Pasture Escape – Growing Up in Dublin, Texas

Now we were all responsible for the care taking of the cows and making sure they would stay in their designated area, the pasture. Dad had two milk cows a brown one think we just called her Brownie and then a bluish gray and white one called ol’ Blue.  We had the help of a barbed wire fence on three sides and 15 foot hihg or so, stockyard fence on the fourth.

Lets face it if you were a cow, and were milked early in the morning before sun rise, and then again in the evening, and were confined to this pasture of a couple of acres, next to the railroad tracks, with a stockyard next door and dependent on a eight year old to fill the water trough each day , wouldn’t you want to get out and kick your heels ever now and again. Well that is exactly what the two cows Dad had would do from time to time.

It would be sheer pandemonium, when they did. It was not so much the fear of a small boy and his brothers trying to surround a 1,000 pound cow, and it running over us, as much as it was the fear of the Hell we would catch if Dad came in and we did not have the cows penned.

I do not know how they would do it, maybe some how they would work the barbwire until it had a loose nail in a fence post , which o wold finally give way, and and then the cow would be able to spring over or through the other two strains of wire and off they would go. Most of the time they would get out along the fence on the Harbin road, which ran across the railroad tracks heading east up the hill.

We would try to circle them and drive them back through the fences sometimes this worked, and some times they would break through one of our parameters and off they would fly. Normally up the hill and down North Davies Street and slow down there stopping in a ditch to eat some grass, and the furtherest i ever saw them go was up Latham street off North Davies.

Regardless we usually resigned ourselves to keeping up with them the best we could keeping eye on them, and them some what corralled until Dad would get in. Knowing we would catch hell from Dad for the Cows Jail Break, but content in knowing it was not worse that could have happened. The cows could have been hit by a car or train, or that they never went west into town and tore up somebody’s yard or house, or made it to the Harbin Highway and been long gone and hit by a truck.
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Hope you enjoyed my ramblings and that it brought back few memories of you childhood days, no matter what state you hail from.

© Texas Tortilla Factory 2006 – Mike Vauthier