Beech Tree News Network

Last Saturday, I was shoveling out the hallway of the barn.  My horse, D’Artagnon, has trouble with his feet in the spring and fall; those are the two times during the year when the pasture grass causes founder in horses prone to grass founder, as D’Artagnon is.  I have to put him up and feed him a diet of just hay.  He hates it and I hate it for him.
     At the present, we have three bulls in the pasture where the barn is located—one older and two younger ones.  The bulls were out in the pasture when I started shoveling manure, and I watched with a wary eye as they started to inch their way toward me.
 I’ve told you before about my history with and subsequent fear of bulls.  Throughout my life, I’ve heard many spiritual teachers put forth the concept that difficult situations keep repeating in a person’s life because the person is reluctant to learn the lesson that the experience is there to teach.  I don’t know exactly what it is I’m not learning, but I wish I would hurry up and learn it, because I have a feeling I’m living on borrowed time where bulls are concerned.
As the bulls neared the barn, I stepped out of the hallway, and started yelling and waving my arms in a please-leave-the-area-now motion.  They paid no mind.  The youngest of the three is the most aggressive.  He came right up to the tip of the shovel I was holding out as a barricade between us.  When he lowered his head, I knew better than to run.
I started to back into the hallway of the barn—holding the shovel out in front of me—because I thought I could ease myself up and over the gate that divides one side of the hallway from the other.  I had forgotten the gate had been pushed back at the bottom causing the top to slant forward, and when I tried to hoist myself up, I didn’t have the strength to overcome the incline.  I found myself in a corner with three bulls facing me, and the only thing separating us was a shovel.  I tried yelling and waving the shovel around, but neither of the three budged.
I’ll admit, in the past, I have had a tendency to over-react in situations like this particular one, but I didn’t this time.  I skipped over-react and went straight to hysterical.  The bulls were unmoved by the display of emotion.  I finally remembered I had my cell phone in my pocket, and I dialed my husband, Garey’s, number—he was in the house.  The call went to his voice mail.  My daughter, Natalie, was in the kitchen, so I called her number so she could find Garey and tell him to get out to the barn right now, which is what I screamed into the phone three times before she could understand what I was saying.
She must have gotten the urgency of the message across, because Garey came running onto the graveled driveway in his bare feet.  He climbed up onto the gate and jumped down to where I was standing.  He pried the shovel from my white-knuckled hands and tried the whole yelling and waving song-and-dance I’d tried earlier.  He was able to inch them back from the stall door nearest us, and hold them at bay until we could get into the stall and cross under the partition to the next stall that came out on the other side of the gate—the side with no bulls.  Garey then got a bucket of corn and led the three of them out to the feed lot where they happily ate what they had come to the barn for in the first place.
In hindsight, I realize the three bulls just came to the barn that day to see what I was doing.  They’ve learned to associate humans with corn, and they wanted an afternoon snack.  I don’t know if they learned anything from the experience—except, if you see a hysterical woman waving around a shovel , a man with a bucket of corn is close behind—but I think I finally learned something.  If there’s a bull in the pasture, stay out of the pasture.