AN EARLY MORNING RESCUE
I woke up at 6:02 on Tuesday morning, a pretty usual routine for me. I reached for my phone and saw that I had an alert from the trail camera at my deer lease. That is not an uncommon event since everything from deer to racoons trigger the camera to take a picture and send it to my phone. This morning, however, it was something different. A few days earlier, my friend Lee McDermett and I set the hog trap at my feeder, right in front of my trail camera. At just after midnight the camera had captured something that I had only heard about happening but had never experienced myself. It’s early calving season in Northeast Texas, and what I had caught in my hog trap was a hundredand fifty-pound calf.
Knowing that both mama and baby were probably freaking out, I quickly got dressed and put my rubber boots on. My plan was to take the tractor since everything is so muddy and I dared not drive to the back of the deer lease. However, when I got outside, I found that a thick fog had settled on our little farm. It is only a quarter of a mile from the end of our driveway to the gate at our deer lease but driving the slow-moving tractor along our Farm to Market Road in the fog even for a quarter of a mile seemed far from safe. So, I quickly opted to take my van and drive as far into the deer lease as I could without getting stuck and walk the rest of the way.
It turned out that, because of the fog and the fact that all of the recent rain had caused grass to cover the vehicle tracks I needed to follow to get to where the hog trap was, I got a little lost a couple of times. But the place isn’t that big, and I soon got on the right path. As I got closer, I could hear the calf calling for its mama and her calling back. The cattle on our deer lease are pretty wild, having little real contact with humans except when their rancher shows up with something to eat. I was pretty close when I could finally make out the trap in the fog and, sure enough, there was a very scared calf inside the trap.
The trap is pretty simple. It is a steel cage about 8 ft by 4 ft by 4 ft with a door that is held open with a pin attached to a plate. When something steps on the plate, a cable runs from there to a pin that holds the door open. When the pin pulls out, the door slams shut with gravity, and whatever is in there is trapped until it is taken out or released.
I tried my best to comfort the little calf, but he just wanted out. His mom supervised the ordeal from about 30 yards away as she constantly called for her baby. I pulled the door open and after a minute or so the calf finally figured out how to get through the door. In all, it was less than an hour between discovering the calf on my trail camera until he was reunited with his mother, and now it is 8:30 and I have had breakfast and told the story to you.
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