13

A load of bull and mad cows

The relationship between man and beast in mustering is prescribed. The musterer, usually, has the upper hand. Animals in less controlled environments sometimes reverse the roles, or have the opportunity to do so, and send humans scuttling.

Once a couple of Australian tourists interrupted their gentle amble through the dairy lands of Manawatu to collect a bounty of field mushrooms. A roadside paddock was pockmarked with healthy clumps of the white-topped delicacy and before too long the Australians were over the fence and heading for the mushrooms, jabbering loudly.

‘You realise we might be trespassing, mate,’ one said to the other.

‘Stone the crows, Blue. Kiwi farmers don’t spit the dummy unless you leave their gates open.’

‘Can you see any bulls, Blue?’

The paddock seemed bereft of livestock. The tourists, secure in the knowledge that they were in a land without dingoes, poisonous snakes, nasty spiders, or strange lizards that, even if they didn’t inflict a fatal bite, could render you liable to break out in sores for six years, advanced on the mushrooms. There were no Kiwi cassowary birds to attack you if you so much as looked them in the eye.

The tourists, reassured by the benign New Zealand rural environment, picked a beer crate’s worth of mushrooms, still jab­bering loudly. They came to a gentle rise in the paddock, an undulation that was barely discernible from the road. In the interests of filling a second crate they mounted the rise to find a veritable inland sea of mushrooms. And a bull.

The jabbering died a death. The colour drained from the tourists’ faces. The bull lying down in the lee of the rise was a monster. It was the size of a small truck. The tourists were a long way from the fence. To their credit they didn’t panic, although most of their blood would have been in their boots. Very slowly they began edging backwards away from the massive Jersey inseminator. The bull woke up and cast a huge, wary bull’s eye at the invaders. It was more a weary, sleepy eye and soon the bull returned to his slumbers, generally smelling the wild flowers and very much appreciating the warm late-afternoon sun.

After edging backwards for a few metres more, the Australians turned on their heels and ran like the clappers towards the fence. They reckoned they could hear the thundering of hooves behind them, but that was just their own heavy footfalls and pounding hearts. They half-dived, half-scrambled over the fence, ripping garments on the barbed wire, and collapsed in heaving heaps on the verge.

After a while they stood up and looked back over the fence. A friendly breeze parted the buttercups. The lush pasture swayed gently. Lengthening shadows spread on the easy undulations. The bull hadn’t moved from his pleasant place in the sun. The only jarring note was struck when the tourists caught sight of two beer crates lying askew on the top of the embankment. Easy come, easy go, maybe. More like a waste of bloody good mushrooms, one Australian jabbered. Better than being gored like a couple of matadors, the other reckoned.

Bulls have had a bad press; it’s said that they will run you down and gore you as soon as look at you. In the light of this it’s interesting to contemplate the term ‘a load of bull’, which refers to something lacking any serious grain of truth. It found its way into Kiwi vernacular as a tribute to the peaceable intentions of beasts with the dimensions of a small diesel locomotive. It was ‘a load of bull’ that the average bull would charge willy-nilly at all and sundry.

That’s not to say that people of the land haven’t felt the wrath of an angry bull. Horrendous injuries can result. In those situations it was not a ‘load of bull’ that a bull will charge willy-nilly at all and sundry. In fact it was a ‘load of bull’ that they wouldn’t.

One of the most agonising outings for a farm appraiser involved the issue of bulls. Because of what he’d been told and what he’d read, and the sheer menacing presence of bulls, he had a fear that had curdled into a phobia. One farmer knew of the appraiser’s affliction and when it was farm appraisal time, the farmer assured the appraiser that his bulls were tucked up securely in a back paddock. Out of harm’s way.

The appraiser seemed placated and with a relaxed swagger accompanied the farmer into a front paddock. As they walked past an implement shed they came upon a bull.

The appraiser took the bull by the horns, which didn’t mean he approached the bull in a panic-stricken state and grabbed its horns in an attempt to neutralise it. It did mean that he took direct action and, unlike the mushroom-gatherers in Manawatu, immediately started running backwards towards the gate. He remembered that you should never turn your back on a bull, although the farmer had never seen a man run so fast backwards. Suggestions by the farmer that the appraiser might have in­vented a new Olympic event, backwards running, elicited little amusement.

‘What a load of bull,’ the appraiser yelled, as he cowered behind the implement shed.

‘No, that was a load of bull,’ the farmer replied while pointing towards the diesel locomotive on legs.

‘You said there’d be no bull, but there was. Both kinds.’

‘Be reasonable. Johnny (the bull) got a bigger fright than you. He’s still running.’ More bull? No. Johnny, normally placid, ran through or over several fences to get to the back paddock.

If some bulls could be unpredictable, certain cows could be mad – and cunning. In the eastern hills of the Bay of Plenty, in the years before adequate fencing was erected, dairy cows were often allowed to wander. They were permitted to fend for themselves in the uncleared bush. Their owners reckoned they’d be able to keep tabs on them by ear. The cows had been fitted out with special collars from which tinkling bells dangled. The cows couldn’t get lost because the farmers could hear their bells ringing as the animals fossicked and foraged.

Cows couldn’t fall back on the sheer menacing presence, the physical intimidation of bulls, but when it suited them – at times when they needed to express their independence and outrage at being exploited – they could be cussed. In the eastern hills they cottoned on to the idea of standing perfectly still for however long it took to convince a keen-eared farmer that his cows had done a runner. A still cow rings no bells.

One farmer became so alarmed he felt constrained to phone his neighbour on the old party line.

‘G’day Fred, it’s Bill here.’ The farmer sounded distressed.

‘G’day Bill. You sound a bit distressed.’ A click sounded on the party line.

‘Just a mo, Bill. Mrs Mac’s listening in.’

‘How can you tell, Fred?’

‘I can smell her feet.’ Another click sounded on the party line.

‘Now, what can I do you for, Bill?’

‘I think my cows have wandered over to your place Fred. I can’t hear their bells.’

‘We’d better take a look.’

The two farmers eventually met up in the bush among the supposedly missing cows, which were now all happily foraging, their bells ringing loudly, as Bill and Fred scratched their heads in bewilderment.

There have been many tales of the maddening antics of cows, like the time a prisoner escaped from a work party at a New Zealand prison. As the siren wailed, prison officers ran in several directions at once. At the time, ‘escape procedures’ were still evolving. These days there are strict protocols to adhere to, but back then the modus operandi seemed to be based on the notion that those officers who kicked up the most dust in their uncoordinated efforts to catch fugitives, won favour with the head honcho. The latter, a superintendent with a low boiling point, took escape attempts personally. How dare any low-life detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure take it upon himself to upset Her Majesty?

The head honcho and several lieutenants charged across the prison farm like stampeding bulls towards the scene of a reported sighting. It was less a sighting, more a hearing. Someone had heard something or somebody making fossicking sounds in a grove of fruit trees. It sounded for all the world like a prisoner in the throes of making good his escape. The head honcho and his lieutenants surrounded the grove, convinced they’d cornered their man.

At about the time a dishevelled individual answering the escapee’s description made it to the adjacent highway, where he flagged down a generous driver heading north, a stray jersey cow emerged from the grove of fruit trees wondering what all the fuss was about.

‘Mad cow’ in New Zealand was not so much a reference to the disease that ravaged Great Britain a few years back. Mad cows were more your hare-brained bovines that, unlike the apparently innocent cows in the Manawahe bush and the renegade down on the prison farm, displayed more manic symptoms.

In earlier times the term ‘mad cow’ could also extend to those women of the land who didn’t toe an often arch-conservative line, or who were somewhat eccentric. In these days of PC gone mad, it wouldn’t pay to use the term too loosely or too often. Suffice to recall the case of an old woman who used to live in a tumbledown, gothic old house in the middle of nowhere. She lived on her own in a situation where her nearest neighbours were five miles down a by-way that was more goat track than road. Her gaunt, weather-beaten house stood on the brow of a hill where the wind had ample opportunity to whistle through boarded-up windows and doors jammed ajar by subsidence.

The old woman rendered down dead cows. At four every morning she’d rise to set the fire burning in her tallow tubs. The smell was gagging once the rendering began. The smoke and fatty wafts merged with the perpetual fog that clouded and cloaked her modus operandi in unsettling mystery. There were reports that she rendered down more than just dead cows. No one wanted to elaborate on that issue. Certainly, from the road, if the fog wasn’t too thick, the old house looked like an Alfred Hitchcock movie set.

Once a journalist, smelling out a good story and despite the ungodly stench, visited the old lady. ‘You’d have to be mad to live like that’ was one observation that kept repeating on him as he climbed up through the clouds of God knows what to talk to the woman.

He was agreeably surprised by her friendliness and charm. And she was the first to admit that her job had its unpleasant moments, but it was a job someone had to do. The demand for tallow was healthy.

Despite the rotting carcasses, bloody pools and general decay, the old lady whistled while she worked. For an hour or two she spoke animatedly to the journalist about this and that and the price of fish. Before the journalist left she invited him to stay for morning tea. The journalist thought he’d better not say no.

An elaborate, spotless table cloth was draped over a cow carcass lying next to the house. An unchipped Crown Lynn teapot, a dainty receptacle, was placed on the dead cow’s rump along with a plate of freshly baked scones. As the journalist sipped at his tea he caught sight of one of the dead cow’s eyes, oozing matter and a reproachful, horrifying stare. The journalist passed on the scones. He had to be somewhere at half-past.

As he climbed back down the hill he could hear the old lady whistling as she returned to her work. Reports that she rendered down more than just dead cows kept nagging at him. Or was that simply a load of bull?

If confusion could reign over what was bull and what was not, the claim made by a local agricultural show that ‘bullfighting and fencing’ would be featured entertainment, caused more confusion. Foreign tourists, particularly Spaniards and Mexicans, it was claimed, would attend the show in the expectation of seeing matadors and toreadors in the bullring. And fencing jousts featuring foils and épeés and touchés.

Of course the bull-fighting was all about rodeo riders grappling with steers, and the fencing saw contestants competing for a prize of strainer posts and fence battens as they sought to erect a chain of fencing in the quickest time.

A few townies at the show thought they might be seeing sword fights too, and a caped matador dispatching a longhorn, but Cam didn’t. He’d been raised on a Kiwi farm and knew what ‘bull­fighting and fencing’ were about. He rather liked the rodeo and he’d always been fascinated by fence building. As a nipper he once followed his father, who was erecting a fence, lugging wire cutters that were taller than he was. Each time his father completed a chain, Cam followed with the cutters, severing the wires on every length of fence.

That was no bull and nor was the fact that Cam’s father, some years later, was the victim of a nasty attack by a real bull that laid him up for several months.