The Night the Cows Came for Us

Let me set the scene.

Two farm kids. Five hundred acres of Mississippi dairy land. Late at night, no lanterns, just the campfire. Three trees in a triangle with hammocks tied together at the top so we could talk until we fell asleep, which was our preferred sleeping arrangement when the weather cooperated.

Also — and this becomes relevant — possibly a bowl or two had been involved earlier in the evening. This was the early eighties. We were seventeen. I'll leave it at that.

Something woke us up.

I don't know what time it was. Late. Dark. The fire had burned down to coals and wasn't throwing much light. We looked around, trying to figure out what had disturbed us, and that's when we saw them.

Glowing orbs. Floating in the darkness at various heights. Maybe twenty of them. Thirty. Just hovering there, slightly reflective, definitely looking at us.

We screamed.

We did not exit the hammocks so much as eject from them. I have no memory of my feet touching the ground between the hammock and the truck bed. We were just suddenly in the truck bed, both of us, hearts going like we'd sprinted a mile.

The glowing orbs didn't move.

It was the herd of Holstein dairy cows. His family's milk cows. They had seen the campfire from across the pasture, gotten curious the way cows do — which is to say, gotten extremely curious in an extremely slow and deliberate way — and walked over to investigate. What we saw in the darkness were their eyes reflecting the last light from the coals.

They just stood there. Looking at us. Probably confused about why two humans were now sitting in a truck bed hyperventilating.

We sat in the truck for a while.

The Gear Lesson Hidden in This Story

Lanterns. Get one. Use it.

I say this as someone who thought a campfire was sufficient lighting for a backcountry camp and learned otherwise at the hands of a Holstein herd. The modern options are so good and so light that there's no real argument for going without.

The Black Diamond Spot 400 headlamp runs about $40, weighs two ounces, throws 400 lumens when you need them, and dims way down for camp use. It would have let us see what was coming across that pasture before it materialized as floating eyes in the darkness.

For actual camp lighting, the LuminAID PackLite is solar-rechargeable, weighs almost nothing, packs completely flat, and throws enough light to actually see your campsite. We carry nothing like this when we were kids because nothing like this existed.

What Actually Got Us Through That Night

After we determined that the cows were not, in fact, supernatural entities, we had to get back to camp. Which meant walking back through the herd. Which the cows found extremely interesting and followed us the entire way.

We rebuilt the fire — partly for light, partly because it turned out to be the thing that made the cows keep a respectful distance. They didn't like the fire. That's useful information.

The hammocks were still fine. The night was still warm. We climbed back in, and my friend said something like "I can't believe we just got scared by dairy cows," and we laughed until we couldn't breathe.

That's the thing about hammock camping — when everything goes sideways, you're still off the ground. Whatever was out there, at least it wasn't directly underneath us.

On Hammock Camping in General

That triangular hammock setup we used — three trees, hammocks tied at the top so we could talk — wasn't something we read about or planned. We just figured out that it worked. You could see your camping partner, you could have an actual conversation, and it was stable in a way that a single hammock strung between two trees isn't.

Modern hammock camping has come a long way from whatever we were using in the early eighties. ENO makes excellent entry-level hammocks for under $60, and their DoubleNest fits two people for exactly the kind of camp conversation my friend and I used to have. Kammock's Roo series runs higher but is bomber-durable and comfortable enough to actually sleep in all night.

A hammock tarp is non-negotiable — I'd go with something like the Kammock Glider or ENO's ProFly rain tarp. Because the night we got caught by the monsoon rain was a different camping trip, and that one's its own story.

Next time: the cow pond campsite, the monsoon, and the mostly-raw chicken.