Holy Cow II (or Flyin* Blind)
From the telling of Spud Murphy
I got along pretty good with Patsy after that. I guess she figured if she had to be milked, better me than Jack. I saw her tits was all cracked and bleedin* so before I even tried milkin* her I got the can of bag balm out of the granary and greased her up pretty good. I tied the calf up to a gate post where Patsy could see she was all right and it wasn*t no time at all I had her half milked out. Then I untied the calf and let him have the other side.
Patsy was an easy milker, once you got to the akshul milkin* part of the project. She had great big tits that you could really get aholt of and when her bag was full you could get about a quarter to a third of a cup full at a time outa each one, maybe more. With a full tit she had a range of about thirty feet. We had three cats at that time, which my dad named Ike, Mike and Spike, in spite of the fact they was all girl cats, and they*d set around in a quarter circle about fifteen feet out from where the milk produkshun was happenin*. They*d set there waitin* their turn and watchin* every move I made until I*d give one of them a shot right in the snoot. I*d just about die laughin*. I*d aim over their heads just high enough so they*d be standin* on their hind feet with their mouth open flailin* around at the stream of milk with their front paws, like they could catch it and hold it in mid air.
As much as I made fun of those cats they really had an important job to do and that was to let us know when a rattle snake was around the house. They*d get it surrounded or penned in a corner somewhere and then they*d snarl and spit with the hair standin* up on their backs until one of us would hear the commotion and come out with a .22 and shoot the snake. No matter how much we owed to them cats for standin* snake watch there was one place they das*nt go, and that was inside the house. Our mother always had pans of milk covered with cheese cloth settin* on a long counter that ran the length of the kitchen wall. Some of the pans had fresh milk where the cream was rising to be skimmed off for light whippin* cream or for churning butter and others had sour milk waitin* to clabber as the first step in making cheese. One day my mother came in and found the cats up on the counter lappin* up milk. Quicker*en you could say Jack Robinson, Ike shot out through the back porch screen door airborne and the other two right behind her. My first thought was that it had took to rainin* cats there, for a moment. I got out of there right away, before I had to answer a lot of dumb questions, like who in hell left the screen door unhooked?
We didn*t have any shortage of rattlesnakes, either. There was a big quartz outcrop on the ridge above and behind the house where a huge den of snakes hibernated through the late fall and winter months. In the spring they*d come crawlin* out of a big crevice where the quartz had slaked away to form a kind of tunnel leadin* in under the outcrop. My mother would sit up on top of the outcrop with the .22 and shoot rattle snakes as the mornin* sun warmed things up and they come crawlin* out. She was a crack shot and many*s the day we kids come home from school to find four or five rattlers hangin* on the fence.
Another animal that*s good to have around if you*re pestered by rattle snakes is an old gander. Ganders are nasty, obnokshus critters anyway, they*ll sneak up behind you and clamp down on whatever part of your anatomy that is available and even if the injury ain*t all that critical, it sure does startle the shit out of you to have that happen. Patsy never liked old Ephriam, either. Whenever he*d get within range of her she*d drop her head like a Tijuana bull and charge him. We had a good size pond on our place so it was just natural to have geese.
When an occasional rattler would make it through the cat defenses, that old gander*s neck would stiffen up and stretch until you*d think it was a lethal weapon. He would spread his wings like he was goin* to launch himself like some kind of a missile with a fully operational warhead at the end of his neck. That old gander would be hissin* and honkin* and the rattle snake rattlin* and between them they*d raise a pretty good ruckus until the rattler would decide to hell with it and just crawl off to some other place that was less hostile.
Gettin* back to Patsy, now, which is what this story is supposed to be about, it happened that one time on a hot summer day she was doin* what she often did, which was to lay under a digger pine up by the corrals, meditatively chewin* her cud as cows do, eyes half closed, a vacant look clouding her statement and her attention appearin* to be fixed on absolutely nothin*. As was normal, a bunch of flies was pesterin* her and her tail was on autopilot, doin* its prescribed business of stirrin* up the flies every so often, sorta like the windshield wiper of a modern automobile set for a little pause between the strokes.
It coulda been that Ephriam, comin* on the scene unexpected like he did, misunderstood the whole situation, takin* the sudden movement of that tail for the lightenin* strike of a timber rattler. In any case, he did what he had to do, and with a mighty HONK launched himself at the offending (in one way or *nother) tail.
Patsy bolted up, sorta in the manner of *The Strawberry Roan* and when she come back to earth she was runnin* and buckin* and bawlin* in a fashion that would have done credit to the top buckin* bull at the county rodeo. Ephriam couldn*t do much by then but hang on, so that*s what he did, all the way down to the *Lower Flat*, a pasture that was a quarter mile below the house and corrals and halfway to Leighton*s cabin. They was too far away by then to see just why or how Ephriam finally managed his dismount, but later in the day when he made an appearance back at the homestead I noticed his feathers was all stuck together with dried cow shit.
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