A cow in need is a friend indeed

Staying up all night with a fussy baby is a timeless element of parenting in that nearly all parents go through it, but it’s also usually a phase of limited duration. And although a friend of mine once wrote an essay about how she misses being up at 2 AM in a rocker looking out at the moon, I didn’t believe her. It’s been over six or seven years since I was up at night with a fussy baby, and I still frequently wake in the morning grateful for an uninterrupted night of sleep.

So I wasn’t very happy to wake shortly after midnight last night to hear a bellowing cow. Steady, repeated, high-volume mooing went on for the next three hours. Occasionally there would be a break, and I’d fall asleep, and then it would inevitably start up again. MOO! … MOO! … MOO!

Even with middle-of-the-night drowsiness, it wasn’t hard for me to make an educated guess about what had happened. I can’t actually tell the half-dozen cows on our farm apart by their voices, but Gracie is the only one with a new calf and I did recognize this sound: the bellowing moo of a cow calling to her calf. So I knew that either the baby bull born last weekend was stuck somewhere and couldn’t get free, or had wandered off to someplace Gracie did not want him to be, or something worse had befallen him and he was dead or incapacitated. I certainly hoped the latter wasn’t the case – we do have a lot of coyotes around this summer, but I’ve never heard of a coyote attacking a calf – but the reality is that in the dark of night, there’s just not a lot to do about it. So Rick and I tried to sleep.

When dawn broke, Rick headed out to investigate. I heard a few more bellowing moos and then silence. Wonderful sweet silence. I fell asleep at last and slept until eight.

Rick told the kids and me at breakfast that as soon as he stepped outside, Gracie stopped mooing and walked toward him. Then she started mooing again as if urging him to follow her, which he did. Gracie brought him to the gate separating the two pastures, from where Rick could see that the calf had slipped through the sheep’s gate to spend the night among the bulls.

Rick crossed into the bulls’ pasture, made his way behind the small calf, and coaxed him back through the sheep’s gate. “And then Gracie went like this: ‘Mmmm. Mmmm.’” Rick told us. Not a bellowing moo like before; a murmur of thanks.

Though he tends to be unsentimental about the animals, I could tell Rick was pleased on a number of levels. He’d solved the problem; Gracie’s appreciation was obvious and almost human; and even Gracie’s reaction when he first stepped outside was gratifying: she approached him with apparent relief, as if she knew he could help her. That kind of trust, whether it comes from friends, animals or children, is always a good feeling.

My kids sometimes tease me at how delighted I always am when anyone asks me for directions. Of course, with the advent of GPS, it happens less and less, but since we live on a main road and often walk along it, we do get a fair number of requests for navigational help. And it just feels good to set people on their way. On a different order of magnitude, at church we all sign up to deliver casseroles when someone has had surgery or has lost a family member, and this summer I was part of a large group of women who took turns sending daily greeting cards to a member of our circle who was dealing with an illness.

Helping feels good: it’s that simple. Whether we’re helping a friend, a neighbor, a stranger or a cow, it’s gratifying to meet someone else’s need. Explaining why may be complicated, but sensing the truth of it isn’t. Rick could even see it in Gracie’s big bovine eyes.