Sheila Anderson photo cow McBride

By: Frank Green

It’s a story of motherly love.

One of Ed Zimmerman’s cows escaped over the weekend when she was brought out to pasture without her calf. So she left to look for her calf, wandering some ten miles down to Horseshoe Lake, around McBride, and back over to Mountain View Road before reuniting with the herd on her own. Nobody corralled her—not the RCMP, the townspeople, or the farmhands who all went looking for Zimmerman’s young beef cow, “number 319.”

“She had the instinct to find that calf even if it took to the end of the world,” Zimmerman said. “Never take a cow away from where it thinks it has its calf.”

The calf still hasn’t been found, and Zimmerman fears it was killed by a cougar. But the mother was anxious to have a calf by her side, so he fixed her up with a different calf. Zimmerman said she seemed content.