Of mad cows and finger steaks

Whenever the mental image of trout, cows, electric fences, or a any of a few other memory sparking images passes through my mind I can't help but think about the one and only time I went fishing for brown trout.

A few years ago a friend of mine had been asking to go fishing for some time.  After bugging me enough I agreed to go fish with him in his "secret trout spot".  After driving for almost two hours from Minneapolis we pulled up to the spot.... sort of.  

We came to a stop on a turnaround rut on the side of a dirt road across from rolling fields of pasture and dewy morning grass.  We hopped out of the car and grabbed the rods, bait and tackle and hopped over the fence into the pasture.  We walked through the cold wet grass, dodging cow pies, and interested cows.  After about 300 yards we came to the edge of a ridge, and thats where I snapped this picture, of the cows looking at their visitors.

Looking up the hill at the cows

Looking down the hill..

If someone were watching this play out in a movie or reading this story in a book, one might think that the cows staying behind, afraid of what lay in the valley below might be foreshadowing.  Unfortunately for us we didn't catch the theatrical que. 

Once we reached the bottom of the hill we found out the real reason the cows didn't want to follow us down the hill.  It being spring, the cows that had given birth were keeping a close eye on their new born calves.  We continued on walking by the first few calves and eventually the cows started bellowing and squealing at us.  I had not ever seen a cow get so mad in my life.  We took off and eventually, after dodging and weaving through trees to use the poor eye sight of the cows to our advantage, we escaped the pasture and got to fishing the cold water creeks weaving throughout the woods.

We carried on catching finger sized trout, and getting eaten alive by airplane sized mosquitos until had a basket full of the little fillets. 

Now we had to try to find our way out after jumping from pool to pool and winding our way, creekside, through the woods.  Conventional wisdom would tell you to follow the stream and backtrack to get back to the pasture, but we forged our own trail that he called a "short cut".  It turned out that the short cut meant walking through old creek bottoms, swamps, and crossing several property lines just to get back to the pasture.

When we finally got to the pasture, we found a new friend waiting to greet us.

It seemed that the cows had been put in a different pasture, and the farmer had let the bull out to pasture, or more likely to give a warm welcome to the trespassing fisherman.  We stood there trying to figure out the situation as he got more and more upset with us, pawing the dirt and letting out screeching bellows that sounded more like an elk than a cow.  This thing was not at all happy to see us, and I didn't want to wait any longer to see if the 5ft. tall electric fences would hold back his primal rage.

So we headed back up the hill and all the way around the farmers property to the edge of the pasture to hop the fence as far away from the angry bull as possible.  We jumped and ran as fast as possible to get back across the pasture and hop back in the car.

Do you have any good stories about fishing?  I'd love to hear about them in the comments section below!

-mc