So Miguel and I charge into the pasture with our two Gators. We don’t have horses although sometimes I wish we did on days like this. We quickly get to our patient and start herding him with the Gators back towards the barn. He is wise to what we are doing and has no intention of going. He also has four wheel drive and can turn on a dime. After a few laps of the pasture, I finally had to do to him what I’ve learned is required with these purchased steers, I had to physically turn him with the Gator. As we are running along (he’s trying to outrun the Gator) I have to match his speed, then place my front fender against his shoulder and physically push him the way I want him to go. Thank God I bought the fender guards on this Gator. They are round so they don’t cut the cow, and they are steel so he doesn’t break my fenders. There is lots of starting, stopping, running, and backing up. It’s actually kind of neat to work together like that with Miguel, working as a team with very little verbal communication.
So we get this cow into the central paddock where he runs into the wall of trucks we’ve erected. We jump off and chase him down the lane and he goes exactly where we want him to, till he gets to the last truck which is Miguel’s truck and trailer. Specifically the goose neck trailer. There is a unique feature of a goose neck trailer. It’s that there is a gap between the truck and trailer as the hitch is actually in the bed of the truck. You can see what I mean here.
Our cow, seeing that forward was the way back to the head gate instead ran right through that gap and then promptly escaped back into the main pasture because of course we’d left the gate open on that side of the paddock. Sigh.
So now we had to go get him again. We took the Gators back into battle and again played bumper cars with the cow to get him back to the barn yard. As we were working him back, he decided that he’d rather go back to the pond and ran through the fence and jumped back in the upper pond. Now I need to go get the paddle boat, drag it back to the upper pond, and do this all over. And it’s hot and we aren’t doing anything that’s actually on our to do list. It’s time to get the boat, but that’s the next post.