Cattle jailbreak

At 8 am Jan called to tell me that there were some cattle in the front yard of the house across the street from her house.  She wasn't sure if they were mine but there were some black and white cattle.  I was sure they were mine and that the bull made a jailbreak.

It had rained overnight and was still misting.  I ran through the tall wet grass in the hayfield over to the neighbor's house. While crossing the hayfield I saw some of my cattle in the south pasture.  So not all of them had gotten out.

When I got to the neighbor's yard I found that none of the cattle were mine.  They looked to be Jamie's cattle, my neighbor across the street.  The person living in the house heard Jan and I talking and came outside.  When Jan went in her house to call Jamie, some cattle in Jamie's pasture came up from the creek.  When the loose cattle saw Jamie's cattle they crossed the road to get to the pasture.  I opened the gate and the cattle went inside.  Mission accomplished.

Or so I thought.

By the time I walked home I saw a pickup pulling a red stock trailer slowly driving down the road and then stopping across from Jamie's pasture.  I talked to the couple and learned they were missing seven cattle from where they were pasturing them a quarter mile down the road. 

Oh... yeah... there occasionally were cattle in a field down the road.

The couple lives elsewhere and by co-incidence had come up to get and take some cattle to the livestock auction when they found some were missing.

I offered to help them retrieve their cattle from Jamie's pasture.

Jamie doesn't have a loading facility for cattle, just a small gate in one corner and some extra moveable corral panels, of which we used two inside the corral. The couple had a few corral panels in their trailer and we used them to secure a path from the gate to their trailer.

The seven cattle were mainly short horn cattle with two Holstein (ugh) cattle.  Jamie's cattle are Corriente cattle with long horns.   The seven cattle were pretty tame and all had names which the woman used when calling and talking to their cattle.

One of the couple's cattle was a little bull and he got easily distracted by the cows.  And one of the couple's Angus cross cow was flighty and ignored their calls.  The guy and I entered the pasture to herd his cattle.  I was a little nervous about the long horns on Jamie's cattle but they were all calm.  One was too friendly and kept getting in the way.  The woman was enticing her cattle with cow "cookies" and Jamie's cow kept trying to get one too.

Eventually we got his cattle separated and loaded into his trailer.  It had started to rain while we were herding the cattle so I was very wet by the time I got home.  When I got home I got out of my wet clothes and went back to bed to sleep for an hour.

At least none of the jail breaking cattle were mine.

Spying Jamie's cattle