Then a commotion started. Back in the herd I could hear scuffling and the shifting of hides against each other. And then Queenie burst her way through the inner ring. The others sidled away, deferring to her. Of all the cows, she was the one I least wanted to see out there.
Her appearance agitated the others and I grew terrified of them all. We humans didn’t really command them, I realized. At milking time, they obeyed the demands of their swollen udders, not our goading and cajoling. In the dark, I could feel their animal natures and knew that their fear could easily turn to desperate, defensive aggression.
Queenie shouldered closer, leaned her massive face so close that I felt the moist heat of her heaving exhalations. The peepers seemed to be screaming. Will didn’t move or speak.
We spent a full minute in stasis. Then, as if some message had passed among them, other cows moved forward, shoving aside the first circle. I felt them—their individuality, their identity within their natural social structure, the herd. Did Queenie signal her approval of us? I don’t know. But one after the other, they approached. I’d named several of them myself and called to them by name as they came near: Bertha, large and rather clumsy, thickset in body but with a relatively small bag. And Twiggy, overcoming her skittishness to satisfy her curiosity. Each one calmed further when they recognized us and felt reassured.
They began to drift away. Perhaps we’d only bored them with our stillness. Or the allure of grassy slopes drew their ever-hungry mouths. We lay there as the circle reconfigured and thinned; after fifteen minutes, the last of them had wandered back into the darkness.
Will rolled over onto his back. I did the same. Through the mild haze, I could just see the blurred stars. We were alone on the gentle slope of Brassard’s upper pasture.
“Cool, huh?” Will said. He put his hands behind his head and looked over at me. There was enough light to see that his face was split by a boyish grin.
We walked back in companionable silence, hugged goodnight in the farmyard, and then I crossed the road and headed up the steep track to my tent home there in the forest darkness.
Erik also showed me another dimension of bovine character and made culling all the more awful. He always carried his harmonica with him and often improvised bluesy meanders on it when he was trying to make a decision. He discovered that the cows were fascinated by it. When he wheedled near the pasture fence, they’d drift toward him from all over the hillside, a slow avalanche of ambling black and white forms. They pressed forward against the fence and watched with fascination, ears upright, lifting their wet snouts and snuffling for olfactory clues to what this strange sound meant. Within a few minutes, scores of cows would be crammed together in a semicircle, rows of bony backs radiating from its center, Erik.
Their fascination, their wonderment, moved me. Like anyone, they were bored by their regimented lives and welcomed having something new to inspect. As they watched and listened, jostling and craning around each other’s head for a better view, they struck me as simple souls—gentle, innocent creatures. They snuffed and shifted, marveling and puzzling. Their faces struck me as expressive, and watching them as Erik played, I realized how individual and distinct each face looked now that I knew them better.
Erik got a huge kick out of their attention and took pleasure from giving them some entertainment. I loved seeing it, too: Erik at the epicenter of this checkered crowd of big, inquisitive animals. I empathized with the pleasure they took from this departure from daily routine. I felt for them and knew them. After all, I had milked them and spoken to them and pushed them and washed their teats and rubbed Bag Balm on their chap, fed them and watched them gratefully chow down. Some of them I had nursed by bottle when they were calves. It hadn’t occurred to me that I’d also have to help kill them.
On the day appointed for my first culling, we herded them all into the cowshed. Will and Brassard and I walked among them with clipboards and pencils, pages of notes we’d taken throughout the year, and Brassard’s spreadsheets. We jotted ear-tag numbers to identify likely culls. Will had done this many times before going off to college and knew a lot about it from making his films; he was a good judge of a cow’s health. Brassard checked various signs of vigor and energy level and bag health. We chalked the bony rear ends of some and put pink tags on their ears. I knew half of them by name. Bertha got chalked—she was robust in body, but that small bag doomed her. So did Savannah, for whom calving was difficult and required long recovery and vet bills; she was simply not pulling her financial weight on the farm.
Will noticed my increasing reluctance. He took my elbow and asked, “You want to keep going? It’s hard if you’re not used to it.”
“Yeah, I should keep at it,” I told him. I set my teeth, and when Brassard asked me I grimly told him what I knew of milk production for each, and read him information about health issues and birth dates from his spreadsheets. As we went, I plunged into the self-punitive state I’d arrived in. I knew how Diz would have put it to me as she scorned my sentimentality: You want to wrestle with your Inner You? You want opportunities to Prove Yourself? Here you go. I agreed with her voice in my head and decided that I had to see this process to the end.
We separated seven culls and moved them into a small paddock defined by temporary electric fencing we had set up. They were to loiter here, wondering why they were pulled
