The Dun Cow

A Willerby Story

The Dun Cow smells like a slaughtered army rotting on the field of its own defeat.

From a distance, its smell might be mistaken for rich, strong manure but the fouler undertones soon come through – a sweet-sour stench of hot-day rotting flesh, clotting blood and curdling vomit.

The first person to get wind of it knows to put “The Cow is coming” on the village WhatsApp, and the neighbours of those not on the group pop round to hurriedly give the message in person.

Windows are shut and curtains drawn.

Children are called in from their play in gardens, fields and woods, and word put out to those in the shortcuts to come home right now this instant or stay right where you are and do not move.

Drying washing is pulled from lines and stuffed into baskets, and pets scooped up and shut in locked rooms.

Then Willerby must wait it out, because The Cow cannot be stopped once she is on her way.

She calls as it comes; a mindless bovine bellowing that is also a roar, sounding again and again like an air-raid siren, louder and louder as it draws closer.

Then the village farm cattle join in, then the sheep and the pigs.

Chickens huddle in the corners of their coops - for weeks after there will be few eggs and these so pitted, misshapen and sulphur-foul not even the pigs will eat them.

Inside houses cats hiss, dogs howl, and caged birds flap their wings madly at their bars, screaming bloody murder at the tops of their voices.

As The Cow enters the village the smell becomes unbearable – eyes water and we splutter and gag into the flannels and towels we hold to our faces.

Nobody who ever sees the Cow wants to see her again, but few for whom it is the first time can resist a peek regardless of how many people tell them they’ll regret it.

It is the size of a double-decker bus - the scale of it can only be appreciated from upstairs windows.

Sharp, car-length swept forward horns come first, followed by a vast brown shaggy head surrounded by a thick cloud of flies that disperse whenshe bellows from herdripping black mouth and then reassemble around her red, teary eyes and sweat-matted nose.

Then the neck – pitted with weeping open sores and dripping giant fat white maggots which writhe and twist as they fall from the Cow’s body to the ground, where they collapse into dark, viscous spots which stain the road for months afterwards.

Its huge body darkens all the houses it passes – shutting out the light like a monstrous, grotesque eclipse.

Up close its fractured, splintered ribs grind against each other, visible through the ragged, gangrenous wounds in her side, sounding like the screaming of falling trees.

This is even worse than its ghastly call; adults clamp the ears of their children with cushions or pillows.

The few who can bear to look at it for longer see its organs too – a huge, bulbous heart wheezing and shuddering as it beats to no set rhythm and vast, hissing, squelching lungs.

Nobody ever gets used to it, and there is always the fear one day The Cow will turn from her path and smash witlessly into the houses, bursting walls, bringing roofs down in a hail of shattered tiles and masonry, trampling the rubble and any unfortunates inside it into blood-soaked dust.

But – thank the stars - she never does.

At least not so far.

Her route never changes – down the road, from the cross and down Main Street, past the church and the Green, past Jack’s Pool, past the turning that goes up the hill to the old fort and then away under the Willerby Bridge.

She always leaves us a final present – a stinking lake of blood-ribboned and clotted yellow milk that takes a gang of us hours to hose away, leaving a noxious miasma that hangs around for days.

Perhaps the worst of it is The Cow’s unpredictability.

There seems no rhyme or reason for when she comes and when she doesn’t.

Sometimes there are years between visits and one awful summer it came almost every day for a month.

“We deserve it,” Mauve said to David, after the last time it called in, scrubbing at the curtains in the back sink, “for what those cruel, stupid boys did to that poor beast. Milking her into a sieve, thinking they were funny, not listening to the maids and then blaming it all on them like those sorts of boys do whenever they’re caught out. Turning our blessing into our curse. Nothing to be done about it now- no way of telling for how many hundreds of years the village will have to live with it.

Enough to ruin anyone’s week, the Dun Cow.”

“Someone back then dropped the ball,” said David.

Mauve nodded. “Yes, they did. Should have stopped those silly lads before harm was done.”

“Have to make sure someone’s ready to take charge when we’re too old for it – that’s not too many years away now.” David said.

Mauve nodded again. “Yes,” she said. “Dan and Sally have got potential.

They’re a bit older than I’d like, but they’re sensible people and get it, and folk live much longer now than they used to. I think they’ll be safe hands when it falls to them. I think - when it comes to it - they’ll do.”