At the end of a long day of baling, we'd lost two stackers to injury and managed to haul somewhere around a thousand bales of hay into the barn before the baler broke.
The counter on the machine read 1,026 (but it had been hiccupping most of the day). There had been a string problem. Bales had been exploding as they were ejected from the shoot. Loose hay was tossed back onto the field and fed into the machinery a second time.
Thus, the final tally for this year's first cut is, at best, an estimate.
About a thousand.
The final tally for injuries was easier to count. My wife stepped between two bales while stacking and fell in slow motion, eventually, landing on the concrete barn floor, her left ankle quickly twice the size of her right.
She wanted to soldier on, but was reminded that in the war on hay, the front line needs to be fully capable or they are deemed a detriment to the effort. We sent her to the tack room for ice, beer and foot elevation (not necessarily in that order).
Shortly after the ankle episode, another volunteer clanked his forehead off a hay-wagon crossbar. Thinking it was the signal for Round 5 of a scheduled 12 rounder, I immediately got into a crouched position and walked toward the center of the ring, throwing left jabs at the air.
Instead, there Mike stood, holding onto what appeared to be a small blue hen's egg quickly forming on his forehead. He'd proven yet another physics law: Two solid objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time. We sent him to the tack room for ice, beer and head-knot examination (not necessarily in that order).
The remaining crew strained and sweated as the wagons of hay continued to roll into the barn. Tosser, Hauler, Hoister, Stacker, we all had a job to do. The Tosser threw bales from the wagon to the barn floor. The Hauler walked those to the Hoister, who threw them to the top of the pile, where the Stacker was busy, building his Great Wall of Hay.
As afternoon faded to night, beer called to us. Production slowed. We lost the Stacker for a while, who had to call his girlfriend (cell phones have become the enemy of farm production). More beer called. The poor old baler, which had been limping through most of the afternoon, hiccupped string again. There was an argument (as there always is) about which side of the bale to place on the bottom. Beer shouted.
Eventually, the baler broke for good.
We put down our beers and applauded poor craftsmanship.
Somewhere, a gun sounded, signaling the end of the game (or one of the two injured had put the other out of her misery). There would be no more baling today. We crawled home with the final score: hay bales about a thousand, injured farmers, two.
