The Dun Cow

A Willerby Story

The Dun Cow stank like a slaughtered army rotting on its field of defeat.

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

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

Windows were shut and curtains drawn.

Children were 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 was pulled from lines and stuffed into baskets, and pets scooped up and shut in locked rooms.

Then Willerby had to wait it out, because The Cow could not be stopped once it was on its way.

It called as it came; a mindless bovine bellowing that was also a roar, sounding again and again like an air-raid siren, louder and louder as it drew closer.

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

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

Inside houses cats hissed, dogs howled, and caged birds flapped their wings madly at their bars, screaming bloody murder at the tops of their voices.

As The Cow entered the village the smell became unbearable – eyes watered and people spluttered and gagged into the flannels and towels they held to their faces.

Nobody who ever saw the Cow wanted to see it again, but few for whom it was the first time could resist a peek regardless of how many people told them they’d regret it.

It was the size of a double-decker bus - the scale of it could only be appreciated from second and third floor windows.

Sharp, car-length swept forward horns came first, followed by a vast brown shaggy head surrounded by a thick cloud of flies that dispersed when it bellowed from its dripping black mouth and then reassembled around its red, teary eyes and sweat-matted nose.

Then it’s neck – pitted with weeping open sores and dripping giant fat white maggots which writhed and twisted as they fell from the Cow’s body to the ground, where they collapsed into dark, viscous spots which stained the road for months afterwards.

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

Up close its fractured, splintered ribs grinding against each other, visible through the ragged, gangrenous wounds in its side, was the screaming of falling trees.

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

Those who could bear to look at it for longer saw its organs too – a huge, bulbous heart wheezing and shuddering as it beat to no set rhythm and vast, hissing, squelching lungs.

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

But it never did.

Its route did not change – down the road, from the cross and down Main Street, past the church and the Green, past Jack’s Pool, past the turning that went up the hill to the old fort and then away under the Willerby Bridge.

It always left a final present – a stinking lake of blood-ribboned and clotted yellow milk that took hours to hose away, leaving a noxious miasma that hung around for days.

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

There seemed no rhyme or reason for when the Cow came and when it didn’t.

Sometimes there were years between visits and one awful summer it had come almost every day for a month.

“We deserve it,” Mauve said to David, 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 we’ll have to live with it. Enough to ruin anyone’s week, the Dun Cow.”

“Whoever was managing 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. “Sally and Dan 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 they’ll do.”