'I told you it was different,' Claud whispered. 'You're going to see something soon you've never seen in your life before.'
'Hold her steady now!' Rummins ordered. 'Don't let her jump round!' Then he hurried over to a shed in the far corner of the yard and brought out the bull. He was an enormous beast, a black-and-white Friesian, with short legs and a body like a ten-ton truck. Rummins was leading it by a chain attached to a steel ring through the bull's nose.
'Look at them bangers on him,' Claud said. 'I'll bet you've never seen a bull with bangers like that before.'
'Tremendous,' I said. They were like a couple of cantaloupe melons in a carrier bag and they were almost dragging on the ground as the bull waddled forward.
'You better stand back and leave the rope to me,' Claud said. 'You get right out of the way.' I was happy to comply.
The bull approached my cow slowly, staring at her with dangerous white eyes. Then he started snorting and pawing the ground with one foreleg.
'Hang on tight!' Rummins shouted to Bert and Claud. They were leaning back against their respective ropes, holding them very taut and at right angles to the cow.
'Come on, boy,' Rummins whispered softly to the bull. 'Go to it, lad.'
With surprising agility the bull heaved his front part up on to the cow's back and I caught a glimpse of a long scarlet penis, as thin as a rapier and just as stiff, and then it was inside the cow and the cow staggered and the bull heaved and snorted and in thirty seconds it was all over. The bull climbed down again slowly and stood there looking somewhat pleased with himself.
'Some bulls don't know where to put it,' Rummins said. 'But mine does. Mine could thread a needle with that dick of his.'
'Wonderful,' I said. 'A bull's eye.'
'That's exactly where the word come from,' Rummins said. 'A bull's eye. Come on, lad,' he said to the bull. 'You've had your lot for today.' He led the bull back to the shed and shut him in and when he returned I thanked him, and then I asked him if he really believed that facing the cow into the sun during the mating would produce a female calf.
'Don't be so damn silly,' he said. 'Of course I believe it. Facts is facts.'
'What do you mean facts is facts?'
'I mean what I say, mister. It's certainty. That's right, ain't it Bert?'
'And if you face her away from the sun does it get you a male?'
'Every single time,' Rummins said. I smiled and he saw it. 'You don't believe me, do you?'
'Not really,' I said.
'Come with me,' he said. 'And when you see what I'm going to show you, you'll bloody well have to believe me. You two stay here and watch that cow; he said to Claud and Bert. Then he led me into the farmhouse. The room we went into was dark and small and dirty. From a drawer in the sideboard he produced a whole stack of thin exercise books. They were the kind children use at school. 'These is calving books,' he announced. 'And in here is a record of every mating that's ever been done on this farm since I first started thirty-two years ago.'
He opened a book at random and allowed me to look. There were four columns on each page: COW'S NAME, DATE OF MATING, DATE OF BIRTH, SEX OF CALF.
I glanced down the sex column. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.
'We don't want no bull calves here,' Rummins said. 'Bull calves is a dead loss on a dairy farm.'
I turned over a page. Heifer, it said. Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer, Heifer.
'Hey,' I said, 'here's a bull calf.'
'That's quite right,' Rummins said. 'Now take a look at what I wrote opposite that one at the time of the mating.' I glanced at column two. Cow jumped round, it said.
'Some of them gets fractious and you can't hold 'em steady,' Rummins said. 'So they finish up facing the other way. That's the only time I ever get a bull.'
'This is fantastic,' I said, leafing through the book.
'Of course it's fantastic,' Rummins said. 'It's one of the most fantastic things in the whole world. Do you actually know what I average on this farm? I average ninety-eight per cent heifers year in year out! Check it for yourself. Go on and check it. I'm not stopping you.'
'I'd like very much to check it,' I said. 'May I sit down?'
'Help yourself,' Rummins said. 'I've got work to do.' I found a pencil and paper and I proceeded to go through each one of the thirty-two little books with great care. There was one book for each year, from 1915 to 1946. There were approximately eighty calves a year born on the farm, and my final results over the thirty-two-year period were as follows: Heifer calves 2,516 Bull calves 56 Total calves born, including stillborn 2,572 I went outside to look for Rummins. Claud had disappeared. He'd probably taken my cow home. I found Rummins in the dairy pouring milk into the separator. 'Haven't you ever told anyone about this?' I asked him.
'Never have,' he said.
'Why not?'
'I reckon it ain't nobody else's business.'
'But my dear man, this could transform the entire milk industry the world over.'
'It might,' he said. 'It might easily do that. It wouldn't do the beef business no harm either if they could get bulls every time.'
'How did you hear about it in the first place?'
'My old dad told me,' Rummins said. 'When I were about eighteen, my old dad said to me, 'I'll tell you a secret,' he said, 'that'll make you rich.' And he told me this.'
'Has it made you rich?'
'I ain't done too bad for myself, have I?' he said.
'But did your father offer any sort of explanation as to why it works?' I asked.
Rummins explored the inner rim of one nostril with the end of his thumb, holding the noseflap between thumb and forefinger as he did so. 'A very clever man, my old dad was,' he said. 'Very clever indeed. Of course he told me how it works.'
'How?'
'He explained to me that a cow don't have nothing to do with deciding the sex of the calf,' Rummins said. All a cow's got is an egg. It's the bull decides what the sex is going to be. The sperm of the bull.'
'Go on,' I said.
'According to my old dad, a bull has two different kinds of sperm, female sperm and male sperm. You follow me so far?'
'Yes,' I said. 'Keep going.'
'So when the old bull shoots off his sperm into the cow, a sort of swimming race takes place between the male and the female sperm to see which one can reach the egg first. If the female sperm wins, you get a heifer.'
'But what's the sun got to do with it?' I asked.
'I'm coming to that,' he said, 'so listen carefully. When an animal is standing on all fours like a cow, and when you face her head into the sun, then the sperm has also got to travel directly into the sun to reach the egg. Switch the cow around and they'll be travelling away from the sun.'
'So what you're saying,' I said, 'is that the sun exerts a pull of some sort on the female sperm and makes them swim faster than the male sperm.'
'Exactly!' cried Rummins. 'That's exactly it! It exerts a pull! It drags them forward! That's why they always win! And if you turn the cow round the other way, it's pulling them backwards and the male sperm wins instead.'
'It's an interesting theory,' I said. 'But it hardly seems likely that the sun, which is millions of miles away, could exert a pull on a bunch of spermatozoa inside a cow.'
'You're talking rubbish!' cried Rummins. 'Absolute and utter rubbish! Don't the moon exert a pull on the bloody tides of the ocean to make 'em high and low? Of course it does! So why shouldn't the sun exert a pull on the
