Then I looked over the rail fence into Dragonfly’s pop’s pasture and saw what looked like twenty scared cows racing furiously across the field, their tails up over their backs and also switching fiercely like the cows were terribly excited.
“It’s a stampede!” Dragonfly cried excitedly.
Say, those cows acted like they were blind and deaf and dumb and scared out of what few wits a cow has and were all running wildly to get away from something—only I couldn’t see anything for them to run away from.
“I’ll bet it’s a lot of warble flies after them,” I said, remembering quick what Pop and I had been studying that week while we were looking up June beetles.
“What’s a warble fly?” Little Tom Till wanted to know, his folks not having any cows—and they always got the milk they drank at their house from Dragonfly’s folks or mine.
Well, anybody who knows anything about a warble fly knows that it is a noisy, buzzing fly about half as big as a big, black horse-fly and it only lives six days after it is born.
“A warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and can’t sting or bite a cow or anything,” I said, feeling all of a sudden quite proud of myself that I had learned so much about a lot of important things such as flies and beetles and other insects.
“Then why are cows scared of them?” Poetry asked, even he not knowing that.
“They just make a fierce, buzzing sound and dive in and lay their eggs on the hair of the cows and as fast as the cows run the fly flies just that fast and flits in and out laying eggs on them. Then after six days of that kind of life it dies. It probably starves to death,” I said, “not being able to eat.”
“And cows are scared of an innocent egg?” Circus asked, and just then got a little scared himself as did all of us because those twenty milk cows were making a beeline for our fence. “They’re coming for the shade,” I said. “Warble flies don’t like shade.”