Sometimes the phone rings while you're still in bed. Your mind then has to cut through the fuzzy edges of sleep before you can answer. You just know your day is off to a bad start when that happens. Your heart starts racing even before you pick up the receiver and if it's still dark outside, you just gotta know that the worst has already happened. Awful things happen in the dark. We've always known that.

However there's one very worst thing that can be said to anybody in the dairy business. There's one line that will always get immediate attention and a lightning response from all hands. Those dreaded words are, "The cows are out!"

"The cows are out! The cows are out!" You repeat them to anybody within hearing. Like Paul Revere, you're off to spread the word.

Cows usually lunch contentedly within the confines of wood, steel and wire. They thoughtfully chew alfalfa leaves, coastal grass, or munch corn silage and then stroll off to the water trough to tank up on a few gallons. When she's eating and drinking and resting, the cow's body is making milk so dairymen like their cows to remain calm at all times. Cows behave well as long as all fences are tight and all gates are shut. However, let one tiny crack appear and all the Dr. Jekylls instantly take on the personalities of Mr. Hyde.

These foster mothers of the human race that have spent a lifetime walking no faster than two miles an hour, lay their ears back and cover the county in 30 minutes. Cows that have only occasionally run from heel flies, race across open fields. Normally careful bovines skirt cliffs and dodge the neighbors' meanest dogs as they head for the open range.

Through the years we've had our share of cow chases, midnight roundups and romps through the oat patch in the early morning mist. We've held the flashlight while fences were mended, apologized to neighbors for stomped out flower beds and cruelly chastised our cows for their capers. However sometimes there just isn't anything to laugh about. I remember one of those times.

When the phone rang, we knew. Even before the words were forming on the caller's lips, our minds were saying, "The cows are out!" We got to the phone before the second ring and in 30 seconds we had on enough clothes to get out in the yard.

The lead cows, already planning where they would go, had torn down the neighbor's yard fence and were lounging around in the flower beds and on their front lawn. By the time we drove up, some had eaten their fill and were resting under the carport. Our neighbor's dogs were watching over them. It was a standoff.

Within fifteen minutes 200 Holsteins were rounded up and we trailed them back up the road and into the lot where full feed lanes and hay racks were waiting. They had hardly touched their breakfast before spotting the open gate and electing to go for a midnight jog.

There were moans and groans all around about the destruction to our neighbor's property, lost milk production, and in my case at least, loss of sleep. Then we saw a sight that made all the other problems shrink. The back part of a cow, the tail, back legs, and some of the body was sticking up out of the ground near where we'd moved that mobile home from a few days ago.

In the hurried mass exodus from the lot, the herd of cows had rushed across the spot where a septic lay buried. The herd raced on except for R132. This unfortunate bovine had broken the lid and fell head first into the full tank. She had drowned. Now only her back end was visible.

That was a very painful experience for all and an expensive one as well. The faulty gate latch was fixed right away and the septic tank fenced off. In the life of a dairyman......in everyone's life......there is always something that needs fixing.