This is the twenty-seventh part in a series, so if you have not already done so, you might want to read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X, Part XI, Part XII, Part XIII, Part XIV, Part XV, Part XVI, Part XVII, Part XVIII, Part XIX, Part XX, Part XXI, Part XXII, Part XXIII, Part XXIV, Part XXV, and Part XXVI before continuing.
“I’m too old for this,” Phil grumbled as we climbed over the baling wire I had used to patch up the fence.
“You could have stayed home,” I reminded him. Charlie and I had both tried to convince him to do just that once we had both come to the realization that we were asking a man in his mid-sixties to go climbing over fences and tromping through fields full of full-grown cattle. Some of which had horns. But Phil was as stubborn as they come.
“As if I would let you track down my cattle without me.”
“I know your cattle as well as you do. I could have managed on my own.”
“Hogwash. Besides, two pairs of eyes are better than one.”
I wasn’t so sure about that given the state of Phil’s eyesight these days. I had seen his phone screen when he was reading messages on it and the text was set large enough for me to read it from across the room. But I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.
We made it over the fence (with some profanity on Phil’s part) and started heading across the field to the barn. It was 20 minutes before sunrise, which we figured would give us enough time to get to Ledd’s barn, sneak in and count his cattle, take the photos we needed, and get out before he let his cattle into the field for the day. If Charlie managed to distract him for long enough, that would give us enough time to sneak out across the field and back to Phil’s farm unnoticed.
Getting across Ledd’s field was the hard part. We weren’t as familiar with his terrain as we were with Phil’s field, and we didn’t want to risk using flashlights. Fortunately, it was a clear night and the stars lit our way until the rising sun slowly turned the sky from black to blue and provided enough ambient light for us to make our way through the field.
Getting into the barn turned out to be the tricky part.
Like Phil’s barn, there was a door on the side for people to walk in and out of the barn. Unlike Phil’s barn, the door had a padlock on it. I made a mental note to add a padlock to the door on Phil’s barn, especially since he’d already been robbed.
“The door to the field isn’t locked,” said Phil. “We’ll enter that way.”
“Are you crazy?” The side entrance to the barn would put us on a platform above the cattle with a sturdy fence between us and the giant beasts. Entering through the field door would put us right in with the cattle. It was a great way to end up as ground meat if anything spooked the cows.
“It’ll be fine. They can’t go anywhere if we close the door behind us.”
“And neither can we.”
But he was already opening the field door, leaving me no choice but to follow him.
To be continued…