So I take the Gator and Miguel and go down to get the boat. This time I’ll lift it with Miguel’s help and carry it on the Gator. We bring it back to the upper pond and I hop in and paddle over to the cow. Paddling is kind of fun, but it’s a leg workout which doesn’t add any coolness to the temperature. As I get to the cow, I’m recalling that hippos are the deadliest creatures in Africa, killing people all the time. I see the cow looking at me thinking, “That thing doesn’t have much freeboard. I probably can’t sink it, but I can knock his butt out of it and turn it over. And he just upgraded to the iPhone 6 (I’d told him earlier when I was taking his picture) which is probably in his pocket still. That would totally be worth it.”
In the end he decided to run instead. Right by Miguel and jump back into the lower pond. Sigh.
I pull the boat out of the upper pond and drag it to the lower pond. Miguel is by the cow, laughing of course. This whole thing is funny. Hot, sweaty, irritating, but funny. I launch the SS Minnow into the lower pond and paddle all the way across it to the cow who this time really doesn’t want to get out. I’m about to play bumper car with him when he finally relents and heads out of the water and thankfully back into the pasture. We collect Gators and again play bumper car with the cow to get him back to the paddock which has been reconfigured with vehicles to receive him from another direction and get him into the head gate, which we finally accomplish. I retrieve my doctor bag from the barn and prep our patient for surgery. After some quick work, I install a trocar and the bloat quickly blows off.
He’s not happy about it, but he is feeling better at this point. Rather than leave the trocar in, we go ahead and remove it and leave the wound open. By the time it starts to heal, the danger of bloat has pretty much passed, we hope. This saves us from having to do this all over again to get him back in the head gate to remove the trocar. This entire series of events took from 4:15 to 6:15, when SWMBO was calling me to go to dinner, something I was more than ready to do. But only after a shower and some time cleaning various wounds I’d picked up during the day. Hopefully today everyone behaves and we can get back to our to do list. For you careful readers, you may have noted that I didn’t mention the escaped cow. We left him in the woods where it was cool to overnight by himself. We’ll hopefully get him today and put him back with his friends.