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Tale of a Cow
By
Graeme Addison
Things happen
for a reason, but when a dead cow floats into your life you
have to wonder what that reason is.
It was
enormously dead and not planning to drift away anytime soon.
The brown swollen thing had got caught under a tree upriver
of Otters’ Haunt, our place on the Vaal River, and if I’d
known then what I know now about managing dead cows I would
have taken swift decisive action. A stick of dynamite would
have done it. Exploded cow sinks (doesn’t it?) but stinking
cow in one piece is an embarrassment to the district.
The pong was
everywhere. This happened late in the afternoon of New
Year’s Eve 2005. Our riverside guest house and bush camp
were full of visitors; champagne on ice; wives and kids
sunning themselves next to the water, and intrepid
fly-fishermen setting out to pursue the wily yellowfish in
every nook and cranium, as one of them informed me.
“Ay!” yelled
one of these rough and ready guys as I followed my nose
towards the source. “You’s gotta sort that out, man. It
honks something terrible!” His laugh was like a donkey’s
bray.
This is what
eco-living means. You have a dream that you will leave the
city and set up an elegant establishment in the wilds,
attracting the best sort of people for weekends communing
with nature. They are soulmates rather than customers. Since
coming to live on the Vaal four years previously, all the
charms of country living had left their mark on us – fire,
flood, pet dogs stuck full porcupine needles, cobras under
the bookshelves. Bachelor parties in the raw, where young
gallants smashed up the billiard table and burnt the
furniture because the firewood pile was too far away.
Next morning
they obligingly paid for the pleasure, punching me
playfully. As an old riverman I recognised these fellows as
Best of Type, my sort really – except that age and the
necessity of making a decent living had forced me to go
respectable.
For all these
reasons I never ceased singing the praises of the rustic
life on the Vaal.
Suicidal cows
were part of this scenario. At first no-one knew where the
cow hid, or rather bobbed on the current, but a quick paddle
upriver soon revealed the 2006 New Year Horror. There it
was, a cow from hell. Peering at the snagged carcass from a
safe distance, I considered the options. Throw a grappling
iron and tow it away upriver. Or drag it up the banks and
bury it. Trouble was it might just break loose and head
directly for our place, where a line of rocks and a low weir
would definitely hold it back, placing the evil right under
our noses. Call the Parys Fire Brigade? – you had to be
joking, this was one evening in the year they would not be
available to deal with agricultural mishaps. Drunks,
accidents and runaway bar fires were their business tonight.
That is, if
they operated at all. This was a small town, and this was
South Africa in the festive season. Everyone would be on a
jorl – even emergency workers.
All this went
through my mind as another part of me pondered the
scientific and historical interest of the moment. Inflated
animal skins made the first blow-up rafts, a technology
still used on Himalayan rivers today. Probably the first
rapids were run when a drowning man hung onto a bloated
bovine in a flood. Better than nothing at all. From that,
someone had the bright idea of refining the technology by
removing the innards and sewing the thing up to make it
waterproof. That’s progress.
But I didn’t
need this sort of progress on New Year’s Eve, and we had
enough inflatables of our own.
For an instant
I believed the cow would hear my prayer and quietly sink out
of sight. Not. Instead, it dislodged itself and spun lazily
into the current, going with the flow like a missile aimed
directly at our business. No-one at our place seemed to
appreciate the gravity of the situation. They were all
getting ready for the night’s merriment. But in the
hospitality game you have to provide a safe, stink-free
environment. There had to be action!
I conferred
with our expert on land and water affairs, Ricky Mudau,
handyman, gardener and riverguide. Ricky had his own views
on life’s challenges because, as a Pedi living in a
predominantly Tswana area, he knew about solving problems in
isolation.
We decided to
harpoon the animal and sink it. A weapon was soon fashioned
from a sharpened iron rod wired to a long thin gum pole. We
headed out like Captain Ahab and Quee-Queg in an inflatable
raft-cum-whaleboat, me standing with the harpoon raised high
at the bows. Our grins as we passed a bunch of fishermen on
the wooden deck at the river were actually grimaces.
By the time we
reached the cow it was stuck fast on a rock; settling in for
the night. It was beginning to get dark and the slimy hide
of the animal glinted purple and gold in the falling sun. As
we closed in I realised the glossy colours were really big
fat blueflies collected around the eyes, ears, mouth and
anus and humming like bees on a hunt for honey.
I prepared to
lunge forward with the harpoon but the stench was so
overpowering that lunge I did – to retch in the water.
Recovering my pride, I jabbed the pole at the most rotund
part of the cow, expecting it to sink into a soft,
jelly-like substance and hear a whoosh of escaping gas.
Nothing happened. The spike bounced off as if the hide were
armour plating.
I lunged again,
still nothing. Except that the blueflies burst around us in
a violent swarm that had us ducking and waving. Damn it,
there would be no surrender. Ricky and I changed places: he
had too a couple of goes, but no way, this cow was tougher
than it looked and built to last. The tip of the iron rod
was bent over and had become as blunt as an old boot. We
backed off, leaving the blueflies to their prize, and made
for the workshop to grind a carefully selected steel spoke
down to a point that would pierce the enemy’s thickest
armour. There was an insane glint in Ricky’s eye as the
sparks flew.
I took this
opportunity to phone the Parys Fire Brigade. Against my
finer instincts, it was time to seek help from the
authorities.
“Yaaaw,”
drawled the duty officer, “what’s problem?”
“We have a dead
cow in the river. Can you come and take it away?”
“Mister,” said
the voice, “how is we suppose to do that?”
“Well, I don’t
know haven’t you had dead cows before?”
“Is not our
problem. The owner must come fetch it.”
“But who the
hell knows who the owner is?” It crossed my mind that he was
expecting me to ask the cow. “Surely you can winch it out of
the river? I mean, the public are using the Vaal for
swimming and fishing. It’ll bring disease. This is an
emergency!”
“No man, we
can’t come now, this is a bad night and half our peoples is
on leaf.”
Had I stopped
there, the cow would have disappeared off the official radar
screen forever. Water – the softest, most powerful force in
the world – does its work on reeking bodies, taking them off
to oblivion. But impatience would be my downfall.
“Let me speak
to the Fire Chief,” I demanded, “This thing can’t stay
here!” At the top of the bureaucratic tree must be someone
who understood the public health and tourism issues
surrounding the incident. I would be heard.
“Ag wait.”
An African lady
came on line. “Father, can I help you? What is the
difficulty?”
The whole
crisis was explained again, and again, and again, as I
climbed the official ladder, each time growing more
insistent, more desperate, putting the case for Public
Responsibility and Pollution Control. Eventually it turned
out that the top man in the department was away in
Namaqualand and nobody else would take the decision to call
up people on New Year’s Eve just to rid one river lodge
owner of a smelly problem.
We went back on
the river. Now thunder and lightning crashed on the eastern
horizon as the last of the sun sank in the west. When rain
comes from the east it’s cyclonic and likely to be heavy.
The river had a well-oiled look in the flashing gloom, as if
it were flexing its muscles to usher the New Year in, but
the cow was as solidly wedged on the rocks as ever and
nothing would budge it. This time, the harpoon really worked
and the cow was soon punctured all over like an oozing
teabag.
Delightful. The
stink got worse and the cow simply snugged itself down more
firmly on its rocks.
Back to the
phone.
“Listen,” I
yelled at the same polite, patient African lady, “people
can’t celebrate if they get sick! This thing has got to go!
Send in the emergency team! Please.”
There was a
pulse of resentment on the other end but I was past caring.
“OK, sir, we’ll
be in touch.” Click.
By now the
mother and father of all thunderstorms was raging in the
east. The tall bluegums on the islands opposite our place
shuddered and shed their leaves. The rain pelted
horizontally across the open field beside the bush camp
where guests huddled in miserable groups under the thatched
lapa. The lights went out as the power failed. The only
consolation was that the smell was blown away, for the time
being, but it would return. This was building up to a New
Year’s Eve of note.
Then the phone
rang. A distant, crackly voice pronounced my name and added
its own – this was the Fire Chief calling from a homely
braai in the middle of the great arid wastelands somewhere
between Pofadder and Pampoensvlei. There was no storm there,
no river bringing the reek of putrefaction, just a
celebration where the dead cow provoked raucous mirth in the
background.
“My frien’,”
said the Chief slightly slurring his words, “Ja well! They’s
coming to sorts out jou probleem.”
This was the
first official acknowledgement that I really did have a
situation on my hands. Here was the pro taking charge,
managing the disaster as we had a right to expect. I
couldn’t express my gratitude enough. I offered to put up
the Chief and his family for a week. Told him the whole
district would thank him for saving us from pestilence. It
amounted to heroism of the highest order.
He yawned.
“What’s that blerry geraas (noise) you got there?”
“Just a bit of
rain,” I shouted as the lighting struck metres away and the
phone went dead.
Somehow the
Auld Lang Syne parties went ahead, everyone fell about in
the slush, and by midnight the skies were clearing to allow
a man-made storm of fireworks, as impressive as the real
thing if you half-closed your eyes. Then a miraculous calm
descended, and with it the returned the puking smell in my
nostrils. Nightmares of giant blueflies invaded my sleep
while a rotting carcass the size of Moby Dick washed up on
the doorstep.
At the first
chink of dawn I was back at the wooden deck peering into the
mist on the river to make out – Oh Gawd, there it was still
– the hump of the cow. I wandered home hoping the Chief
would make good his promise, soon. By the time our guests
woke up with sore heads the cow must be ancient history. It
must be disappeared. Pong gone.
Meantime,
citizen help was on the way. Hugh and Clive, paddling
friends from town, drove in and bounced up to me with the
offer to remove my cow. They seemed perversely eager to
manhandle the carcass like abattoir workers – their way of
kicking off the year.
“We’ll get rid
of your cow!” they chirped.
With friends
like these, who needs health and emergency services?
But…My cow,
who said it was my cow? Suddenly I was the owner of this
abomination. Everyone in town thought the cow was my
project to mark 2006. No, a hundred times no! I was the
victim, not the perpetrator.
The cow had
been the talk of a party last night at Hugh’s place when
Karen, my wife and business partner, went to out pop
champagne. I I just went to bed, nursing cow angst.
I directed my
friends to the deck and told them it was over to them. I
could do no more.
Just then, with
a rumble of vehicles and a clanking of chains, the Fire
Brigade arrived in force. Red Land Rovers, big winch,
workers in overalls with lifejackets. Poles and hooks and
ropes.
There were
hungover expressions all around and it was sad that most had
not been to bed, or just briefly so, before being rousted
out to deal with the Chief’s priority assignment. My
attempts to crack a few pathetic jokes about mad cow disease
and feeling cowed by the New Year didn’t go down well. They
even rejected the offer of strong coffee.
“Let’s get on
with it,” said the team leader, Hannes, moodily. Funny, he
was normally quite buoyant when he came to Otters’ Haunt to
fight veld fires. He enjoyed it if lives and property were
threatened, if flames ten metres high threatened to consume
us all. A dead cow didn’t have quite the same appeal.
We crossed to
the deck lookout to study he problem. Hugh and Clive were
just leaving – they shrugged and shook their heads, which I
took to be an admission that they too couldn’t do anything
much. Anyway the professionals were here now.
The mist had
lifted.
“So where it
is?” said Hannes.
“There, on that
rock over there.” I pointed at yesterday’s bluefly paradise.
He squinted
into the rising sun. “That’s not a cow, that’s a rock,” he
shot me a puzzled glance.
“No it is, you
can smell it,” I insisted. I didn’t want to take another
whiff myself but I urged him: “Smell it!”
“I can’t smell
anything,” he said flatly.
I took another
look at the rock. It wasn’t the same, it seemed much smaller
than yesterday, so I searched the river for the whole band
of rocks that we knew so well from picking our way through
them in boats. They were all underwater. The willows lining
the banks now had their tendrils trailing in strong
currents. I rubbed my eyes. Hannes watched me like a man
contemplating a fight in a pub but uncertain whether to
start it or walk away. The other men gathered round.
“I could have
sworn there were rocks here yesterday,” I mumbled.
“Eish!”
breathed one of the workers, “die baas is versuip!” (the
boss is pissed). There was a ripple of angry agreement.
“No, seriously,
honestly,” I pleaded with Hannes, “the cow was struck right
there. It smelt terrible. It was a health hazard…” I trailed
off. “The river must have risen in the night.” I paused and
searched again, one last time. “It’s gone.”
“I guess so,
meneer,” Hannes looked me dead in the eye. “You know, we
came specially early for this.”
“Uh,” smiling
weakly at the whole group I made an empty, apologetic
gesture. Disgusted, they turned and strode back to their
vehicles, revved up, and roared away, leaving me standing
there without the ghost of an excuse. The Parys Fire Brigade
won’t be back here again in a hurry.
It was all my
fault – the cow, the phonecalls, the storm, the hangovers,
the missing carcass, everything. What a bummer.
After a minute
I took a deep breath of the fresh New Year and tried to
shake the feeling of being a complete idiot.
Things happen
for a reason. After the Day of the Dead Cow it rained
non-stop for weeks and months. The beast was a messenger
from the weather gods. The river surged, threatening to
drive us from house, home and offices. But just like the
cow, it never quite brought disaster, and quietly subsided.
There is a
deeper reason too. Somewhere in the universe is an Office of
Practical Jokes where they plan incidents like this. If the
carcass had remained stuck on its rock, the Fire Brigade
would never have come. It had to float away so that
the emergency team would come. Get it? Whom the gods
wish to humble, they first make foolishly angry. This is the
Law of the Dead Cow.
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