“What’re you up to?” I asked.
“Nothing. In itself rather nice.”
It was. I stood with him and shared the tranquility of the fading day. Far across the pasture, in a thin belt of marshy land near the stream, the spring peepers were tuning up: a few questioning calls, then more, then more until, within three minutes, they sang out a continuous racketing chorus. From farther down, the peepers in one of the small ponds at the end of Brassard’s land joined in.
“Amphibian love songs,” Will said. “My favorite sound on Earth.” He got quiet, then asked, “What are your plans for the evening?”
They weren’t plans so much as necessary rituals: “I’m going to cook dinner in my apartment down here and then I’m going to head up to camp. Why?”
“Because I just remembered something I used to do when I was a kid. And I thought I’d try it again and wondered if you might want to come along.”
“What is it?”
He laughed. “It’s sort of stupid and sort of magical. Why don’t you have dinner, I’ll cook up something for Dad, and let’s get together in another hour or so. When it’s full dark.”
Mystified, I agreed, and he headed off to the house.
An hour didn’t leave time for me to hike up to the tent for dinner, so I went into my tiny Spartan apartment. I blinded myself by flicking on the electric lights, then set to boiling up two packets of the ramen I kept in the cabinet for times when I was too tired, or the weather was too rough, to trek back to camp. The noodles were exquisite, as almost any meal will be when you’re very hungry—no other seasoning is as good as a hard day’s work.
I had just finished when Will knocked and stuck his head into the doorway. “Ready?”
“What exactly should I get ready for?” I asked.
“Just a short jaunt. Regular boots, a sweater or jacket. Pullover hat is optional. That’s about it.”
We went out into the night. The motion lights didn’t switch on, and Will explained that he’d turned them off for now: “Better in real darkness.”
He led me to the wooden fence and climbed over, and when I joined him he headed without a word into the night. I assumed that not talking was part of this; up on my land, I had learned the value of silence. We went diagonally uphill and across the pasture, into the vague dark, toward the peepers and toward the scattered white blotches that emerged from the darkness—the cows’ black parts had melded with the night. As we got closer, I could see them react to our approach, lifting their heads from the grass, or standing up quickly if they’d been reclining. Will headed toward the densest cluster of the herd.
We plugged onward. After another few minutes, we were far enough into the darkness that the house lights were no longer rectangles but just a cluster of dots. Then we came over a slight rise and started down toward the wetland where the peepers were now rioting, deafening, and the house lights were lost from view. We were between the roll of the hill and the black mass of Brassard’s eastern forested ridge, with no visible lights or any evidence of mankind’s existence at all. This could have been the twenty-first century or the Stone Age.
My eyes had adjusted to the dark by the time Will signaled that we should stop. He was a colorless man-silhouette, and the blotched cow shapes were inexplicable as they moved uneasily in the darkness.
Will lay down on the ground, signaling me to do the same.
I hesitated. It was chill and felt wild here, and I knew what a Holstein cow was. Their long-lashed, docile eyes are misleading: They can be stubborn, obnoxious animals and, if you’re not alert, dangerous. Each was ten times my weight, and when I was standing, the heads of some were higher than mine. There were times when I could have sworn a group of cows literally didn’t even know I was there and therefore didn’t obey my shoves and scoldings. Even their absentminded unruliness could knock me over, and the bad mood of one could send the whole herd into uneasy motion that threatened to become a stampede. And Queenie—just the sight of her war-paint facial markings in the milking parlor gave me a flutter of trepidation.
I was leery, but I lay down near Will, belly to the ground, feeling very vulnerable and wondering what we were doing.
The peepers racketed. The white blotches moved in the darkness and after a while I noticed the blotches growing and gathering, and soon I could see the whole cows, dozens, coming toward us. Some were clearly agitated, approaching us sideways, bucketing in defensive display as they came.
Will lay contentedly on his stomach in the grass.
Soon we were surrounded by a shifting, shoulder-to-shoulder circle of Holsteins, craning their necks to bring their noses closer to us, jostling, stamping, uneasy but curious. Did they recognize our scents? If they did, why were they so jittery? I lay there, paralyzed, surrounded by a towering wall of huge animals, rows of knobby forelegs, faces as big as my body. They were huffing heavily, not at all calm, and their eyes were wide and wary, showing white. Some pounded their hooves an arm’s length from my face.
“Rose! Rosie!” Will whispered. He held out his hand toward one of the cows, and now I recognized her, too: a sweet-tempered smaller cow whose side markings vaguely resembled roses. Rose cautiously extended her nose,
