As we began the journey, Morag moved rapidly and I was forced to run to keep by her side. I could feel the strength of her head and shoulders almost surging back along the rope like a current and thought uneasily that if she were to lunge I would not be able to control her. Contrary to what I had been told, I wrapped the rope around my hand, figuring that if she had to drag me, she at least would not escape. We covered the first mile rapidly and both of us were breathing heavily. She will soon tire, I thought, and then she will be easier to handle.
After the first mile the road began to climb steeply and the small rocks rolled beneath our feet but still she did not seem to slacken much.
In one way this is good, I thought. At least we are getting there in a hurry.
I had had an earlier vision of her standing stubbornly in the middle of the road while I tried in vain to urge her on. This was obviously not going to be the case – at least not for the first two miles. After the climb the road passed through a sort of upland plateau for perhaps three hundred yards and then became a series of hairpin turns. Suddenly and unexpectedly it dipped and rose and twisted in such a manner as to make it impossible to see what was ahead. It was in the middle of the second turn that we saw him or perhaps heard him first. There was a low rumble in his throat which he continually repeated as he approached us coming down the hill.
The hill at this spot rose from the cliff edge of the sea which was on our right and ascended steeply before levelling off into another plateau. On that plateau I could now see a herd of cattle in the distance and he was coming from them and rapidly bearing down on us. He weighed perhaps a ton, with immense shoulders and an enormous chest. He was mostly white but his head and neck were a brindled grey which shaded at times almost into blue. He carried his head low as he moved and moaned towards us with strands of bead-like saliva falling from his lower jaw. His horns were thick and yellowed and spiralled downward and outward like those of a mountain sheep. No formal heritage was visible in the way he looked or the way he moved, and there was nothing like him in any book entitled Standard Breeds of Cattle.
He was approaching quickly now, coming down the hill towards us, the grade of the hill seeming to give him added momentum. He was walking very rapidly and determinedly with that low moaning rumble in his throat, but he was not running. He was not running at all like those bulls run in the jokes about bulls after cows. None of us, I knew, were in any joke. At the base of the hill beside the road there was a rail fence which formed a separation but I could see that the rails and the posts were rotten and that they represented perhaps more the idea of a fence than the fact of one. I thought that with his size and speed and the downward grade of the hill he would perhaps jump over it, but instead he merely walked through it as if it did not exist at all. The whole section of the fence parted to his progress like the furrow before the breaking plough or the water before the ongoing ship. The edges of the rotted, broken rails seemed to cling to his flanks as he passed through their destruction but they had no effect upon his movement. He continued to bear down upon us rapidly but also unhurriedly, as if he were very certain of everything and very much in control.
In romantic retrospect, I see myself sometimes as one of those “guides” in the Gothic novels, attempting to guard my tremulous female figure from the lascivious, slobbering male who, in the fulfilling of his desires, will cause irrevocable pain. Or by another extension the “concerned father” who will do almost anything to keep his vulnerable daughter from the one he knows to be not right for her. Defence against the figure “with but one thing on his mind.”
But in the reality of that evening’s dusty road, she swung her head towards him with swift and arching strength. Her sweeping horns seemed almost to whistle through the air and she lifted me, with the rope wrapped tightly around my hand, completely off my feet. As if I were some slight and ridiculous irritant she could no longer tolerate. She swung my body almost into his looming head and I could see, as under a microscope, the dark and deepened liquid of his eyes, the gnarled, yellow rings at the base of his horns, his grey-blue jowls and the strings of beaded saliva trailing from his jaw. I could smell the sweet, heavy hotness of his grass-filled breath as their muzzles touched, and for an instant I thought I might lose my own life if either horned head should swing in the wrong direction. Then with a moan he swung behind her and reared up massively, his heavy shoulders silhouetted and rising into the evening sun which was settling now to the waiting sea. It seemed in that moment as if Morag were approaching her answer even as I was to be denied mine.
“Is that what you want?” came a voice near at hand.
“No,” I said or perhaps sobbed, “no,” almost before noticing where the voice came from.
“Christ,” he said, sliding from the back of the horse almost in one motion.
He too had come upon us suddenly and unexpectedly around the hairpin turn. He was apparently coming from the village, judging from the two rum bottles which protruded from his faded blue overalls, and it seemed he had not been hurrying because the huge, black horse which immediately began to crop the roadside grass showed no signs of perspiration. He was an old man then, deep into his seventies, and was my grandfather’s cousin and therefore also mine. He was a tremendously big man and had lived the kind of reckless life that big men sometimes lead in such communities – perhaps because there was often no one to stop them from doing almost anything they wanted. He was to die at a future time, late at night and in mysterious darkness, falling or pushed from the rickety balcony outside a bootlegger’s second-storey door. His neck was broken when he was discovered and his money gone and someone had cut the reins of his black horse and its companion as they stood hitched to the steel-wheeled wagon and waiting as on so many other nights. They had galloped home then, wildly through the night, the sparks flashing from the steel of their shoes as they swung the wagon behind them, lifting it off its wheels in the tightest turns and suspending it for seconds over the cliff’s edge and above the darkened sea. The people who lived along the road had been awakened by the sound of the rushing horses and had recognized them from the sure-footed terror of their hoofbeats in the same manner that their descendants now recognize the individual motor sounds of different cars. They had heard the sounds before and did not know that on this occasion the black horses were careening through the night, driverless and without a human guide.
When the horses arrived home they were covered with froth, the muscles of their shoulders and flanks trembled and twitched and their eyes were glassy and wild. The people of the house came out then and with lanterns and flashlights began to retrace the journey of the wagon, seeking to find him in the roadside ditch or over the cliff’s edge on the boulders touched by the sea, or even perhaps lying sprawled in the middle of the road. But they did not find him all that night and in the morning someone brought the official, final news. They noticed then that the reins had been cut and wondered why they had not noticed it before.
But that is ahead of my story. For at that meeting on the narrow road and in the presence of the bull, we did not know what future was in store for any of us. Our present seemed too real.
In memory, now, he moved with tremendous speed, although he did not seem to hurry and the illusion was probably due to the length of his legs and the amount of ground he covered in a single step. Without breaking stride, he bent down and his right hand scooped up a large rock which lay by the roadside. It seemed almost the size of a bowling ball yet he carried it easily and lightly in his gigantic hand. As he approached the rearing, lunging bull, he extended his left hand up and forward until it grasped one of the mountain sheep horns and then in one fluid arc of motion and follow-through, he brought the rocky boulder down between the bull’s concentrated, widespread eyes. The thud of the rock on skull was like the sound on the butchering days and the bull toppled sideways and to his knees. His eyes, drained of their passion, rolled glassily upwards in their sockets, and two thin streams of saliva now green from regurgitated
grass trickled from his nostrils and back into his sagging mouth. His penis, still dripping fluid, collapsed limply within its sheath. His day’s breeding or attempted breeding was over.
“Did he get it in?” he said, wiping his hand on his overalls and then reaching for one of the rum bottles.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t see.”
“If he got it in,” he said, “you never can be sure. What are you doing here anyway apart from trying to get yourself killed?”
Briefly and disjointedly I stammered out the nature of my mission.
“Well,” he said, “you may as well keep going. I’ll go with you partway if you want. Here, you jump on the horse.”
Easily and with the same arm he had used for the rock, he lifted me up to the back of the horse and then passed me the reins. He took Morag’s rope in his hand and almost automatically she began to move in step with him while I followed behind on the horse. I looked back once at the bull and he was still kneeling and partially lying by the roadside where he had been struck down. His head seemed to loll to one side.
After we had negotiated the remainder of the hairpin turns and had travelled perhaps a mile, he stopped and passed Morag’s rope towards me. I dismounted from the horse, exchanging the reins for the proffered rope.
“You should be all right now,” he said. “Perhaps you should go back by the other road.”
Taking a deep pull from one of his rum bottles, he mounted the black horse and turned him in the direction of his original homeward journey.
Morag and I continued on our way more quietly and more slowly than when we had set out. When we entered the laneway to the MacDougall yard, the sun was almost setting and I could see that they were hurrying to get their last load of hay into the barn before darkness. Mr. MacDougall was on top of the hay wagon, organizing the pitches tossed up by the others, and he was not awfully glad to see us.
“Jesus H. Christ, another goddamn cow,” he said, driving his fork deep into the hay before him. I was reminded of my father’s earlier remarks.
Nevertheless, he climbed down from the wagon and his place was taken by one of his sons. On the way to the barn, I told him what had happened.
“Did he get it in?” he asked.
“I dont know,” I said, “I couldn’t see.”
“He probably didn’t,” he said, “if it happened as fast as you say. Perhaps he didn’t reach her. Sometimes it takes them a while to get set. Anyway, we’ll just have to see.”
I stood in the dusky yard, clutching Morag’s rope and waiting for the cherry-red and white bull with all the proper characteristics to come moaning forth, guided by a long wooden staff snapped into the ring of his nose. The breeding was almost leisurely and seemed thorough.
“Well, this one is sure as hell in,” said MacDougall appreciatively. “No doubt about that. It should be all right.”
After the bull was returned to his barn, I paid MacDougall the fee and he went into his house and then returned with a scribbler from which he tore a page. On it he wrote the date and Morag’s ownership and the fact that the breeding had occurred. He squinted his eyes in the dusky gloom and his hands were heavy and thick and unaccustomed to holding the stubby, yellow pencil. The funky odour of the bull’s perspiration and semen still hung about his hands and about the man himself.
On the return we took a more travelled route and I was afraid as the darkness descended that we might be hit by a passing car or truck, but there was little traffic and we walked steadily and briskly. Although the route was longer, the return journey seemed much shorter than the outgoing one, the way return journeys often do. It was totally dark when we entered our own yard and my father was in the barn where he seemed to be waiting.
“How did you get along?” he asked.
Again, I stated my story.
“Do you think he got it in?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I was so exhausted I could hardly stand. My father took Morag’s rope from me and led her into the barn. I went into the house and to bed without eating any supper. The mark from Morag’s rope still burned and circled redly about my hand and wrist.
During the weeks that followed I played and replayed the events of the day within the privacy of my mind. I half hoped she had not conceived so that we could perhaps start over again; but I knew that if she had not, valuable time would already be lost and a September mating would at best produce a summer calf instead of a spring one; and that would perhaps be too late for the calf club’s organization. When the September dates came, I watched Morag anxiously but there were no signs. She grazed contentedly and lay in the sun by the sea and walked home placidly to be milked. She seemed at ease with everything.
We went into September seriously then with a new round of activities: grain crops had to be harvested and preparations began for the digging of potatoes. School reopened and I was in the eighth grade. There were various fall fairs and exhibitions and our agricultural representative was everywhere. The first truckload of lambs was hauled away, bleating in the autumn sun, and the vines and tendrils of the vegetable gardens turned to russet and then to darker brown.
In October Morag was still quiet and calm when the serious butchering and selling began, and by Halloween when the first snow fell she and the other animals entered the stables for their winter confinement.
All winter I watched her anxiously and nervously, almost as if I were the young expectant father. When she began to grow heavier I moved her to a special stall so she might have more room, and sometimes I would place my hands and arms around her expanded girth, hoping I might feel life. When first I felt it, we were already out of the coldest depth of winter and into the erratic, gale-filled month of March. The calf became even more real then, as I lead her through my mind in various elegant postures and positions.
Spring came early that year and although the nights remained cold, during the days the sun shone warmly down upon our backs as we went about repairing fences and replacing sluices and generally rectifying the ravages of winter. By May first the cattle were out during the day busily seeking the first adventurous blades of grass. During the first week the older more mature animals still sought the relative warmth of the stable at night while the younger ones seemed quite willing to give up warmth for the advantages of freedom. I was torn between Morag’s giving birth outside where there would be less chance of infection but possible dangers from the cold or keeping her inside where her surroundings would be warmer but more constricted and less sanitary. She was now so heavy that she seemed almost to fall when she lay down and she had great difficulty in getting up.
In the late afternoon of the tenth of May when I went down to the shore for the cows I could not see Morag among them and I knew then that her time had come, apart from any decision that might be mine. I searched for half an hour, knowing that she would not give birth near the sea which was still dotted with the winter’s ice floes and the source of chilling winds, so I began to criss-cross the wooded hollows and the inland sheltered gatherings of spruce. Finally I found her heavy tracks deep in the wet spring earth. They were already nearly filled with water, indicating that she had passed a considerable time before. I followed them across a small stream which trickled from a marsh and then around the edge of the marsh itself and then up a steep incline and finally to the edge of a considerable grove of spruce and fir.
The trees of the grove were closely crowded together. Parting the branches and still following the heavy tracks in the brown needled floor, I came suddenly into a small clearing which was almost like a room. The edges of it were bordered by wild brambles which had not yet begun to bud and there were also several older heavier trees which had been uprooted and toppled by the winter winds and now lay like heavy barriers along the wooded perimeter. There seemed no way out of it except through the entranceway that we had used. Morag was lying on her side when I entered. She was already greatly dilated and the mucus discharge had begun. She struggled to
her feet when I entered and swung her horns towards me and for a moment I was afraid that she might charge even as the unborn calf began to protrude. But then she became calmer and after pacing several preparatory circles she flopped heavily down upon her side once more.
As in all births, it seemed surprisingly fast once it actually began. After all the months of our waiting, it seemed to take no time at all.
His shoulders were heavy and thick and his chest was large. He was mostly white but his head and neck were a brindled grey that shaded at times almost into blue. No formal heritage was visible in the way he looked and there was nothing like him in any book entitled Standard Breeds of Cattle. Morag rose and turned to lick the mucus from his nostrils and nudged him with her nose. Almost immediately he tried to struggle to his feet, clothed in the shimmering curtains of placenta which hung transparently from about his newborn frame.
He tottered and fell and tottered and fell but then seemed to gain control of his wobbly legs even as his mother’s nose pushed him firmly but gently towards his first nursing. They seemed very glad to see each other, and if disappointment was mine it obviously was not shared by them.
The calf club wish ended there in the tiny groved room on the tenth of May when the eighth grade was not yet completed.
I do not think I had to work as hard that summer. Perhaps it was just that the weather was better. Or that I was older. Or that my parents were doing more than I realized. Perhaps all of them together. Anyway, there seemed to be more free time, and that was the summer I flung myself into baseball with a passionate enthusiasm.
We played some evenings and on Sunday afternoons and we travelled considerable distances. I found that I could hit the ball naturally and easily but it was the fielding that I loved most of all. I played third base and the shortstop and I divided up our territory and responsibilities.
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun Page 8