Alf was a big, blustery man and a good enough farmer, I guess at least he made it pay. He had a big new barn and it's just like him not to paint it red, the way any proper barn is painted, but white with red trim. Who ever heard of paint trim on a barn?
Just beyond Alf's place, Bounce and I turned off the road and went down across the pasture, heading for the big hole in the creek.
Alfs prize Hereford bull was way off in another corner of the pasture with the rest of the stock. When he saw us, he started coming for us, not mean or belligerent, but just investigating and ready for a fight if one was offered him. I wasn't afraid of him, because I'd made friends with him that summer I had worked for Alf. I used to pet him and scratch behind his ears.
Alf said I was a crazy fool and someday the bull would kill me. "You can never trust a bull," Alf said.
When the bull was near enough to see who it was, he knew we meant no harm, so he went back across the pasture again.
We got to the hole and I started fishing, while Bounce went up the stream to do some investigating. I caught a few fish, but they weren't very big and they weren't biting very often and I got disinterested. I like to fish, but to keep my interest up, I have to catch some.
So I got to daydreaming. I began wondering if you marked off a certain area of ground a hundred feet square, say and went over it real careful, how many different kinds of plants you'd find. I looked over a patch of ground next to where I was sitting and I could see just ordinary pasture grass and some dandelions and some dock and a couple of violets, and a buttercup which didn't have any flowers.
Suddenly, when I was looking at the dandelion, I realized I could see all that dandelion, not just the part that showed above the ground!
I don't know how long I'd been seeing it that way before realizing it. And I'm not certain that "seeing" is the right word.
Maybe "know" would be better. I knew how that dandelion's big taproot went down into the ground and how the little feathery roots grew out of it, and I knew where all the roots were, how they were taking water and chemicals out of the ground, how reserve food was stored in the root and how the dandelion used the sunlight to convert its food into a form it could use. And the funniest thing about it was that I had never known any of it before.