The Bull and The Road

This bull is a massive animal. Huge and muscle-bound, built to thrive on the violence of life. Big horns, piercing eyes, sinews and muscles that bulge from beneath tough, leathery skin, and a large wet nose, constantly sniffing out edibles. A huge frame, a hulking beast that can be slow, ponderous, almost docile one moment but thundering, angry, and fierce the next.

But there’s less of the latter these days. He’s a domesticated bull. Mostly just a source of sperm for local breeders’ cows. Now isn’t the season for reproduction so he’s just been left out to pasture. A bull’s life revolves around a few simple pursuits – reproduction, food, survival from predatory threats. Reproduction is off the schedule for now, food is in abundance (he literally walks, sleeps, and defecates on a huge platter of food instead of scrounging it up from scant, scrubby foliage scattered across the landscape), and the barbed wire fence surrounding his pasture has so far kept everything but squirrels and mice from encroaching on his space.

So, for now, there’s lots of time for other things, within this bull’s secluded, comfy biosphere. Mostly this is just emptiness of the mind. Being bovine by nature – unless under threat or stimulation – it comes naturally enough for a bull to mindlessly chew cud all day, every day. With all physical needs met, there isn’t much to stimulate, actuate, or obfuscate.

However, having extra time on your hands, a lot of extra time on your hands, seems to have the effect of driving the mind towards contemplation. Perhaps even within a bull’s mind, the long days going by unpunctuated by predators’ howls, territorial clashes with other bulls, searching far and wide for food, gathering a large, fertile harem of females, or resolving disputes within a large herd, may lead that mind to become contemplative. Existential. Inquisitive about the enlightening, the instructive, the titillating, and the superfluous.

Let’s just imagine our bull turns his mind away from multitudes of juicy, indistinguishably succulent blades of grass and towards the dark strip of tarmac that borders his pasture. It’s the local, rural roadway. It cuts through grassy lawns, dissects groves of trees, and is often bordered by lush shrubs and bushes. It connects the homes, and lives, of local residents in this suburban community. Slowly transforming itself from backwater to neighborhood, this piece of until now undiscovered beauty (or real estate) is becoming a place that gradually more and more humans call home. This road has become a passageway. A conduit. A place where worlds meet. If the bull turned a contemplative eye towards this road, what are some of the things he might see?

The Squirrel

Squirrels are live wires. Jittery, bubbly, anxious, fretting. The never walk anywhere. They’re either sitting still – a jittering pulse of reluctantly stationary energy – or bolting – hurling themselves around with spurts of pent-up energy in what can only be described as a bouncy lunge. Nothing in between.

Squirrels spend most of their time in trees. That’s where safety is. Down on the ground is where there’s predators and dangers. But for some reason (though it seems they could easily live a pretty decent life without ever touching the ground), squirrels occasionally feel the need to travel along the surface of the earth.

This means they occasionally cross the tarmac within eyeshot of the bull. If he should lumber over to the fence and cock his massive head to direct an eye in the right direction, he could pick up the furtive figure of a squirrel traversing the road. Having absolutely no prior knowledge, instinct, or experience of such things, the squirrel is understandably bewildered. He stops, he starts. He freezes, he darts. He tears about in circles (even more than he normally does). It’s a big slab of warm, hard, sunbaked, alien material within his little world.

What the squirrel doesn’t know, and would boggle his mind he did, is that this road is a thoroughfare. It’s a place for passing through, not for sitting still. Linger at your own mortal peril. This is a totally new concept for almost all living things, but even more so for an animal that could spend a whole morning plotting how to get paws on every single acorn on one tree.

Of course, you know what enters the scene next. A motorized vehicle. In this case, let’s say it’s a large Chevrolet SUV driven by a late-for-the-school-board-meeting mother of two. Going 42 mph in a 30-mph zone, on a road that dips and bends across the landscape, it isn’t surprising that the squirrel is caught off guard. Lucky for him, he happened to be sitting, blinking, relatively close to the side of the road. A rush of blood, a heart palpitating mind-numbingly fast, a thrash of leg, perhaps a peep of abject terror, and he just barely makes it.

The squirrel will never connect the two. That motorized vehicles are only something that’s encountered on tarmac. He doesn’t think it’s any more likely to encounter this hurtling mass of tons of metal there, than anywhere else in the forest. It just came out of the blue. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. He could just as easily have been perched on a log, and this massive thing could have come bursting out of the fir trees behind him.

The squirrel made it. There’s nothing for the bull to ponder at the moment, except maybe the absurdity of luck, and the many alternatives that ebb just barely out of reach, for good or ill, that shape the destiny of a consciousness.

The Fawn

Let’s say it’s now the next day, and it’s been a while since the bull has had something other than grass to stimulate his neurons. So, he’s now planted himself right next to the edge of the fence bordering the road, hoping to see something that he can ruminate on intellectually. Food for thought.

A Ford van with a ladder and shovels on the roof has just zoomed by, and something catches the bull’s eye (besides the small pancake of fur and dried blood near the other side of the road that is all there’s left of a squirrel that had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time earlier in the morning). It’s movement in the bushes. A doe. Startled by the roar and rush of sweeping air, it lost its nerve and jumped out onto the road.

Deer have been prey for millennia. Every muscle and nerve in their body is tuned to the flight reflex. It’s their go-to reaction. Unless it’s very evident it isn’t a predator, they’ll just run for it. But this is especially true for this doe. Maybe she’s a first-time mother. Maybe she’s just highly strung by nature. Whatever the reason, she’s jumpy even by the standards of this jumpy species.

But the doe isn’t alone. By now she’s run down the road a little way to where a verdant, recently mowed lawn reaches down to meet the road. She bounds onto it, just as a fawn sticks its nose out of the bush. It wants to follow mother. Mother went that way, so the fawn must follow. It bounds out, skips across a few feet or tarmac, then jumps onto the lawn, into safety.

But there’s another fawn. This one also feels the primal (or maybe just emotional) urge to follow its mother. No matter what. So, it jumps out into the middle of the road. But this one doesn’t scamper. It doesn’t dash. It hops. It must have seen its mother do that once. And decided to follow suit nonstop. Each step was a theatrical jump vertically into the air, all four hooves leaving the ground simultaneously, then tapping back down with a lively clop. The fawn made its way along the road for a couple yards, then spotted its mother and sibling in the yard. Suddenly changing direction, it cartoonishly skidded for a moment on the hard, sticky surface of the tarmac before bouncing off into the yard. Safe for now.

The bull turns back to his grass, left to ponder the exuberance, influence ability, and ineffability of youth.

The Dog

The bull isn’t trying to spot anything this morning. His mind has become more and more empty recently. Grass is almost all he thinks about. The lack of a need to think about anything else gradually gnaws away at his ability to think about anything else.

But something intrudes onto his quest for grass. He happened to be up against the fence, next to the road, seeking out a particularly munchy patch of grass, when a big, blue pickup truck lumbers by.

But that’s not what catches his attention – pickup trucks are a pretty regular occurrence. It’s the sudden, frantic, and feverish howling, barking, and yelping emerging from its open window that catches his attention. It’s coming from a small dog. Bathed, freshened, with a little red bandana tied around its neck, the dog yaws and salivates out the open window.

Slightly startled, though unmoved, the bull stares along the truck’s path down the road as the dog keeps yapping. Soon, however, the dog suddenly stops. The bull couldn’t discern if it was an incisive rebuke from the truck’s driver or a hard swat on the rump, but either way, the dog switches from wild baying to a simmering whimper, trying desperately to keep its wolf instincts from lashing out.

But by now, the bull’s attention has been taken by another commotion in the bushes. Behind a bush, in a grassy lawn just along from his pasture, it’s the doe again. Seemingly needlessly (since it’s a good 10-20 yards between the thick shrub she’s standing behind and the road), she totally freaks out. She starts limping quickly towards the darker, inner reaches of the forest.

Since the last time the bull’s seen them, a few days ago, the mother’s jumpiness has increased. As she darts away, noticeably larger fawns try to follow. And the cause of this increased jumpiness seems pretty obvious. The doe’s rear-right leg is dangling. Whether it’s a break or just a sprain, it must have been damaged in the aftermath of some freight. Possibly a brush with a predator. But in this suburban oasis, it’s much more likely to be from either a glancing blow from a vehicle or getting flushed out by a car or truck and stumbling in the dense brush.

The bull contemplates their prospects briefly. Especially the fawns. With a crippled mother, the outlook isn’t great. It could spell a grim destiny for all of them. But then again, in a suburban landscape bordered by forest yet full of shrubs, flower bushes, and watered lawns, there’s a better chance for them to get by. Predators are fewer, and food is more abundant and appealing. Humans take, but they sometimes (inadvertently) give, too.

But the deer family is gone now, and the bull, now feeling disappointed by a looming lack of spectacle for the morning, turns back to his grass.