick was cut on the rocks.  I lost a good pair of shoes and much of my self-respect.  But we sat down in the next field in exhaustion and relief.  There were hugs all around.  I gave Nick the rest of a pocketful of treats.  We vowed never to go into strange fields again without a little more investigation.  Our education in the ways of the Irish (and their animals) continues.