I’m sure I’ll look back at this journal entry some day and laugh at my naivete, there’s so much one doesn’t realize they don’t understand about country living until they come face to face with the details. For instance, bulls and fences. Most of the Ozarks have their cows behind four or five levels of barbed wire. This seems to work well… or at least well enough. But those five strands start to look rather delicate and fragile when you’re a few feet away from a very large bull who’s pawing the ground and lowering its head. We’ve worked a little with cows, helped friends out here and there, and butchered a cow, but that is about the extent of our bovine knowledge. We were out walking when we must have startled a herd. The she-cows all went charging out of the woods in hysterics and the bull came towards us like we were the Death Star and he was Luke Skywalker in an X-wing. We kept walking calmly and talking…doing that whole thing you do with children where you give them space, but don’t take the side eye off them. And that was it…he snorted and stomped and lowered his head, followed us for a ways and then walked off. He left assured of his manly protectiveness, and Jim and I spent the next thirty minutes discussing how we would have handled that if he really had charged the fence.
There were no trees, with fences and pasture stretched out on both sides of the road and in every direction. Jim thinks I should have shimmied under the barbed wire fence on the other side and found a tree to climb while he did his best impression of a rodeo clown. I think we should have climbed the closest gate because at least that is stronger than 5-wire. Both of us agreed we wouldn’t have run in a straight line.
I had “Active Shooter Training “ and “Trauma First Aid” today and I couldn’t help but think fate may have gotten the two incidences mixed up. Surely it would have been better to do the trauma medical training first and then had the meeting with the mad bull, but no. Honestly though, a lot of the active shooter advice seems like it would work on a bull too. I kind of enjoyed the whole class. Statistics and data and clarity are so much more helpful to my brain. Also, I’m kind of thinking everyone who lives on a farm should probably take a trauma first aid class.
I’ve already got tourniquets and clotting powder in my Amazon cart, and I (allegedly) know how to pack a mean wound now. Lord have mercy, may I never need to use the knowledge for anything.