I shook the bottle in my hands, mixing the formula inside. I kept a finger on the rubber nipple to keep the milk inside from squirted out, but despite my best efforts, tiny splashes of sticky milk somehow ended up over most of my forearm. It came off with a couple swipes on my pajama bottoms.
It might've been a warm sunny day if not for the 40 mph winds wind that pummeled my family's tiny farm. Sand stung my eyes as I walked, collecting in my eyelashes and tear ducts. Luckily I wasn't going far, but I now wished I had put on more than just a T-shirt.
The iron gate shrieked as rusted hinged grated on one another. I stepped through, dropping the latch back into place with a loud metal-on-metal clang.
"Hey baby," I called. "You hungry?"
The corral I was in housed a number of animals, most of which, admittedly, are chickens. There are two barns, one for the chickens and one for keeping square bales of wheat hay, and a shed that used to have saddles and other tack, but is all but useless now. In the middle of the pen there is a half eaten round bale and, to the left, a tiny stock tank. There, next to the hay, stood a short black cow, lazily chewing on chunks of wheat stalk.
She gave me a look as I entered, trying to determine in her syrup-like way of thinking whether or not I was coming to kill and eat her, decided that I probably wasn't, and proceeded to ignore me. Underneath her belly I could see four tiny little cloven hooves, telling me her baby was too nervous of me to stray very far from his only protection.
My boots stuck in semi-dried mud as I walked around the hay bale. In the corner of the pen, where a series of welded pipes met to create the fence, was a second baby. He was black, like his mother and brother, and he had a patch of crusted fur on the crown of his nose from past feedings getting messy. At only five or six days old and as a twin, he was still very tiny. He shied clumsily away from me as approached, gangly little legs unsteady.
"Hey, easy boy." I put a hand on his back to steady him, trying to offer him the bottle with my other hand. He wouldn't have it, though, and I settled for throwing one leg over his neck and holding him between my legs. He pulled back struggling, but I offered him the bottle a second time, gently pushing it past his gums. Almost instantly, he relaxed as started hungrily gulping down the warm liquid inside. Bottle feeding was important for his survival. His mother didn't have the resources to raise two large healthy babies. They probably would both survive, but it wouldn't be worth the effort selling them when the time came. Their weights would just be too low.
"There. See? This isn't so bad," I cooed, running my fingers through his silky black fuzz. The bottle gurgled as air bubbles replaced the quickly disappearing milk. His ears flapped occasionally as he drank, the green eartag with the number 374 hanging loosely in his ear.
I noticed that the calf had sucked most of the air out of the bottle and had effectively cut off suction. I pulled the nozzle from his mouth and, with a loud pop, it came loose.
He panicked at the sound, jumping between my knees.
I laughed, offering him what remained of the milk, "Scare yourself?"
The cow had become interested in what we were doing, which, frankly, made me a little nervous. I'd been around overly-protective cattle before and I wasn't too keen on the idea of being chased down and crushed underneath thousands of pounds of bone and muscle, but she didn't overtly angry. Just curious.
She walked up behind us, reaching out with the tip of her nose and very lightly sniffing the calf to make sure it wasn't hers (which it was, but don't tell her that) and decided that the baby was fine where it was.
The baby was sucked nothing but air now, the bottle empty and I gently removed it from his mouth. Slobber flew in the wind as he tried to find the bottle that wasn't there.
I started walking away and he trotted after me, now hoping that I would give him more.
"It's gone, buddy," I told him gently. "You drank it all."
He seemed to lose interest in me, if not in the milk, and approached his birth mother, thrusting his head under her belly in hunger. She let him feed, which surprised me a little, the other calf coming from the other side to eat his breakfast as well.
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Didn't have a good way to end this one, so I just left it as is.
Anyway, just another day on the farm. Hope you like it!
-FlyOn