by John Connell
At midday, the inspector arrives. He is tall and thin and has the air of a true bureaucrat. Da tries to flatter him with coffee and some tea cake I bought in the local shop. I know better than to be out in the yard, and so make myself scarce. I will travel to Clonfin and inspect the cows. On my way out, I give Da the thumbs-up, but he does not see.
The cows are growing short of grass on the hill farm. We shall have to bring them a bale of silage, but those too are growing scarce. I have not yet counted them, but I think there are only forty-odd left. I do the sums in my head and realize that we will need to buy more feed or let the cows out. But the grass is not yet growing, so I don’t know what they would eat.
I do not delay in Clonfin, for the weather has turned, but, driving home, I decide to visit Mary and get the paper. Her shop is the oldest in the village, and she and I have got to know each other in the last few years. Mary is a wonderful woman. I buy the paper or some bread from her from time to time and we talk. She is a great reader and I have lent her books and stories. We talk sometimes of Patrick Kavanagh or Shakespeare.
“It’s tough going, but he’s a great man with them words.”
“The Shakespeare is beautiful,” I agree.
We discuss the weather and politics, and, running out of talk now, I roll up my newspaper and bid her farewell and say I shall call again soon. I apologize for the dirt my wellingtons leave upon her floor.
❀
The inspection is finished when I return. Da shakes his head and calls the man a “pencil-necked cunt.” We have not passed inspection, failing on a small technicality.
“We’ll reapply,” Mam says as we break for our coffee.
Da says, “I guess so.”
“What would he know about farming, anyway?” I say.
“Not much. We’ll pass next time,” Da says.
I unfurl the paper. The scientists have proven Einstein’s theory of relativity. Gravitational waves are real, the article says. I read it out.
“Haven’t I always said that’s what attracted me to your father?” Mam laughs. “He always had a great pull about him.”
I put on the potatoes for lunch and we soon forget the inspector and his visit.
The Wild West
To tell the history of the Americas is to tell the story of bovine expansion. Settlers may have made the Wild West and the frontier, but they followed in the wake of their bovine brother. No other animal has so shaped a culture. So many American icons are associated with the cow: the cowboy, the western, the rodeo, the hamburger, the steak house, the Marlboro Man, the very notion of the frontier itself. The story began more than five centuries ago.
On his second voyage, in 1493, Columbus brought with him a species that forever changed the Americas. Up until this point in history, both the north and south of this vast continent had never met or encountered such an animal. For the native North Americans, this must have been a strange experience, for the cow looked somewhat like the buffalo of the Great Plains but smaller and nearly hairless. For the South Americans, it must have seemed an alien.
It is the cow, second only to man, that has colonized all the habitable continents of this world. It is the cow that Europeans brought to their settlements first; it is the cow to which they devoted their greatest shares of land; it is the cow for which they cleared whole forests and species.
In the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquistadors arrived and established ranches in the south of what is now the United States, from California to Texas. Their cattle had come from Iberian fighting stock, and the breed developed into the Florida Cracker (now one of America’s rarest bloodlines) and the Texas Longhorn, which recent genetics has revealed to be a true hybrid mix of European and Indian cow species. The Longhorn was a tough and hardy breed. For much of the early colonization of the southern territories, the cattle fended for themselves, and so the species evolved to suit its environment, becoming strong, aggressive, fleshy and drought resistant. The breed was so successful that by the turn of the next century there were several hundred thousand of them throughout the American south.
Although the cowboy is such an American hero, the first cowboys in the States were actually Spanish vaqueros. It was they, along with the Native Americans, who first tended America’s cattle herds.
In the early seventeenth century, the English settlers came to America, bringing with them some of the smaller, quieter English breeds. By 1633, the herd of the Plymouth Colony in present-day Massachusetts numbered some fifteen hundred cattle. For these Puritan settlers, the cow became a symbol of their new life, as well as a link with their agrarian roots across the Atlantic.
Although the cow adapted itself to the American landscape, it can be said that the American landscape also adapted itself to the cow, for it was the cow that opened up the Great Plains. It is perhaps hard to imagine that time now, that frontier, the feeling of the ever-expanding horizon and limitless possibilities of the new country. The Great Plains have often been called the American Serengeti, and they must have been as amazing to the cows as to the settlers, for they were wide and open and lush.
At the end of the Civil War, in 1865, returning Texans found a state herd of some five million. Demand for beef was growing in the North, and so the Texas cowboys began to transport the cattle on vast drives through the rich fertile grasslands and on towards the waiting Yankee states. Teams of cowboys would move three or four thousand head of cattle at a time. The work was hard, dangerous and brutal. It is the stuff from which legends are born, and place names such as Shawnee, Ogallala and Dodge City have entered the popular imagination. They were all of them cattle towns where cowboys met railheads. They were places of infamy, where men spent their wages and indulged in the comforts of liquor and flesh.
The story of a powerful steer called Old Blue has also gained a place in the halls of myth. Old Blue was the dominant bull of rancher Charles Goodnight, a bull so good at leading cattle and preventing stampedes that he was used on several trips back and forth across the plains. In his working life, Old Blue led over ten thousand head of cattle. After his last trip, he was not slaughtered but retired to Goodnight’s farm, where he lived another twenty years, with a small harem of cows by his side, like the Apis bulls of old.
Although there was no spiritual element in the Americans’ relationship with the cow, it was an animal that conferred power. Like the Fulani tribesmen in Africa, the early Texans measured their wealth in terms of head of cattle. And like Queen Medb and her Celts, battles were fought over those same animals.
The ox was an important part of this story of the West too, for it was oxen who pulled the wagon trains across the frontier and allowed for the greatest inward migration of a people the world has ever known. The ox, a castrated bull, plowed the fields and cleared the forests. It was stronger and more reliable than the horse and mule, it ran on grass, and its dung could fertilize the new American homesteads.
Before long, railroad lines were built into the frontier to transport animals. Now there was no need for the long cattle drives. Open-range grazing ended and large-scale land enclosures began, bringing with them new breeds of cattle that were more suited to fencing and homesteading. By 1885, there were some forty-five million cattle in the United States; the once-plentiful Texas Longhorn had been reduced to just a handful of animals.
The coming of the cattle trains also signaled the end of the nomadic way of life for the native plains people. As cattle towns sprang up along the route of the railroad, there was an inevitable clash over access to grass for cows and buffalo, and the cow traders ensured that the buffalo lost. The holocaust of this animal, for there is no other word for it, meant the disappearance of a major food source for the Native Americans of the plains. And so, starving and divided, the great tribes were driven off the frontier. Chief Joseph was among them.
Buffalo golgotha
To look at this picture is to see the industrialized slaughter of an animal on a scale heretofore never seen. In the sixteenth century,
there were estimated to be some thirty million buffalo in North America; by the turn of the nineteenth century, there were just one hundred. But I think this image points to something deeper, something more malign: the destructive nature at our very core. To look at this picture again is to see horrible echoes of human genocide through the centuries. Could we replace those animal skulls with ones of another kind, a sentient kind? Could they be the bones of Rwandans, or Aborigines, or Jews, the skulls of starving Irishmen or Congolese rubber slaves? The picture, most of all, says to us that what we are prepared to do to one animal can and might carry across the boundary of species, as it later did in industrial proportions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It says to us that perhaps we practiced the mass cruelty of genocide on animals first; the buffalo just happened to be the unlucky creature.
If there is one small of piece of redemption to be found in this image of the extermination of the buffalo, it is that the skulls were later ground down for fertilizer and scattered across the soil of the plains to encourage growth. So they returned at least in some form to what they once knew.
This Lady’s Not for Turning
The silage was wrong. I knew I had read or heard this somewhere: we shouldn’t have been feeding it to the sheep. This morning one of the ewes has come down with an illness. Though I have not seen it before, I know straightaway that it is turning sickness, for she can no longer stand upright nor walk; instead, she keeps her head bowed low and moves in circles. There is a general depressed air about her.
Da is away and I am alone. I separate the ewe from the flock and move her to a private pen I have hastily made. I stand her on her feet, but she quickly falls over. I stand her again, and she falls over again, and I see now that she will die from this illness. Perhaps yesterday there would have been a chance to save her, but not today, now that the bacteria has spread to her brain.
Listeria is caused by a bacterium that lives in bad silage, and if a herd comes into contact with a bad bale, you can expect between 2 and 10 percent of the animals to be affected. I read about the disease on my phone, and halfway I pause, for I can pinpoint the exact bale that has caused this, and I was the one who gave it to the sheep. It came from the front pile, and in cutting off the plastic that surrounded it, I had seen a small amount of blue-white fungal growth on the outer layer. I removed that part and fed the rest to the sheep. But the bacterium must have been alive in it, and it jumped from grass to beast and has riddled the ewe. I shall be very lucky if she is the only one.
I am a member of a sheep farmers’ group on Facebook, and I turn to my fellows for help, but there are no concrete answers.
I pet the ewe’s head and retrace our steps of yesterday; together she and I go back twenty-four hours. She had been walking oddly, I remember, turning into walls, but I had thought her getting ready to go into labor, for she is heavily pregnant and her time is near, and the actions were not dissimilar. I may lose her lambs too. Her eyes seem clouded and absent and she may well be blind, for that is also a symptom.
Our front-line defense medicine against all bacteria is penicillin, so I give her a dose. I will call Da so he can get in contact with the vet and see what can be done. But I must be nurse and doctor for now.
Da makes the necessary call, but the prognosis is not good. I sit with the ewe for a time and rub her muzzle. She is foaming from the mouth now—it is sticky and warm. I have put feed and water down for her, but I know she is beyond eating. It is bad enough that I didn’t properly look into the question of feeding the sheep silage; it is worse that it was I who fed her the poisoned bale. I curse myself for having missed the earlier signs. I clean the foam from her mouth and she begins to spasm. It won’t be long now.
I have taken all remaining traces of the feed from the other sheep, and it will be hay from now on, even if we have to buy more in.
The thought crosses my mind to shoot her and put her out of her misery, but I have no rifle to hand and a shotgun is too messy. The ewe’s breathing is slow and labored, and then comes the slow inevitable death rattle and the final twitching of muscle and nerve.
She died at five p.m. Her last hours were not peaceful: blind and shaking in convulsions of delirium she left this world. The bacteria has won, and in its victory killed itself. I did all I could, but it was all done too late.
Hunt
The ewe’s death, the thought of the gun—it has all reminded me of my time with the buffalo hunters.
It was years ago, and I was in the wilderness of Australia’s Northern Territory. The jungle of Arnhem Land is vast. Covering some 34,000 square kilometers, it is about the size of France, yet holds a population of only 16,000, most of whom are Aboriginal people belonging to the Yolngu Nation.
I arrived in the far-eastern peninsula town of Nhulunbuy, and it was there that I met the hunt operator who drove me and the paying customer, a South African hunter called Len, to our camp some five hours inland. There were five of us—six if you counted the cook, but he did not hunt and so was not counted.
Asiatic water buffalo was introduced to Australia by the British some two hundred years before, for meat and for use as work animals, but the herds had broken loose and turned feral, and their numbers grew into the thousands. They were big and strong and looked like the cows of home, except for their horns, which were large and black and covered their heads.
Len spoke with a hoarse accent and told me he had paid ten thousand dollars to kill a bull buffalo. The money would be divided between the local Aboriginal community, who gave permission to use their land, and the hunt organizer, a white Australian.
On the second day, we found the herd, which numbered in the hundreds. The buffalo has no natural enemy here save dingoes and crocodiles. The Aborigines sometimes kill the buffalo for food, but transporting the animal is so hard that they always have to butcher it where it dies.
Len wanted a bull’s head and pelt, and it was my job to record his mission for Australian radio. Our camp was beside a billabong which had a large crocodile. The cook said it was a pet and would never harm us, and he fed it bits of offal. In the mornings, I often heard a mighty clap ring out as the croc snapped its mouth upon the water’s surface. It was over six meters long and far from being some tame dog.
Each day, we trekked through the bush. It was a slow process, for the jungle there is wild and virgin, untouched since creation. Our guide was a New Zealander, who walked barefoot the whole journey. He had not left the jungle for over a year. He told me he would be taking a holiday to America in a few weeks to shoot a cougar. He only went to other countries to kill things.
At night, we ate by the campfire and drank whiskey. On the third day, the Aboriginal elder came to meet us, for he had heard I was a journalist. His sons had to carry him from the truck, for he was a leper and had lost his legs to the disease. We shook hands, and I clasped his stump. It would have been an insult not to embrace him, and his leprosy was dry. He told me of the buffalo and the coming of the British, which was his word for the white men. He wished us a good hunt and instructed that I come and see his home afterwards.
On the fourth day, we tracked a large bull. The South African hunter, Len, told me that he would kill something today. His desire for blood seemed to be a way of trying to exert dominance over the world around him. It felt as if some ancient drive had possessed him, something of the hunter and gatherer, and yet there was something of the consumption of modernity about it too. He wanted one of everything: a dead water buffalo, a dead impala, a dead lion; on and on the list went. Their skins littering his house as reminders of kills past.
The bull was old and we followed him for an hour or more before the opportunity arose to take the shot. We did not speak, and then the crack rang out through the air and the bull was down. He fell as he was crossing a small river. The bullet went straight through his shoulder, smashing both his front legs and his heart. But buffalo are big animals, and though his heart was destroyed, he lived for a time. I still remember the blood-s
oaked breathing as he labored to deliver those last few gasps. His chest rising and falling, he did not try to move. It was the same painful movement I saw in the sick ewe all these years later: the agony of death. There was nothing beautiful in it, only a slowing, a fading. When the bull passed out of this world, we congratulated Len.
“He’s a big old bull,” he said.
“How do you feel?” I asked.
“I feel good. I came here to shoot a bull and he’s a big old skinny bull, a real warrior, exactly what I wanted.”
They butchered the animal there and then. They cut off its head first and then the guide began to skin it. Its pelt was an inch or more thick in parts. I thought of our cows at home as I watched the bull become a carcass in minutes. We took no meat, leaving it instead for the dingoes and wild pigs, who would eat it whole within a few days, the guide said.
When we returned to camp it was dark and we were tired. We had walked for many hours and our load was heavy. We had to cross a large, crocodile-infested lake before making our final turn for home. I was afraid that we would be attacked. The boat journey across the lake took place in silence and I could tell our guide had not meant to come this way. The smell of our pelt and the butchered head would have been enough to drive the lurking creatures into a feeding frenzy. As we approached the shore, the motor cut out and my fear surged. Shining our lamps out across the water, hundreds of eyes reflected back at me, waiting patiently for some small mistake. We had the rifles with us, but we knew that they would be quite useless in the darkness. Above us the stars shone as we rowed the last meters, careful not to touch the giant beasts. When we reached the shore, I was never so glad of earth.