It was a dark and stormy night, but then it’s always a dark and stormy night when cows are having trouble calving. Heaven forbid they should give birth to a breech calf or a 150-pound mammoth baby on a nice sunny afternoon!

A cow could be straining for an hour, and when you go out to check her in good weather, she will stop and walk away nonchalantly whistling as if everything is O.K. And if she knows she is going to have problems, she will actually cross her legs and hold that calf in until nightfall, and then only try to have it if she senses a blizzard approaching.

So, as I was saying, it was a dark and stormy night around 9 p.m. The wind was blowing hard and the skies had chosen this night to dump a month’s worth of rain and snow all at once.

In the middle of this outburst of Mother Nature, my husband, Mike, and I went out to check a cow that an hour before had looked like she was getting ready to calve.

As soon as the cows heard the four-wheeler coming, they scattered, similar to the balls on a pool table after a break, into all four corners. Only, unlike the pool balls, the cows kept shuffling around, exchanging positions making it hard with a spotlight to tell which ones we had already looked at.

I’m convinced they do this on purpose because I can always hear them snickering amongst themselves on these occasions.

Once we found the cow that was trying to have a baby, there was, as always, a little group of interested cows hovering around her watching. To see what’s going on we had to go in and break it up like detectives on a crime scene, “Nothing here to see girls, move along now. Go on back to your corners.”

Once we got past all of their usual shenanigans, this particular cow had just given birth and was standing about 25 feet from her newborn calf watching as it struggled to get up. Thank goodness, I thought, it looks O.K., now we can go back to the house and get warm. But, as we examined the situation a little closer, something looked amiss. The calf looked like it was doing fine, but the mother hadn’t bothered to lick it off as is the custom among cows.

While we were sitting on the four-wheeler in the drenching rain pondering this situation, all of a sudden the cow let out a huge bellow and stampeded toward her calf at a dead run and stopped about 12 inches short of trampling it. She then proceeded to butt it around with her head.

Now, I’m no expert, but I think this cow had been contemplating what had just happened to her, and after assessing the situation, she had finally figured out the source of all her pain, and was more than slightly annoyed at it. Having witnessed this type of mad cow behavior before, during their postnatal phase, we sat and watched for a few more minutes to see if she would settle down and start taking care of her calf.

But, seeing us huddled on the four-wheeler shivering in the shadows, I’m sure the cow decided that since she had no problems having the calf, she would take advantage of this situation anyway, like most cows would, to keep us out in the nasty weather longer. So, she proceeded to get really aggressive with the calf and acted like she was going to grind it into the mud with her head.

My husband was driving so he said, “Quick, chase her away from the calf.” So I jumped off the four-wheeler and ran up to her just in time to see the glare of her eyes shimmering through the rain before she turned and started running after me.

I made a hasty retreat to the only nearby protection – the other side of the four-wheeler where Mike was still sitting. After tiring of watching the circus of me running circles around him with the cow in hot pursuit, Mike finally stepped off the four-wheeler between me and the cow and, in a very calm but demanding tone, said, “Git out of here, you old biddy.”

There was a brief moment of indecision as the cow and I both stopped and looked at each other wondering which one of us he was referring to. I finally said, “I think he means you sister, so scoot!” She reluctantly turned and shuffled off to join the cow congregation that had now gathered to watch the evening’s events.

“What in the heck were you doing?” Mike said.

“Well, wasn’t it obvious?” I said. “I was using myself as a decoy to lure her away from her calf!”

Not wanting to witness another raging female that night, he offered encouragingly, “Well, I guess it kind of worked.”

With the cow out of the way, we quickly turned our attention to the calf that was still flailing around on the ground trying to stand up.

“We’ll have to get the calf into the barn and then go get the cow and bring her in and milk her and see if we can get this little guy fed,” Mike said.

He instructed me to get on the back of the four-wheeler – of course that’s where ranch wives always ride when the dog isn’t along – and he maneuvered the slimy, wet calf onto the rack behind me. I grabbed one of his legs on each side of me and wrapped him around my waist like a rather large fanny pack as Mike steered us to the barn.

The barn is on the other side of the corrals so Mike dropped the calf and me off in front of the corral gate and said, “Get him into the barn and I’ll go get the cow.”

No problem…or so I thought. I leaned over to pick up the 80-pound calf by wrapping my arms around his chest and he immediately proceeded to squirt out of my hands. He was so slimy and slippery from the birth and the rain that I couldn’t hang on to him. So I tried picking him up by hanging on a little lower around his middle, and the same thing happened – he slid right down to the ground.

I even tried picking him up upside down by his rump first, and that didn’t do either one of us any favors, in fact, when he slid down this time I went with him. Every time I just about got him picked up and would take a step or two toward the barn, he would shoot out of my hands like a big fish.

After about 10 minutes of this, I was covered in slime and mud, and was wet from head to toe, and had only made about 20 feet of progress in my quest for the barn.

I finally had to stop and rest, and while I was waiting to catch my breath, Mike, who was nearing the corrals with the cow, yelled, “You did know that he could probably walk by now, didn’t you?”

“Errrr, yeah…sure, I was just getting ready to let him do that,” I said as I turned and lifted the calf to a standing position.

“O.K. little guy,” I said to the calf, “let’s get you in the barn.” He just stood there. I nudged him with my knees; he still just stood there. I pushed and lifted on his rump, which immediately went up into the air while he braced his front legs in the locked position.

“Alright, if that’s the way you want it,” I told the calf, “I’ll use your hind legs and steer you like a wheelbarrow.” I soon found out that trying to pick up a slimy calf’s hind legs and hold onto them when he was now old enough to offer some resistance, isn’t much easier than trying to pick up the whole slimy calf.

After several attempts, I finally threw up my arms in disgust and said, “That’s it, I give up. You can just stay out here.” I turned and started to walk toward the barn thinking that I would at least open the doors for Mike to get the cow in. I went about 10 steps and heard this faint little moo. I looked over my shoulder and the calf was following me.

“Nah,” I told myself, “it couldn’t be this easy.” So I took a few more steps and the calf came running up behind me again. “We’ll I’ll be darned,” I said, “it looks like you finally decided to cooperate.” In the process, he had apparently also decided out of desperation that I was his only hope at getting some food and he started butting me. Fortunately he wasn’t old enough to do much damage, and he eventually butted me all the way into the barn.

About that time, the cow, with Mike following, came bursting into the barn. I was standing in a corner of the barn and had nowhere to go to get out of her way, so I clenched my body preparing for the worst and waited for her to take her frustration out on me.

She came right up to me and sniffed my coat, which was covered in calf slime, and began licking me.

Feeling a little uncomfortable with this sudden show of affection, especially after our earlier encounter, I shoved the calf that had been standing behind me in front of her nose and she started licking him instead.

Apparently she was no longer mad at the little guy.

“Just wait till he becomes a teenager,” I told her, “and you’ll be mad all over again.”