While touring a secondary highway, the children were playing a travel game. They selected an object on the roadside and counted points when the object appeared on a team’s side of the road. The object of the day was a herd of cows. They made no distinction between a herd of milk cows or a herd of beef cattle. When a herd was sighted a team of two would declare a point for the team. The points accumulated for each team, and the advantage would swing from one side to the other from time to time. A side would lose all its points any time a team came upon a graveyard on its side of the road. Thus it was that a large lead could be lost abruptly, causing moans and groans to emanate from the back of the car. The game went on quite peacefully for a relatively long time without much argument.

“Over on the hillside, a point for us,” a voice exclaimed.

“Do you see anything unusual about those cattle?” I asked.

“They’re on a steep hillside.”

“Yeah,” I said “Anything else?” 

“They’re all headed in the same direction,” someone observed.

“Did you notice the shape of the hill?” I said.

“It’s kind of steep,” someone said.

“It is,” I said, “It’s shaped like a miniature mountain.” The pasture was located on a huge mound, shaped roughly like an elongated sand pile. There was no sand to be seen, however, save that, which may have been around an outcropping of rock that surfaced here and there. The whole hill was covered with thick green grass specked with trees or small groves of trees spaced at intervals providing shade for the cattle. On a bright sunny day such as that, shade would have been a welcome respite from the sun. The mound was set apart from other hills, so that one could walk around the mound without having to go either higher or lower in elevation. That’s what the cows were doing.

“Those are not ordinary cows,” I said, “They’re Rac-a-Be-Bobs. Their right legs are shorter than their left legs. That makes it easy for them to go around the hill in one direction, but nearly impossible in the reverse.”

“How did they get that way?” someone asked.

“Well, a long time ago, some cows got in the habit of just walking around and around, and this habit continued, until after many generations, their right legs became shorter, and their left longer to adapt to their environment. Now, when a new calf is born it has two shorter legs. If the shorter legs are on the wrong side when it is born, it gets lost from its mother and starves to death. In that way the strain is kept pure, and they all move in the same direction. So, what started as a habit many generations ago became a necessity.”

“Amazing,” came the reply.

Our journey continued and the game went on. It was many years later before I found out that my story was remembered and may even have been believed by little kids who heard it.