Udder Terror
by Peter Graff

Fly fishing for trout is a poetic activity, a quiet one, an endeavor elegant because it is an endeavor restrained, controlled, and if not exactly predictable, certainly predictably exact.

Mention in a casual social conversation that you are a fly fisherman and non-anglers fall into dreamy-eyed musings on the presumed solitude and beauty of it all: the gurgling rapids, recumbent willows, Brad Pitt waving a bamboo baton to the music of the rising trout beneath the Montana sky, blah, blah, blah.  Quickly, however, the poetry in their eyes snuffs like a candle flame between a wet thumb and forefinger, and they change the topic to something slightly more prosaic like gas prices, designated hitters or lawn weed-and-feed. This is because they realize that poetry often camouflages ugly truth, and because they secretly suspect there’s a lot of inconvenience and probably worse disguised by the elegance of fly angling. They suspect, and it is well-founded suspicion, that behind the romance is boredom, danger, agony and plenty of death.

It’s true. Press an angler and he will admit to cases of unfortunate fly fishermen and women who started the afternoon under gentle breezes and gathering clouds and ended the day caught in flash flood, swept pell-mell downstream, slammed up against a cut-bank, held until water replaces breath in the lungs. A fly fisherman can tell you how a misstep into a deep hole when laden with vest and filling waders will send someone into the gravel kicking and screaming to an audience of indifferent minnows and hungry crawfish. Then there’s the lightning strikes, mosquito stings, snake bites, barbed-wire strings, sociopaths in the pools ahead, guys with rods who wish you dead……. the poetry of misery, that’s fly fishing.

In addition to these threats are the ones anglers keep within a circle of silence because they are menaces that border on the occult, and to admit to them openly might cause the outside world to question anglers’ sanity even more than is already the case.

Consider the River Hobs, malicious, nearly invisible creatures barely the size of a hair follicle, that shinny up a fly line, crawl into a reel, snarl the line, and then signal trout to a feeding frenzy while you stand muttering and cursing inside a cloud of mosquitoes. Or Stream Sirens that call from the depths of deep black holes, enticing anglers to take just one more step in hopes of getting close enough to cast for the big brown that surely is hiding there (see above paragraph on drowning). There are the Barbs, a dozen to the size of a pinhead, that reach out quietly to unsuspecting waders causing them to bleed ice water, and the Tharuk, cold wraith-like creature the color of falling shadows that gather about the neck of the lost angler at nightfall and sends him scrabbling into the woods groping blindly for a way back to his vehicle. At the bottom of rivers live Boulder Trolls who reach out to stop the forward progress of a wading boot while the rest of the fisherman continues forward and down. Woe betide the fisherman who falls afoul of the  Myopiae, creatures who wait until dusk to dim the eyes of middle-aged fishermen trying to tie a # 18 onto the end of a 7X tippet.

Worst of all, there are cows.

A fly fisherman can tell you about the cows and how cows surpass all other menaces, real or shadowy. Cows are up to no good and they mean to spoil an angler’s afternoon, or life.

I realize there are many who snort at the last sentence believing cows are little more than kindly loafs lounging around in pastures, asking little and giving so much: milk, cheese, moos, garden fertilizer, etc. These would be foolish people who cannot discriminate between cartoons and reality, people who see that big sack hanging between a cow’s back legs and find the whole thing humorous. These are fools, inexperienced people who know not the history of the beast nor understand the threat they pose to the modern world of fly angling.

Some history, then.

Originally, cows roamed freely throughout Europe, the Middle East and Southern Asia and were known as “Aurochs,” the specific term for female aurochs being “Baglaydese.“ The females while 25% as large as the males, which measured six feet at the shoulder, were pretty formidable in their own right weighing in at close to one ton of foul-tempered petulance and curved horn. If you need someone to draw you a picture, it’s already been done: ancient cow pictures (and those of their boyfriends) grace the caves in Lascaux and Chauvet, France, full of spears, suggesting that Iron Age folks were terrified by them and considered the only good cow a perforated one.

Evidence suggests that while smaller than the males, the females were 42% meaner, meaner more during the full moon, though their aggressiveness was less direct than the male counterparts. Rather then charge at an enemy head-on, they preferred to congregate in groups destroying others with mean-spirited gossip. Probably the term “herd” derived from groups of cows gathered on a hillside gossiping about “what I heard,” “have you heard?” and “I think I just heard a fisherhuman.” Passive aggression failing, these droves of ancient cows could become, with the swish of a tail, even more directly belligerent. 

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Years later, after the world had become more domesticated, Julius Caesar described cows as beasts that, “spare neither man nor beast that they see. They cannot be brought to endure the sight of men, nor be tamed, even when taken young.” Legend has it that a cow ate his favorite toga. Then when the animal proceeded to munch both his sandals he cried in exasperation, “Et, two, Brute?”  This became a famous saying.

Though aurochs eventually disappeared from Asia, and the Roman Empire disappeared from Italy, smaller versions of the cow spread across Europe like the butt of a pasta-lover. Ironically, and to stretch the food metaphor, humankind was probably responsible for the infestation because of a fondness for buttered scones and cereal soaked in cow fluid. It wasn’t long before these beasts were lined up along, and in, the best trout streams in Europe, India, and Africa. After they ruined the fishing, some booked passage for America and there you have it. From this sordid and violent history arises the modern Moo-S-of-A cow.

You can sum up the modern cow’s intelligence as follows: they’re dumb and really contrary.  In fact, the Indo-European word for cow is close to the present German word, kuh. Guess what that rhymes with? And close observation of their behavior shows that they haven’t forgotten their impaled ancestors or the many generations of cold hands that laid hold of their spigots, and while dumb, they are also cagey. They are here to get even. Consider:

Cows are vindictive. Too rough a yank by a dairyman will result in a kicked-over pail, indiscriminant defecation, a hoof planted squarely on the offender’s foot, the pinning sequence completed by leaning against the human and jamming him up against the boards until someone arrives and pacifies the cow with a two-by-four.

Cows have a fine-tuned radar system that can detect a fisherman from miles away. Combine this with a surprising swiftness of hoof and that explains why in the time between the slam of the car door and the angler’s arrival at the river, the cows have relocated from the pasture and are standing in the middle of the stream.

No sooner does the angler step into the stream then the entire herd turns en masse to fix the poor soul with a collective, malevolent eye. If the angler moves right, so do the cows; if the angler tries a flanking maneuver, the cows counter it immediately. Some fishermen have tried to bluff the cows by moving forward and although I can find no statistics on cow stompings, the fact that none have been reported only convinces me that they occur regularly and with no survivors.

Cows can be cunning. They have been known to feign indifference as a fisherman runs around them. Then the trap is sprung and the angler finds himself ankle-deep in a minefield of cow pies cleverly planted by the enemy. While bull shit is acceptable in angling, no self-respecting trout will ever bite a fly with fresh cow poop holding to the opposite end of the rod.

Even when they cannot find a fisherman to terrorize they’ll spitefully stomp around the prettiest of pools, breaking down the banks, turning the water into chocolate milk. Then they’ll pee in the water in such volume that often the water level raises several inches as well as the tang quotient. Further they emit prodigious amounts of gas from both ends (300+ liters per bossy per day) making them second only to coal-burning power plants and Amana refrigerators as contributors to the greenhouse effect. In short, they are bad for fishing.

Which brings us to the ultimate question: What do you do if confronted by cows on the trout river? Quite simply, there is nothing that can be done. Give it up. You might as well call it a day, go home, and paint pictures of them on the wall. There is no protective amulet and no proven strategy to beat them. Since the beginning of time, cows have proven to be virtually invincible. Despite their pastoral appearance, there is no poetry in cows. They remain high on the list of those forces that seek to thwart anglers, devoid of compassion, without a trace of the milk of human kindness.


Peter Graff, who writes The Last Cast, is a regular contributor to Midwest Fly Fishing™ magazine.
copyright Midwest Fly Fishing™ Magazine 2004