In the Muddy Middle of a Herd

I can't claim that this was an enjoyable drawing to make, but it feels good to have actually done it.  I walked out to the field behind our house this afternoon just before rain started pelting down.  The college farm crew has finally moved some cows to this field after nearly two months of no cows to eat the grass and weeds.  I stepped through the stile that connects our back woods to the field and landed in the middle of a wash of poop and mud and waist high grass and some disgruntled-looking cows that seemed completely unequal to the task of clearing the meadow.  I stood there inside the electric fence enclosure and tried to make sense of the slowly moving black shapes and the grass and weed textures and puddles and poop.  I gave up on drawing cows and just outlined what seemed to be more or less the shapes I could see.  I filled in a texture strip.  Flies were landing on my notebook.  Cows were ponging and mooing.  A couple of calves surfaced from underneath bushes.  The clouds gathered and grew darker.  Drops began spitting down.  I backed out of the field and landed in one of the four enormous piles of clay excavated by the groundhogs that have taken over the fenceline inside our yard.

I shook off my tall boots and dumped my umbrella, made a quick run to the garden to see if there was anything to pick, found an enormous cucumber, as big as one of those inedible zucchinis that leap into being at the end of a rainy spell.  A weapon of a cucumber.  Anybody have a good overgrown cucumber recipe?