Marshfield, Massachusetts police announced Monday night what the whole town had been waiting five days to hear: the runaway bull and heifer calf that had been living off the grid in the woods off Plain Street were finally caught, unharmed, and headed home.
The pair — a black Angus bull and a heifer that officers had taken to calling Bessie and Clyde — had been loose since the previous Wednesday, slipping past search parties and staying just far enough into the tree line to avoid capture. The break came when deputies from the Plymouth County Sheriff's Department brought in a thermal-imaging drone, which finally located the animals deep in the woods as darkness fell.
A tranquilizer rifle and a rope
With officers setting up a perimeter around the surrounding roads, Jeff Perette of R.G. Wilson Farm walked into the woods alone carrying a tranquilizer rifle and darted both animals. "A short time later, the tranquilizer began to take effect, and both animals slowed to a stop," the Marshfield Police Department wrote in its update. Officers and a crowd of volunteers who had turned out to help then moved in to rope and secure the bull and calf while the sedative held.
Once the tranquilizer wore off, the two animals were loaded into a trailer and driven back to their owner's property, five days and one very large manhunt after they first got loose. Police did not say how the pair escaped in the first place, and did not need to — for a department more used to traffic stops than cattle drives, getting Bessie and Clyde home in one piece was the only ending that mattered.
