Even as I ran, I was remembering what Pop and I had learned about warble flies—or heel flies, as some folks call them—and I thought what if I was a real cow instead of merely being as awkward as one part of the time? If I had my own brain with what it knew about warble flies, I would have the living daylights scared out of me, my cow-self, on account of even though a warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and never eats any food during the six days of its short life, it does lay eggs all over the legs and lower part of the cow.
When a warble fly egg hatches, which it does in four or five days after it is laid, the thing that hatches out isn’t a fly at all but is a grub, which quick starts to bore its grubby way right through the cow’s skin and into the cow. Once it gets inside, the dumb thing starts on a chewing journey through the inside, making its own path as it goes and making the cow itch like everything, which is maybe why some cows are not as friendly as other cows at certain times of the year. I’ll bet if I were a cow, I wouldn’t be worth a whoop to a farmer or anybody who owned me because I would probably feel the grub and maybe a half-dozen or more of his grubby relatives working their way all through me, some of them stopping like grubs do, right in my throat and staying a while just above where I would be chewing my cud.
During the whole five or six months while a grub is still inside of a cow, it travels all around and finally chews a tunnel along the edges of the cow’s spinal column and at last it stops and makes its home right under the skin of the back. There it chews a small hole all the way through the cowhide so it can breathe, which it does with its tail, getting good fresh country air through the hole, staying there nearly through the winter.
While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble and finally works its way out through the air hole and tumbles off to the ground, and if it is spring and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly on the inside of itself. Then as quick as it is a fly, it crawls out of itself and makes a dive for the first cow it can find, starting to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six short days of noisy, buzzing fly-life are over.
I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s pop’s stampeding cows. I was also remembering that in the wintertime in some parts of America, starlings, and even magpies light on the backs of cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with their sharp bills.
Boy, oh boy, if I was a cow and one or a half-dozen of those very high-voiced, buzzing flies was trying to lay her eggs on me and I knew what would happen if they did, I would most certainly beat it for the shade, which warble flies don’t like. Or if I could, I would find somebody’s bayou or a little stream somewhere, splash myself out into it and stand in the water up to my sides like I had seen cows do all around Sugar Creek for years without knowing before why they did it.
Say, you should have seen Dragonfly’s pop’s cows ignore the few rails on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.
Maybe I’d better tell you that Pop says that every year American meat packers throw away enough grubby meat to feed eighty-three thousand people for a whole year—all on account of the crazy warble flies. Also, Pop says, a lot of cows’ hides have holes in them when they are butchered and people lose money that way too on account of that part of the cow is where the leather is generally best—and what good is a piece of leather for making shoes or leather goods if it has a hole in it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a pond on a hot summer day, but should let them stay there in the shade if they want to.
Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy, whining flies, either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast, it not being easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some people are too thin.
Anyway that is how come we didn’t get to look for the tent of the “turtledove” and the “bobwhite” until quite a while later. It took us almost an hour to get Dragonfly’s pop’s cows out of the bayou, we having to drive them out on account of the cornfield being on the other side, and you can’t trust a cow with a cornfield any more than you can trust a boy or a girl with an open cookie jar.