Muster

Have you ever chased a bunch of cows with the aim of getting them to go into a particular space, along a particular route? No? Well, after his morning we have - we helped our neighbour Peter, together with our neighbour Jenny, to muster a herd (well, herdette) of 15 cows and 14 calves to go from one paddock to another. The route is drawn on the map to the left. It was lovely to do and gave us that real old country-and-western-Heehaw! feel. Well, forget about the western as we are on the Eastern seaboard here, and there wasn't much of Heehaw! but it was definitely a lovely experience. One advantage (for me, at least) was / is that, rather than focusing one thoughts on sore backs and what might go wrong, one is completely focused on the job of herding the cattle to their destination paddock. Very relaxing, and we got all of them across (except for the 16^th cow and the 15^th calf, who decided to do a runner earlier on after we just started. Peter was a star, bellowing kind but firm instructions. 'Jenny, stay behind!", "Niki, move forward to the left." or " Hans, stay!" Certainly to be repeated. ("Every week!", Niki shouted after we were done.) We ended up in a ride across parts of our neighbour John's property that I hadn't seen in a long time. Great fun.

muster