‘It was. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy seeing the old place but that cart thing, whatever you call it, that I went in wasn’t very comfortable.’
Franexhaled, not sure if she was glad Amy was still her slightly difficult self or annoyed that something she had thought would be a wonderful treat turned out to be ‘not very comfortable’.
‘You haven’t had any side effects from the cheese you tasted?’
‘No. Why should I? It wasn’t poisoned, was it?’
‘Of course not, it’s just it was made from unpasteurised milk … Oh, never mind.’
Fran kept her word and left Amy quite quickly. Amy was tired and needed to ‘rest her eyes’ as she liked to call a daytime nap.
She had parked her car in front of the house and was about to go in when she heard a noise. She’d lived on the farm long enough to know it was a cow – a cow obviously in distress.
She ran down to the cowshed to see if she could find Tig, although she knew if he had been around he’d have heard the cow himself and done something about it.
She went into the house and dialled his number on the landline. No reply. She left a message.
As a last resort she ran up the stairs and called Issi, hoping against hope she’d find Tig with her. But there was no reply, no sound. They were both out.
Just now, even Roy would have been something. He could have made himself useful for the first time and rescued the cow – at least he probably wasn’t frightened of them.
Eventhrough the walls of the house, the cow’s distressed bellow was audible. She had to do something. She couldn’t let it suffer. She pulled on her stripy boots. She reallyshouldhave bought some proper farming ones by now.
She went back round to the front of the house and looked towards the bellowing. She spotted the cow. It was in the highest field and very near the hedge.
As she sprinted up the hill towards it, she did feel a touch of pride at how much fitter she was these days. There would have been a time when a hill that steep would have had her puffing a bit.
Her pride was short-lived though. There was a cow, in distress, and there she was, not knowing what on earth to do about it.
Nervously, she opened the gate, went in and set off towards the animal. As she got nearer, she recognised it. This was Flora, the cow who’d had the difficult calving that she’d watched. And there was no calf visible. That was the problem! The calf must, somehow, have got on the other side of the hedge. No wonder Flora was bellowing. But one of the few things Fran was certain about was that cows could be very dangerous if separated from their calves.
Without getting too near, and grateful that the other cows were way down the bottom of the field, she peered through a gap. Yes, there was the calf. So all she had to do was somehow get the calf back through the hedge. But first she had to get herself into that field.
Cursingherself for not having learnt the geography of the farm better, she tried to remember where the gate was to the field next to the top one. Then Flora gave another huge bellow and she decided to stop worrying about the gate and just go through the hedge.
She looked briefly for a less dense bit, squeezed her eyes shut and led with her elbows. Determination and managing to ignore the scratches got her through to the other side. She landed with a bump and immediately began rolling down the hill a bit. She sat up and saw the calf – and also realised that she’d found the quarry.
No wonder she hadn’t found it before. It was small and in a bit of a dip, very out of the way. A small hawthorn tree had grown up in front of it, hiding the wooden door that seemed to have come off its hinges. Through the gap, Fran could just about make out a couple of shelves on the wall. This must be the place where Amy ripened the cheese all those years ago.
Hugely encouraged by this discovery, she turned her full attention to the calf.
Now she was the same side of the hedge she could see what had happened. It had somehow got through the hedge and had followed its mother’s bellows further along, away from the gap it had gone through. All she had to do – so simple and possibly impossible – was to persuade it back to the hole in the hedge and push it through.
Ofcourse she should have brought something with her – a head collar or something – but would a calf be led like that unless it had been trained from birth? Fran was pretty ignorant about cows, she was the first to admit, but she felt this was unlikely.
She climbed up the side of the quarry to join the calf. She couldn’t see the hole it had come through but decided if she could push herself through a hedge, she might be able to push a calf, especially if its mother was on the other side.
Bravely, she spoke to it. ‘OK, darling, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m just going to join you up with your mother.’ She was sure she’d heard the expression ‘join you up’, or something similar, with regard to horse whispering.
Annoyingly, however, the calf hadn’t watched the same television programme and was obviously going to need something more hands-on. She put her arms round the little chap’s neck and pulled, hoping to get it to move towards a gap. ‘Come on, lovely, Mummy’s this way!’
She managed to drag it along a little bit and then fortunately the cow was able to see her calf and butted the hedge. That made a bit of a bigger gap and, with Fran pushing from behind (having forgotten cows could kick), it got through to the other side.
The calf might well have been fairly scratched – as she was herself – but it was with its mother, who stopped bellowing, obviously delighted to be reunited.
Franbecame aware of a trickle of blood running down her own face and realised she had to find the gate to the field or go back through the hedge. She was so buoyed by her success she decided to go for broke and return through the hedge. She was grazed and muddy and her coat was torn but who cared? She’d found the quarry and rescued a calf. She almost felt like a proper farmer – at last!
While Fran was washing her hands and face and generally returning herself to looking fairly normal, she realised she really wanted to go back to the care home to tell Amy about the quarry immediately.
