Intruder alert! ('The DSM')

It started with footprints in the potager. No. It started when I was perusing my young vegetables; seeing if they had grown in the last three hours from when I last looked. Such was my life during lockdown. As I was contemplating why the carrot seeds I planted weeks earlier hadn’t appeared, I noticed a patch or dollop of brown something on the lawn. On closer inspection it looked like a cowpat, which was confusing as we don’t have a cow. It was then I noticed hoof prints, several of them criss-crossing my freshly hoed earth. I looked around to see if I had missed a cow in the garden...nothing. 

When recounting my Arthur C. Clark happening to Anna, my wife, she said there was also a big cowpat at the front gate too. We have a large section of garden, running parallel to a lane which is not fenced. So, using my powers of deduction and the direction of hoof prints, I surmised the cows had entered from the lane, had a poo, danced on my leeks and then left via the front gate only stopping for another quick poo. 

I was surprised that neither Anna nor myself had spotted the intruder/intruders. The pat was not steaming and had begun ‘crusting over’. Maybe they snuck into our garden at night. Are cows nocturnal? During the previous owners’ tenure of the property a cow fell into the swimming pool and had to be winched out with a Manitou.

Fast forward a week. I noticed fresh footprints amongst my kohlrabi. Branches had been torn from a fruit tree and a conifer hedge (it looked like one of the jumped fences at the Grand National). I heard a loud ‘moo’, that sounded very close. 

The field next to us, which never has cows in...had cows in, about thirty...brown, with horns, having a high old time, doing as they pleased. Just then I heard the screeching of brakes as a couple, I took for the farmer and his wife, judging by the panicked look on their faces, stopped their car and enquired as to the whereabouts of their bovine escapees. Having limited French, I replied “Les vaches” and pointed to the adjacent field. More screeching, this time of tyres, as he disappeared up the lane. 

Over the next few minutes more red-faced French farmhands arrived in an assortment of vehicles and attempted the round up. It was like watching One Man and His Dog, except with cows instead of sheep and a Mad Max collection of vehicles instead of a dog. Not wanting to look as though I was finding amusement in their misfortune, and having roped our garden off, went inside. 

For the next hour all I could hearing was the revving of engines, mooing and “Pascal, vite!”. As I washed up I saw what looked like the running of the bulls in Pamplona outside the kitchen window. The mischievous cows diverted into an open ploughed field pursued by a small white Citroën. Seeing the car driving at thirty miles per hour across the furrowed land was an amazing site. The occupants being jiggled about inside. 

The cows disappeared out of sight but I charted their whereabouts for the rest of the evening from the distant moos. 

The following day, on my way to the shops, I passed what must have been the guilty herd. This field, unlike the others, resembled Stalag Luft III with barbed wire, electric fences and content cows looking as though they were planning their next great escape.