As I chew my aunt’s delicious homemade beef jerky, I can’t help but think of Arnold…
You see, there was once a beef cow named Arnold. His story begins on a grassy pasture in eastern Oregon. From the macabre depths of his mother’s inside, he emerged–wet, frail, quivering in the summer heat, like his siblings. But from the moment he was born, he was a special cow–and he knew it. It was, in fact, his ability to “know” that set him apart.
His mouth was not evolved to use language, but his brain was. Arnold was a genius amid his milling companions, a renaissance cow. While his body was confined to grazing pastures, his mind hurdled past the mountains framing his horizon, to the world beyond. He reveled in the English language, in poetry and music; he observed the biological wonder of the bugs and plants that surrounded him; he considered the magic of addition, subtraction, and geometry. Arnie ate up knowledge with a ravenous appetite not possessed by his doltish brethren.
Arnie tried to capture his companions’ intellect, but they expressed interest only in the grass beneath their hooves, the cud in their mouths. “Have you noticed the new fungus growing in our field?” he brayed to his fellows on a spring morning. “I believe they’re all part of one larger subterranean network… Interesting, no?” His friends looked back with big watery eyes, and ambled off in search of dandelions. “Perhaps tomorrow you’ll be interested…” he would say, and sigh. He knew they would not. Being a smart cow could be hard, Arnie found.
There was another disadvantage to being a beef cow with gifted mental capabilities: he knew what kind of fate awaited him. One day, his Uncle Ebert was lead away by Farmer Dave, and later that week, his Aunt Bessie too. Neither were ever seen again. It didn’t take an Einstein to put the pieces together, but it did take a cow like Arnold. The knowledge weighed heavy on his broad flanks, and whenever another member of the herd disappeared, he grew more anxious. And so at the age of five, Arnold dedicated all of the wonderful intricacies of his brain to a single purpose: subterfuge. Arnold decided to escape.
It was summer when Arnie began his reconnaissance. Farmer Dave was gone, and his bovine companions were too preoccupied with the swarms of horseflies to notice Arnold’s uneasy patrol. As he trotted, his heaving sides tested the wooden fence surrounding the enclosure, but he didn’t find a single weakness. He lowed a nasty curse he’d learned from an angry Farmer Dave. Escaping would be no easy task, Arnold realized.
In the pasture, the stench had become unbearable. Cow patties baked like pungent pound cakes in the midday heat, and hardened inseparably onto the grass beneath.
“Why,” Arnold moaned, “must I be given the gift of knowledge, when I am to be confined to this terrible prison of fools!” His snout rose woefully to the heavens, but what happened next came from below.
“Moooo!” Arnie lowed in pain as he lost his footing on top of a rock-hard cow patty. He would have sworn, had his curious mind not suddenly grasped a crafty solution. For the first time in his life, freedom tasted as real as the cud in his mouth.
He began to eat. He knew Farmer Dave would not move the herd to another pasture for at least three days. So he gorged on the dwindling swatches of grass, crunching down so many chunks, washed down mouthfuls of cud, until he could swallow no more. Never in his life had he eaten so much. And before long, the inevitable happened: it all started to come out on the other side.
Arnold’s bowels growled with thunderous ferocity. He ignored the pain, and set about his dirty task; to the best of his ability (having hooves and not hands), he constructed a pyramidal encasement of excrement around the corner of the gate. By noontime, the pile had turned to stone, locking the gate in place. Arnold had seen this happen before–on accident, of course. His liberty relied on Farmer Dave solving the blockage in the same way this time.
The next day, Arnold heard the approaching rumble of Dave’s pickup. “Hopefully, this is goodbye,” he bayed at the cow closest to him. With that, Arnie trotted off to his position by the gate, to resume a nonchalant meandering. Farmer Dave stepped down from the cab of his truck, and tested the sun-hardened cow pile. Arnold could smell his anger, and heard a barrage of expletives, quite a few of which were new to the cow.
Farmer Dave returned to his truck. With a guttural chunk, it revved to life. Arnold could have lowed with joy as Farmer Dave began his familiar maneuver. The truck backed bed-first into the gate, and slowly, the chunk of manure disintegrated. With a crack, the gate was flung wide-open…
“Later, fools!” howled Arnold, as he galloped headlong through the opening. He could hear Farmer Dave’s truck motor after him across the uneven grassland, but by the time he had caught up, Arnold had already waded to the other side of a nearby river. He paused for a second, reveling in his fugitive victory. Dave stepped down from his cab, engaging in all forms of fist waving and dirt kicking. With one last flick of his tail, Arnie surveyed his home of five years, then trotted away towards the mountains.
To this day, Farmer Dave isn’t quite sure what happened, or what to believe. When he returned to the pasture, he was greeted with the strangest sight: a familiar swear word, carved into the dirt with what looked like hoof marks. He could glean nothing from the cows milling about in the enclosure, except that maybe the grass was especially delicious that day, and the horse flies uncommonly savage. All that had changed was the number of cows to be eaten, and the sanctity of unmarred earth. Arnold had won.
The jerky is perfect: succulent, chewy, with enough salt to kill a horse (just how I like it). And I know that the meat couldn’t possibly have come from Arnold’s flanks, because Arnold is wandering the plains of Idaho, or enjoying the glades of Wyoming. Perhaps Arnold is scaling the mountains of Montana. Somewhere in the world, Arnold is reciting poetry to the trees, discussing mathematics with the birds, and getting fat off of wild flowers. And maybe, just maybe, Arnie has found himself a honey: a girl cow, who like him, couldn’t stand the life of confinement; who, like him, had sought a life of freedom; who, like him, reveled in the finer things in life. Cheers to you Arnold. Cheers to chasing after happiness.
