Three tremendous bovine faces descend towards you, the heat from their stinking maws flooding already flooding the air around you. You have all of a split second to decide how to respond to the overwhelming threat that looms before you. In that split second, you decide to courageously lift your blade up as if you were some Greek hero of lore(or, perhaps, a modern rpg equivalent) , facing down mighty Cerberus. Yet though these bovine giants would seem less fearsome than a vicious guard dog, the incredible scale of their encroaching maws makes it clear that you're up against a vastly greater foe. As the central of the three cows draws near, you ready yourself for a lunge. You grip the machete tight and true, eying the build-sized lunging tongue, ready to sweep you up as if you were any other ordinary insect. One prick should be all it takes to repel the cow and make it think twice about trying to eat from this hay pile again.
Unfortunately, although your grip on the blade and your fighting posture are respectable enough for an amateur like you, the footing on which you stand is woefully inadequate. Before you can meet the cow's tongue in battle, you are swept off of your feet by a sudden jolt in the hay pile below. Completely unprepared for the sudden shift below, you are unable to stabilize yourself. You wind up tumbling into a recess in the hay pile, your blade slipping from your clutches and vanishing into the ever shifting maze of cowfood below, never to be retrieved again. . It seems another cow manage to get to the hay first, and the resulting bite had caused the entire pile of fluffy hay to shift about, if only slightly. But to a being as small as yourself, a slight shift was all it took! You failed to consider just how much of an impact a single bite from one of the cows would have on the world around you. You had a nagging feeling that you were prideful to think you had a significant chance of overcoming the cow head on...but as it turns out you never got the chance to face it at all.
After a few second of tumbling you manage to right yourself. For a moment you frantically search for your dagger, but your futile efforts at finding it are soon disrupted by the clacking of teeth as the center cow rips an entire mound of tree-sized haystraws from the bed and lift them skyward. You turn your attention to the closest cow, now the leftmost of the three, and notice that it, tooo, has hay-straws protruding from its closed mouth. The three cows noisily munch at their food, breaking it up and slurping oversized mouthfuls of hay inward with their greedy slimy tongues. Those haystraws won't last long, and it is doubtful the cows' hunger will be sated until the entire trough is emptied out.
Realizing you need a tool to defend yourself, you quickly renew your search for the blade, crawling under the top layer of hay in a desperate attempt to find it. Before long you feel the warmth of the cows' breath returning as the gigantic cows go for another round. You scream out in terror as a frightful earthquake resounds from all over, and for a moment you fear you have already been swept up. But the rumbling halts, and you find that your position is no worse than it was before. You burrow deeper, thrashing through the hay. Could the machete have really fallen so far? You search and search, crawling deeper, knowing that doing so has the added benefit of buying you additional time before you have to face the risk of being fed upon again.
Yet in all your efforts, you never find the dagger. Instead, you wind up squandering what precious time you have left. Deeper though you may crawl, the sounds of the cows' clamping down and chomping and shorting begin to grow louder as they go to town on their meal. Are they eating it without restraint? No, for they aren't starving. Yet their ordinary pace of grazing is enough for the contents of the trough to quickly dwindle. Soon the darkened confines of the lower reaches of the hay pile grow light, and before you can react you find yourself overtaken by a mighty force. Though your body is completely engulfed by haystraw, all it takes is a little bit of feeling around to realize that a tongue lies beneath. You scream and frantically struggle to break free from the pile before you get chewed into oblivion alongside it. With great effort you manage to fight your way out of the mass of straws and emerge unprotected into the moist, dark cavern of the cow's maw. At once the motions of its tongue send your body bouncing about, threatening to sweep you into the path of its mighty herbivorous teeth, or worse send you plunging into the depths of its belly.
You brace yourself as best you can, gripping at the tongue in an attempt to avoid falling over...but it is ultimately not your actions that determine what happens next. Surprised by the presence of this moving thing in its mouth, the cow spits you out roughly onto the hay pile below, your body covered in slime and aching severely all over from the force of the spit. You groan and stagger onto your feet, only to stumble once more. Much of the fight has already left your body, and in your dazed state you're hardly equipped to figure out the lay of the land now that the cows have laid into it. You're left to lie there as the hay rumbles beneath you , the cow's muzzles crashing down all around you as they take more and more from the trough. After enough time you're able to figure out that you're in the middle of a large recess, in the hay pile, surroundd in all sides by arduous inclines. You give up on trying to climb your way out.
Eventually, though, the cows manage to work down the haypile until it is more or less even, leaving your tiny form left along a near flat surface. The cows look at one another before one finally takes up the courage to bite into the patch of hay with the tiny insect around it, likely figuring it wouldn't hurt to include it in her meal. This time around, the cow is ready for any move you make. You are sloshed and mashed within the bovine beast's maw, broken and crippled. Lying atop its tongue, you lift your cripple right arm up and curse the creature pathetically before it sweeps you down into the depths of its belly.
Or, rather, the first of four 'stomachs.' You plunge down the moist tunnel that is the cow's throat and land among a pile of chewed hay within her. You have arrived within the rumen. After doing what you can to dry yourself off, you begin to crawl off of the hay, only to find yourself soaked in a thick, yucky fluid, one that is irritating to the touch . Actually, painful to the touch. As it turns out, you are not alone. A complex ecosystem of microbes lives within any given cow's rumen, serving as part of a symbiotic relationship with their bovine overlord The microbes do the heavy lifting of the first stage of digestion. You shrunk yourself to go on a grand adventure, but even at your tiny size you are a god among mortals compared to these microbial beings.
A god in scale alone, unlike the cow. The microbes begin their task of preparing you for digestion. The cow's intentions are clear. The outsider is to be digested, and so they get right to it. By the time the first stage of your digestion passes, and you haven't a clue how long that would be, you are swept deeper in. A thick pool of saliva engulfs your body. You nearly drown in it, but have just enough access to air to survive long enough to get spat back into the maw of the cow. The light. You rejoice as you see the light of day once more! But it is fleeting. You've been broken down into cud...and cows chew their cud. The cow's moth closes again and soon you are put through an unimaginable amount of pain as the cow's teeth directly and intentionally smash down upon your body. Every bone in your body is broken, and your skin is badly scraped. You find yourself in constant pain. The fleeting chance you are afforded to breathe in more yucky cowbreath air proves to be more of a curse than a blessing, for you are given a renewed sense of awareness as you are sent back down into the belly once more.
After enough trip through the first two stomachs, you travel into the Omasum, where the cow's belly somehow begins to siphon away the moisture from your body. You find yourself parched to the core, incapable of processing any meaningful thought. It's debatable as to whether your consciousness should even exists at this point. You certainly aren't moving. Your beaten, partially digested, pulverized-to-a-pulp body at last makes its final journey down to the Abomasum, where the actual process of digestion begins. Gradually what little is left of your body is worn down until nothing but a mush remains.
A while later, the cow at last does the deed, depositing its manure upon the hay below. Nary a comment is made as one of the stable hands shovels the manure up and dumps it onto a muck cart. Not a trace of the tiny man that made the mistake of challenging a cow remains. In the fables tom thumb perhaps was able to survive it, but you certainly weren't. But despite the disgusting nature of your fate, you are afforded some level of dignity. The manure is loaded into a spreader and made into the nutrients for the farmland soil, your churned up mush remains at last being claimed by the earth.
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