Cows!

Here's something that doesn't happen anywhere else I've ever been.

My mom, brother, mother and father-in-law went to the rodeo in Culbertson last Saturday night. Afterward we went to the Stagecoach restaurant/bar in Culbertson for some delicious nachos, and just visited for a little while. We headed out of town for home at about 11:00 p.m.

We get about 3 miles from our house and see flashing lights up on the side of the road ahead of us. We thought it was just a semi truck pulled over, as they often do that. Well we are driving along getting closer to the flashing lights and all of a sudden see two HUGE dark-colored things in the middle of the road. Me being from Western MT and thinking, "Holy crap! They're moose!" But, we don't have that many moose over here. As we drive by, we realize that this vehicle with the flashing lights had hit 2 cows! One was just sitting in the road, and the other was clearly dead. We pull up to the truck and there are 3 young guys getting out. We asked them when this happened, to which they replied, "about 20 seconds ago!" My M-I-Law got out and called 911 with them, while the rest of us drove back to where the cows were. We had to get out of the truck and chase the rest of the cows away from the road. There were about 30 of them total.

The guy who owns the cows is notorious for not taking care of his animals, and my F-I-Law had just put this guys escaped cows back into their field yesterday. The owner comes driving like a bat out of hell down the driveway and says, "What's going on? What's going on?" My F-I-Law says, "your cows were out on the road, two of them got hit, and there's a wrecked vehicle up the road." The guy is driving this minivan and drives over to the dead cow. He tries to push it off the road with his BUMPER and runs over the cow. We had a chain in our truck and he pulled the cow off of the road with that...kept going off the road and landed in a ditch. We had to pull him out of the ditch, then he almost backed into the truck! I will call this man CRAZY-PANTS because he looked like a crazed man and was acting like he was strung out on drugs.

Long story short, the cowboys were traveling from the Culbertson rodeo to their next destination, and could no longer drive their damaged vehicle. Sadly there were 2 horses in the horse trailer they were hauling and one of the ponies got a deep cut near his eye. We got a tow truck to haul their truck and trailer to our farmyard, and the cowboys ended up staying the night at my in-laws' house. We cooked them breakfast the next morning and one of their dads came with a truck the next day to take them home.

So for now, we have a busted pickup sitting in our farmyard.

The hilarious part is, my mom and brother are totally not used to this stuff! My brother said, "Man! Eastern MT is WAY more exciting than the Bitterroot Valley! If it's like this, I'm never going to school and just going to stay here!" He's totally kidding of course, but seriously! Who does this stuff happen to?!?!?

I am sad to report that there was the cow fatality, but the other cow and horse were fine, as were the cowboys.

Yeeeeeeehaw!!! This is a picture of what several cows can do to your vehicle.