The excitement and relief were short-lived, however. Now we knew where she was, but lacked the means to transport her home due to mechanical issues. Surely an animal trailer should be easy to find/rent/borrow in these parts, right? Well, no. You should have gathered by now that things just aren't that straightforward in our world. The next 3 weeks were spent on the phone, in the classifieds, and scouting the region for a trailer. Everything was either unregistered, non-functional or non-existent. As the weeks went by, we were sinking into increasingly unbearable depths of guilt over leaving her there, where the rancher was kindly feeding and caring for her in our absence. But we couldn't exactly rent a U-haul for this mission. No way would it hold her, even if it were legal. And then there was the matter of an international border separating us.

A fine young man by the name of Ben Peach (our hero) came to our rescue in a very knight-on-white-horse kind of way in the 11th hour... getting back into town just when we were considering selling her off to the rancher for beef. The rescue was made, profuse apologies and reimbursement were offered to the kind rancher with the patience of a saint, and the 800-pound escapee was safely returned to her painstakingly well-fenced field. Now that her milk had long since dried up and she was about 3 months into her next pregnancy, there were no further escape attempts. Of course, she was still as anti-social as ever, and, come to think of it, still is.

Yes, you read right. She dried right up after hoofing it out of here, since no calf or human was taking her milk anymore at that point. So we ended up paying more for the California milk during her absence than she'd cost us in the first place. Not quite what we'd had in mind when first tossing around the idea of a family cow on that cold January day.

We've since added another dairy cow to the herd, a genial Jersey named Suzy who actually consents to being milked. Raven tries her best to distract and agitate Suzy while Kurtis milks her, and sometimes she succeeds.

Needless to say, we're revisiting the freezer solution.