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Remember those archetypal ‘Hickory Dickory’ images of a cow jumping over the moon that you saw everywhere as a child?. You know the one – the beautiful fanciful vision that upon growing old you cast out of your ‘reality’ bag, to dwell in the ‘against the laws of earthbound physics’ bag.

Here begins the point whereby you think again.

This week, we have seen scared cows lift their 300-500kg bulk off the earth to ‘fly’ over fences and sprint into neighbouring properties. If you stood in the right place, the rising full moon would have easily given the illusion of a cow indeed jumping over the moon.

Here begins the tale of Big Jack, the missing Hereford steer…

Without a casting blame, but in some way maintaining our own aura of passable cow handling techniques, let us just say that third party involvement was the cause of Jack the giant jumper’s antics. His decision to fly over the fence and run for miles was heavily influenced by fear of a human who didn’t understand what he was about. Watching Big Jack ascend the other side of the hill from the dark depths of vertical ravine was on one hand, a relief in that he survived the descent – but mostly, makes you feel pretty helpless on Sunday evening at 8pm. Big Jack had left the paddock.

Here beings the hunt for Big Jack…

We have spent the last few mornings & evenings walking neighbours acreages, making up ‘Have you seen Big Jack?’ signs complete with offers of rewards (he is worth $600 and we’ve only had him for about 3 weeks). There have also been other ‘complications’ in terms of some visiting cows on our property that has meant that with the search for Big Jack we have been generally been feeling pretty pissed off with the whole situation all week. We also found a decomposing sheep had got its head wedged in our back boundary fence. Everywhere we turned, something seemed to be going wrong.

Here begins the happy ending…

This morning, on the way to work after another particularly depressing morning without our Big Jack, we got the call. Big Jack had turned up on a neighbouring property, approximately 5 kilometres away. Big Jack is back. Er, well not exactly yet – we will have to somehow collect him up and trailer him back home.

Here begins the life lesson…

Cows can and do jump and will jump, over anything.

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