Things have generally went well for us and I feel very blessed, but we have definitely had a bad start to this year. So hopefully we get all the bad luck out of the way early for the remainder of the year.

The worst of it was that our old home burned to the ground. While we have moved to the new farm down the road, my brother wasn’t as lucky and lost everything except a few things stored in his shop. The trailer was a duplex with two independent 1 bedroom units with their own water and power connections. My brother and I bought it to live in while we worked on the property and the plan was to eventually build a house to replace it. Our plans changed when we bought the farm and my family moved into the farm house. We were going to move my mother up here this year and she was going live in our side of the duplex, obviously that plan will have to wait. We had a friend staying in our side of the duplex in meantime, and he lost a lot of his stuff in the fire as well.

The trailer and almost everything in it was a total lost, one end was left barely standing, the other end burned to the ground. The amazing thing is I was in the trailer less than two hours before it was completely ablaze. I was on my way to pickup a truck and had stopped there on my way. We think the fire started from an electrical short, and nobody except my brothers cat was there. Unfortunately for the cat there was no way out.

We can tell that the fire started in the front of the trailer in my brothers living room or the end of his bedroom, but there is no obvious reason for the fire to have started. By the time we knew it was on fire it was already too late, and the whole structure was ablaze. So it will remain an annoying mystery.

One good thing is my brother had some of his things in two fire safes. I have always wondered how well they worked, and these two were well tested. The larger one was in the bedroom on the end of the trailer that burned completely down. When the fire burned through the floor the safe fell into the crawl space under the trailer. Here is a picture of what it looked like when we pulled it from the house:

The plastic handle and dial had melted away, as well as the hinges. It is kinda hard to tell from the cellphone picture but the safe looked swollen. This was not a high dollar safe, but it did its job well. It was Sentry brand from Walmart. You can see in the picture there is a peace of the beds headboard stuck to the side of the safe.

We pulled the safe from the house while it was still smoldering. The items in the safe were very warm, and the envelope of money had turned black on one side from the heat, but nothing burned. Everything in the safe was fine except the envelope and some plastic coin envelopes. So these little safes do there job. The fire melted the aluminum siding into streams draining down the foundation, but the safe kept its contents from melting.

The other fire safe had hard drives in it, it was located in the area where the fire started. The hard drives had a plastic shell that warped, but the drives still look good, we have not had time to test them.

You would think that the fire would be enough bad luck, but there was more to come. After the fire we had a day with strong winds that ripped a peace of tin off the trailer and it took out the electric fence keeping the cattle in. Usually it isn’t that big of a deal when the cows get out, but this time they decided to go on a walkabout. Not just a couple, but everyone. Our guess is they were spooked after the fire, and the heavy winds probably didn’t help either. They decided to find a better pasture and left that evening.

We found out they were missing about 9 that evening and immediately searched for them. We searched the entire sawmill with no luck. We drove down all the roads around the sawmill and spotlighted the fields to no avail. They were gone, and we had to wait for daybreak to find them.

My cows had always stuck around the area when loose. In fact they usually ended up coming up to the house and mooing at me looking for some cow candy. I think the house being gone led to their walkabout.

We got up the next morning ready to begin searching at daybreak. We started by driving down every road and looking for our small herd. The worst of it was the winds were from the north, and the high for that day was going to be 12, during the morning it was 1. Just the other day it was 50, if they wanted to go for an adventure they should have picked a better day.

The driving was a dead end with no sign of 11 crazy cows. Just across the road from our sawmill is a thousand acre chunk of land with no roads to its core. Knowing our luck the cattle were going to be in the middle. We switched to an ATV and began searching the area in sections, and switching out with someone waiting in a truck, to take turns thawing out. After several hours we had searched most of the area accessible to a wheeled vehicle, as well as some wooded area that wasn’t. There was no sign of our cattle.

We switched to going door to door asking if anyone had seen our cows. We started with the most likely direction our cows would go, and fanned out from there. At this point it was pretty depressing.

That evening we went to go to neighbors miles away in the event our cattle had hoofed it that far. I was really wishing I had tracking collars on my cattle at this point. We again searched all the visible areas from the road.

As things often turn out when it looks the bleakest you get a break. Our break was a call from the mail lady saying she saw our cattle at an abandoned house a half mile from the sawmill. It was an area we searched, so they had decided to come back. Now we had to get them home.

Nobody was missing, they had stuck together like a proper herd. While very thirsty, and a slight limp on Holstein nobody else seemed worse for wear. The spot they were found was very close to the highway, so my wife stayed with them while I ran home to get sweet feed. My brother went home to get the ATC and bring up the rear when we started the mile and a half drive home.

 

At this point I was very glad to have docile cows that were trained to follow me. With a bucket of sweet feed to entice them I walked ahead and they for the most part followed me home. Since they were already on the loose we decided to take them to the farm, and not back to the sawmill. It went pretty smooth, although it was obvious they had a good adventure and were pretty tired when we got them home.

Since we were not ready for them at the Farm, they get to stay in the corral for a week. When they get used to their new home I will let them into the paddock that just needs the wires strung up.

 

 

 

 

It could have went much worse, at-least we have the cattle at the farm and everybody made it okay. We were planning to move them to the farm next week, they were on the last Paddock of stockpiled forage at the sawmill. They apparently wanted to jump the gun and get to the farm sooner.