bovines by moonlight

traditional dancers, not bovines

The workshop is finished. I stumbled back into my house last night, fell asleep at 8pm without having supper and slept soundly till 7 the next morning. This may have had something to do with a last-ditch effort at painting Ghanzi red on Saturday night – after the traditional dance (picture above, but for best photos, please see facebook in the next few weeks), a few workshop participants rallied for a trip into town.

Unfortunately, by the time we got organized and on the road it was past 11pm, and by the time we got to Ghanzi, everything was closed. Typical. Undeterred, we drove down the road a bit, parked, and in the time-honoured tradition of pick-up truck owners everywhere, flipped down the tailgate and cracked open some beverages. About an hour later, we decided that we needed some entertainment, and the subject of cow tipping came up. The moon was more than half full and the night was clear, so we could easily follow the farm roads in pursuit of our hapless prey: the cow.

COWS AT NIGHT:

First you discern only the vague, lumpy shapes. They are shadows, grey and black and silver, muddled abstract forms bulked on the side of the road. Then you hear the soft snuffling and breathing, the occasional shift of hooves, the flick of ears and tails beating against their hides. There's a smell, a warm odour of digested grass, trampled dung, and coarse hair. They are large, and for a crazy moment you doubt that they're cows at all; for a split second you think oh shit, it's buffalo, we're going to fucking die. The strangeness of domestication hits you – these are animals, huge and heavy and powerful, with vulnerable young resting at their feet, and yet you can safely approach them. You can walk right up as if to shake hands, reach out towards their flicking velvet ears, make sudden noises and move towards the little ones, and basically do whatever you want. They're not going to surge up and stampede, or kick the hell out of your ribs to protect their babies, or spear you on their horns, or bite a chunk out of your leg... Did you know that an ostrich has a powerful enough kick to kill a person? A cow could beat the crap out of you if it wanted to. I mean, witness bull-riders or matadors. You don't even need to be gored, you just need to be trampled. Not even trampled, just walked on a little bit, by accident. They are huge. Imagine trying to punch a cow. Would it even notice?

Despite all of that, there we were: three suspicious human creatures in the middle of the night, making our mildly-inebriated moonlit approach. The cows didn't care. An air of exasperated submission – what do you want now? - and a shuffling of hooves, but nothing more. Domestication! What a strange and powerful thing. Despite being domesticated, however, the cows were most definitely awake, so we decided to abandon the cow-tipping idea. (I have still never tipped a cow. It's on my high-priority to-do list.)

I think I'm going to leave this at "cows" for now, and write more about the workshop later.