It was cold. Cold enough for me to be sure it was dead.
The cow looked over her shoulder at me with big droopy cow eyes.
‘That’s a shame, Alice,’ I said. I don’t know why I chose that moment to give her a name.
I patted her gently and then grasped the calf’s hoof. I put my foot up on Alice’s rump, lent backwards, and pulled as hard as I could. Alice groaned and staggered as she tried to push the calf out but it didn’t move far.
We tried again a couple more times but the calf seemed to be stuck.
‘Looks like I’ll have to call the vet, Alice,’ I said, as I rubbed her back all the way up to her ears. ‘We’ll get it out soon. Just hang on.’
It was five hours before the vet came. I took her up the hill and we found Alice lying on the ground, moaning. The vet said I should have called her earlier. The calf could have been dead inside her for days. Now Alice was really sick. The dead calf was swelling up inside her.
The vet got down to business. She pushed her whole arm up inside the cow trying to find the other hoof, but she couldn’t find it, so she got out her scalpel and cut the calf’s head off.
Next, she reached in again and found the other hoof, tied a chain around both hooves, and winched out the headless calf.
I didn’t watch. I sat on the ground stroking Alice’s cheeks and humming softly. The vet said Alice would probably die. If a cow doesn’t get up, she said, it dies.
For the next three days Alice lay on the ground. When I visited her she would try to get up but her back legs didn’t work. I gave her water in a bucket and some hay, but nothing changed.
The next day the farmer came home. He got out his gun and headed up the hill. I didn’t go. I tried to keep busy with a few chores.
He came back with a smile on his face. Alice was standing up.
After that she got better by the day. At first she couldn’t stand for long, then she walked with a horrible limp, one hoof dragging on the ground behind her.
One day she was back with the herd, and we knew she was going to be fine. Every time I saw Alice I called hello, but as time went by she ignored me. Eventually she stopped limping.
The vet said Alice was damaged inside and would never be able to have a calf. Alice had a good spring. Lots of hay. Plenty of new grass. Warm sunny days. But the time to put the bull out with the cows was approaching and Alice had nowhere to go.
One day, while the cows were eating their hay, the farmer got his gun out again. The bullet went in right between her eyes. Her legs slowly folded underneath her. The other cows watched her for a while and then turned their attention back to the fresh hay.
Alice’s life was short but it was mainly pretty good. When she came home wrapped up in beautiful parcels labelled fillet steak and roast beef and ribs, it felt like eating her was the best thing to do.
The hump beneath the moon got closer and closer as I walked along the verge of the highway. I came to a stile, and a sign that announced the hump was, in fact, Mount Iron. I climbed the stile and set off to conquer it. I fancied the idea of being the first person to climb to the summit that morning.
I had barely got as high as the first foothill when I saw a retired couple walking down. ‘Morning, Steve,’ they said. How did they know my name? Who were they, and what were they doing up so goddamned early? They must have climbed Mount Iron in the dark. I pondered the questions and saw another retired couple walking down. ‘Morning, Steve,’ they said.
Five days in Wānaka and I was already part of the furniture. Four more early-bird trampers trotted down the mountain with cheerful first-person salutations. I recognised a man and two women from various morning and afternoon teas at Mount Aspiring College. It felt good to belong. It was a wonderful tramp, steep and unbelievably scenic – I walked into and then above a soft thick carpet of woolly fog that moved through the valley in a lovely white twist. Lake Hāwea lay beneath it. Trudged onward, past rosehip and rowan berries, thistle and thorn, the plants holding with a tight white-knuckled grip on to the hard rock of Mount Iron. I came to a bald spur. A sign said DANGER.
I thought about Beth McArthur, lonely and sighing in the front of the class, daring to write about becoming a widow.
We didn’t put our names down for what happened. My husband fell off our rock. It’s a ten-metre schist rock on top of which we had our home built 40 years ago. He always said, ‘No one will ever fall off the rock.’ But he did. Just like that.
It was a warm summer evening. I remember the date, of course. November 3, 2008. Just an ordinary Monday.
After our evening meal we planned to drive the fourteen kilometres to our ten-acre block at Springvale to tend our peonies but Dick decided to stay at home and watch TV. A night off. I said, ‘Well I’m going out to weed that garden in front of my office.’
Dick wandered out the front door during the ads. ‘How’s it going, young Beth?’ he asked.
‘Good.’ I replied. ‘I’m just going to pop over the rock and cut down that seedling elm.’
‘I’ll do it for you,’ he said. I gave him the secateurs and he descended the couple of metres
