Hassy vs Cow
When I decided I was going to write a blog and formed it all in my mind how it was going to go, stories of my travels sort of thing, this was the first story that came to mind. More than anything I have to commit it all to paper before it fades totally into one of those memories that you can´t be 100% is real or something you dreamt. Fortunately for me I shared this experience with the hobbit and a couple of hundred people on Instagram at the time of happening so i´m almost positive I didn´t dream it.
Those of you who were with me on Instagram at the time will remember this but since then i´ve gained a few new followers and a website so you´ll just have to bear down and take it again, much like hassy did.
The date was 29th August 2019 and we were about half way through our summer holiday in Austria (i´ll write another article about this in broader terms). During our first days in Austria we discovered alpine cows, I don´t mean like we were the first people ever to see them in real life, but that we just hadn´t really thought about how pretty they were, so kind of like we just sort of found them to be a thing. I mean come on, i´ve seen cows before but non that horny or wearing giant bells around their necks. I´m more aware now thinking back what the bells are for but at the time I just thought it was really cute in a way that you´d be in this really beautiful peaceful place and there is just this faint sound of clanging coming from nowhere and it´s just cows grazing around and having a good old time.
The first time I saw one I thought ooh I want to get a shot of one with one of the many wonderful backdrops of the alps, there´s fucking loads of them around, should be easy, can hear them a mile off and they look pretty cool as far as cows go. So on the travels around we would be on the look out for any interesting looking cows, with a bell (deal breaker) and a good enough backdrop. It was on that fateful day, the 29th, that we discovered the photogenic cow in question and I pulled in to take my shot.
Now if the hobbit were to tell this story he would tell it in a way that would make me look bad, not in a truly horrible sense but more in a Darwin award sense. I will admit that while i´m not a complete moron, I do have a bit of a skewed sense of general peril and putting myself in those kinds of situations with reckless abandon. Don´t get me wrong i´m not hanging off cliffs or anything (unless you count the paragliding incident) or standing on waterfalls (except that one time by accident) but i´m not against a little adventure or going somewhere I probably shouldn´t. The hobbit would say i´m reckless, I would say i´m just a bit of a risk taker, an adventurer if you will, so really this was just one of them times where I was being cautiously risky but all in the name of art.
In reality I was creeping towards a giant fuck off cow with rather pointy looking horns and it wasn´t too happy about it. It was sat down when I started and I did get off a shot but I wanted to get a bit closer, limited by my 80mm lens at the time and hassy just needed to be a liiiiiiiiiiiitle closer, not in it´s face or anything just a bit closer. I´d done a similar thing with an Icelandic ram a few months previous and I stopped creeping on that when it started grunting at me so I was expecting a little bit of a warning grunt from the big bastard before I got too close for comfort. Turns out she wasn´t in the warning mood and just sprang up out of nowhere and became a hell of a lot fucking bigger than I´d expected. I don´t know if giant alpine cows can spring anywhere so much but it sure felt spritely enough at the time so for the purposes of this story the buggar jumped up like a gazelle.
I of course instinctively slowly walked backwards but thought in that moment it would be better to leave hassy on the tripod where it was in case old cow here thought I was brandishing a weapon and got a bit lairy.
In true hobbit fashion he was about a quarter of a mile away by this point and had no intention of rescuing me or my beloved hassy. Don´t be mad at him, I knew he was a weasel when I married him, even after he abandoned me at speed while I was stuck in a moon chair next to an exploding gas canister at a camping trip we went on (first and last I might add).
Anyway back to the matter at hand and the cow had moved forward to investigate hassy and it´s at this point that I realized just how big this buggar was because hassy looked tiny in comparison.
So now i´m stood at the edge of a field eye to eye with a big fuck off horn wielding alpine cow while it´s standing guard over my favourite possession in the entire world, the hobbit is watching this unfold from Switzerland and i´m shushing the cow hoping it´s going to calm it down enough to fuck off and let me rescue hassy. Shushing didn´t work, nor did begging or bargaining and the cow proceeded to give hassy a good licking, paying particular close attention to the lens which was practically dripping with cow spit at this point. I call over to Switzerland and ask the hobbit to try and walk the border and distract the big bastard long enough to let me nip in and grab hassy and get out again, which in the greatest act of bravery i´ve ever witnessed from him he did. But it was in vain because although the cow moved her head to see what was happening, she did not take one step away from where she was and soon turned her attention back to the now dripping but clearly tasty hassy.
Then the inevitable happened and hassy gave up being licked and toppled over, which only served to alert the other cows in the area that it was their turn to come and see what the bitch had been doing meaning hassy was now surrounded. No amount of shushing or hobbit distraction is going to eliminate 2 or 3 giant cows and so I resigned myself to watching and waiting for hassy or myself to get trampled, all the while knowing that the hobbit would be stood in the next country watching.
Soon enough the herd got bored of hassy and my anguish and decided to move on. I don´t know how I got so lucky but non of them stood on top of the camera or tripod on their way off, clanging their bells as they went (fuckers) and I was finally able to rescue my now cow spit covered treasure.
Then when the cows were a suitable distance away the hobbit returned from his trip to outer space.
Cow spit is a lovely glue for grass by the way. We had some wet wipes in the car which managed to get most of the juicy bits off and by the grace of whatever hassy seemed to be in full working condition with no evidence of damage, just mild trauma and cow spit. I got something a bit stronger later on and gave it a full bath back at the hotel room, still marveling at how undamaged it was in the end. One of my friends laughed at me and said I should have pushed the cow away because it´s just a cow but i´ve also since read about alpine cows killing people they don´t like so fuck that!
After returning from his trip elsewhere the hobbit asked me if i´d learned my lesson about taking risks (after a hearty pile of told you so´s) and I said what do you think? The next day I was stood in a river with the camera so you can be a judge of that.
So the moral of the story is don´t shush an alpine cow it just eggs it on and if you´re going to marry a cowardly hobbit expect to be left alone shushing the cow while it licks your camera like it´s a giant popsicle.
The final image for my sins. Was it worth it? You decide