July 27, 2001 ~ In an East Texas pasture,
there is a brand-new, factory-fresh, red bull calf with lipstick on his head. Who could resist kissing a baby like that? This one has a brown mask, and a couple of other spots on his face. He�s a big, sturdy, healthy boy; kind of skittish and goofy, but that�s to be expected since he�s only hours old. You should have seen him checking out the pond for the first time. Bessie wanted a drink and the calf followed her down there. He must have stepped into the mud; he hadn�t even made it to the water when he kind of hopped up in the air, with a real funny, startled look on his face. Like, �What is THAT stuff?� I always like watching new baby animals, seeing how they react to all those first-time experiences.
Bessie was one of our very first cows. We got our first bull calf (Because he had cute ears. Well, he DID!), and then we bought three little heifers (young females). Bessie was one of those three, is one of the two survivors. Beulah died not long after giving birth to her first calf. We'd been out of town... for my brother's funeral. Came home tired, just bone-weary, and that next morning I woke up to find Beulah dead in the pasture, covered with frost, her baby snuggled up next to her, trying to keep warm. You know how sometimes you think things just can't get any worse, and then they do? But that calf had to be cared for, and bottle-feeding him gave me something to do, those first hard weeks after Bruce died. It was a bull calf, later a steer calf, which meant we couldn't keep it, and I learned that I should NOT bottle-feed calves that we weren't planning to keep. I got way too attached to that baby.
As I sat there watching Bessie's new baby, running and hopping and flopping around, I remembered those first three cows of ours, when they were calves... and I smiled.
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