Armed With Two Butter Knives

Hadley and I sold ten pigs yesterday.  Mr. 10PigPurchaser was extremely friendly and admitted about 25 times that he has no idea what he is doing, as this is his first time raising pigs.

He was in good company.

Me:  Ok, do you care if we grab boys or girls?

Mr 10:  I don’t know?  Does it matter?  I just want lots of bacon?

Me:  I don’t think it matters.  Now, they are going to scream.

Mr 10:  They are?  Why?

Me:  I think it is like their defense mechanism.  But it is normal and don’t worry.

Mr 10:  They “scream?”

Me:  Oh, yes.  It is horrific.

So we grabbed him ten screaming, non-gendered pigs and away he went, looking forward to his future bacon.

But here is the best news of all:  We only have 13 piglets left.

!

Could the end be near?

David was telling me a sad story about one of our farmer friends.  Farmer Friend’s bull, who was actually Dutch Bros’ Father, broke through a fence and was loose.  Farmer Friend roped him and then left to get a halter so he could lead him back.  When Farmer Friend returned, the bull had accidentally panicked and pulled his rope too tight and strangled himself.

Farm life is hard, dudes.

It reminded me of a story that for some reason I never told you.  So now I will.  This story is two years old.  And why didn’t I write about it two years ago, I ask you?

So at this point in time, we had Matilda and her twins-Tiny Tim and Houdini.  We also had the two horses-Ruby and Chico.  AND we had Rosie, but she was at the aforementioned Farmer Friend’s house getting pregnant with Dutch Bro.

Are you with me?

We get home late one night and see that our fence is broken and all animals are missing, except Tiny Tim.  Tiny Tim was in a special pen so I could bottle feed him because his meany pants Mom, Matilda, rejected him and chose to only love and nourish Houdini.

HD:  Oh, right!  Dad, I noticed the fence was broken today!

Me and David:  WHY DID YOU NOT SAY SOMETHING?

HD:  Geez.  I forgot.

We hatch a plan that involves ropes, buckets of feed, and cell phones.  Kate was to stay at the house and be the lookout to let us know if any of our animal friends have come home to us.

Please note:  It is probably 10pm, it is very dark, and our “neighborhood” is very much stretched out.

For reasons I do not recall, we decide to head up the road to where we believe the horses are.  We are trying to be quiet and not wake up our neighbors.  We were most definitely trespassing.  Our neighbors like us, but if they did not know it was us, they might greet us with a shotgun, if you know what I mean.

Anyways.

David is doing this weird thing where he is making the horses go round and round and making clicking noises with his mouth and trying to rope a horse.  He gets Ruby quickly and ties her up and he proceeds to do the same thing with Chico.

He tries and tries and tries again.

In the meantime, we can hear lots of mooing and we now believe Matilda and Houdini have started a meet and greet at a different neighbor’s cattle ranch.  But we still need to get the horses in.

I like to pride myself on being the voice of reason.  So finally, I  whisper/shout to David:

Just walk Ruby home and Chico will follow!

And I was correct.  Because while I am not very street smart, I am a good animal observer and I know that Chico gets very fussy if Ruby is not by his side.  Must be love.

So, we get the horses back and now must find Matilda and Houdini.

This is where things are going to get hairy.  Please remember this event happened two years ago.

David, Hadley, the boys, and I took the truck down the road to neighboring meet and greet.  Cows are extremely social, so Matilda and Houdini wanted to hang out with their new friends.  Meanwhile, all the neighbor’s cows were angry mooing and causing a ruckus and why that neighbor didn’t greet us with a shotgun is beyond me.

Readers.  Are you familiar with Matilda?  Matilda is the first cow we ever got, and she is beautiful.

Totally not kidding.  She is a looker.

But she is a brat and a half.

She was not interested in listening to David, nor I, and had no intentions of coming peacefully home.  At one point she took off running towards the ONE BUSY ROAD we live near.  As she was running that way, I saw an innocent car coming down the road.  I was terrified that the car would hit her, seeing as how she is black and blends in well with the black night.  Luckily David was able to turn her away from the road.

At this point, is is probably closer to 11pm and we are no longer whispering.  The diesel truck is roaring and we are all shouting.  Finally, David ropes Houdini, who is Matilda’s calf.  He yells for Hadley to run back to the house and get the four wheeler.  His plan is to have Hadley drive the four wheeler and pull Houdini behind her and hopefully Matilda will peacefully follow.

Ha.

Hadley does as instructed and Matilda doesn’t care.  She just let’s him go.  Meanwhile, since Houdini is struggling, the rope gets tight around his neck and Hadley ends up having to drag him the rest of the way home, sure he was dead.  When she got home, she screamed for Kate and she and Kate were able to loosen the rope and get Houdini safely in the pen.  Then Hadley took the four wheeler back to where the rest of us were.

I know that you know that I like to joke around, but I was purely terrified.  Matilda is very large and I was very worried that David or one of the boys were going to get hurt.  David got a rope around Matilda and was trying to tie her to the truck.  She was thrashing about and I screamed at the boys to get in the cab of the truck.

They were like:  But, Moooooom.

And I was like a dragon breathing fire:  YOU LISTEN TO ME AND GET YOUR BUTTS IN THE TRUCK.

We finally get everything situated where we think we can tow Matilda home.  I am the driver of the truck, with the poor, totally bored boys in the cab.  David was trying to help lead Matilda from behind and I was pulling her.  I have no rememberance of where Hadley was specifically, but she had to have been there.

Matilda is tied to the back of the truck and then she would try to run away and kind of pull the truck with her.  There was a lot of yelling.  David would yell at me to drive, so I would start to drive, then he would scream for me to stop, as Matilda was refusing to move and the rope was choking her.  This went on for many, many minutes.

At one point David yells that Matilda is about to die.  So we all get out of the truck and look.  She has gotten the rope very tight around her neck and David cannot even get his fingers under it to loosen it.

He tells the kids to run home and get the halter.  The halter was what we should have used in the first place, as the halter would have prevented the choking.  They take the four wheeler and come back with a rope and not a halter.  Which was so not helpful at that moment.

David and I both strongly feel like Matilda is about to die.  It was such a horrible feeling because we could not do anything.  David tells Hadley to quickly take the fourwheeler and run to the house and grab his butchering knives so he can try to cut the rope off of her.  I decided to help and text Kate and tell her to grab the knives for Hadley.  I fail to specify which knives.

When Hadley ran into the house, Kate was standing there, armed with two butter knives.

Hadley:  What are you doing?!

Kate:  Mom, said you needed knives!?

Hadley grabbed the murderous knives and drove back to the scene.  David was able to finally cut the rope off of Matilda, but she would not get up.

We were sure we killed her.

Finally, David kind of kicked her a couple of times, and she got up, breathing murderous threats towards us once again.

I do not remember what we did differently, friends, but we rigged her up better this time and were able to pull her behind the truck without choking her.  I called the house and told Kate to go open the big gate and we drove the truck right into the pen and delivered her safely home so she could continue her happy life with Houdini all while hating us and Tiny Tim.

The next morning, I texted all of our neighbors to apologize for the disturbance the night before and no one had heard a thing.

?

It was a very intense night.  Anyways, I felt badly for Farmer Friend whose bull strangled himself, as it almost happened to us one night.

***

We have accepted an offer on our house, so that is exciting.  Hopefully it will be a quick and easy closing.

Happy Tuesday!