Prosery

 

 

Flash Flood

 

Thunder in the mountains.  Stallion herds his mares to higher ground.  Vision stretches to miles on this calm cold morning.  Prairie dogs pop from holes, sentinel  forms alert, ready to run, but there’s nothing new to see.  Sunlight delineates each whisker.  Cattle dot the far horizon of a deceptively flat basin floor.  Not even the stallion stands high enough to see the many declivities that cut the landscape into a maze of washes,  dry creeks and gulches.  Without warning, silence turns to sound, a rushing, roaring, boiling, cacophony of confusion.  Tiny rodents crouch against the ground ready to run, but the noise is everywhere, rising rapidly to fierce crescendo, fading away as quickly as it came.  But quiet does not return.  Across the arroyo, a cow is screaming.  Her leg bone is shattered.  She will take a long time to die.

 

Prompted by Linda Lee Lyberg in Prosery  Prompt was a line from Jim Harrison‘s poem “Cow” from his book  Dead Man’s Float, “A cow is screaming across the arroyo.”