Stagtine, 19. The Muck

Section 2, Chapter 3

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“The tender purling of dead grasses against the headward, winter wind, their stalks still erect and singing hymns of summer’s hallowed, golden days. “

“Morgan!” I cried. “My boots! They’re stuck!”

My body freed itself from my voice and its words were a faraway, detached cadence in the cold. Desolate fear settled as the desolate, farmed gladiator screamed in my direction.

Morgan had already scrambled to the paddock’s gate and was panting atop of it. She was covered in freezing mud and had already shocked herself too many times on the electric reel to give another damn.

“He’s coming!” she exclaimed.

I could not move.

Our bull Paddy, or Padraig, was often a very kind giant. During our farm’s breeding window when he lived with the herd, he was their lead and he was our management’s focus. He would come at our woop woop and the herd would follow. Bulls get a bad rap in popular images of agriculture. They are often pictured as minivan-sized monuments of testosterone and anger with eyes enflamed and muscles fueled to charge. But these bulls have never had a place in our management. Life is hard enough and life spent fearing death or injury is not a life we have ever been interested in. Why are they so mean, anyway?

On farm tours, we would lay with Paddy in the shade while he chewed on his cud and we would scratch his nose to demonstrate his domestication to our onlooking guests. Look at this, we would say. This is farming in nature’s image.

But nature slogged aggressively in my direction. The darkness of the morning grew darker and Paddy’s plangent pains heightened. Hours of attempting to calm him down, to move him elsewhere, to repair the fencing he had destroyed when he got out and ran down the road, endangering our small community and the commuting passersby, had failed. Our work and commotion had only made it worse—the patched fence was not strong and would not hold another charge. His anger mounted with the morning. And now I was about to be his piñata, but tethered to the ground instead of hanging overhead.

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