Lost cow bell

I’ve been reading “On Trails: An Exploration,” a book by Robert Moor of British Columbia. The writer once thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail  and became infatuated with, well, trails. He has made a full-scale examination of the meaning of roads, ways, paths, established ways, whatever you call them. He identifies the origin (at least, that we know of) of animal movement. In the Cambrian era, about 530 million years ago, when most living things were sentient, a soft-bodied Ediacaran began to move, more slowly than snails, something like cooling lava, leaving wispy but visible tracess on what is now rock surface. Moor visited some of the trails in the company of experts in Newfoundland. 

The writer bounces from there to Cherokee trails to Eisenhower highways to western bison routes to the internet, mentioning along the way cow paths.

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Cow paths. Now that’s something I have strong recollections of. Our family each summer visited relatives in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. My Uncle Hubert and Aunt Ruby Sutton had a small farmstead (eight or nine milking cows). They had a wonderful wooden porch swing. You wanted to be there the day Aunt Ruby made doughnuts.

Uncle Hubert milked twice a day, the farmer’s norm. I’d tag along in the afternoon when one or another cousin would round up the pasture gals and bring them to the barn to be milked.

We went down the fenced lane and into the pasture and followed one or another of the trails, 10 inches wide at the most. Cows may be bulky and look awkward, but they have ballet-dancer feet and don’t need a wide foot path. Their girth pushed aside any intruding bushes.

The terrain was slightly hilly, and the cows invariably had wandered to the pasture’s far end, to chew their cuds in the shade and whatever else Jerseys do during the day.

The cows meandered to the outreaches one or two at a time. But they formed a small parade for the march back to the barn.

Their paths were wonders, weaving along fence lines, detouring to scrawny maples. Some paths joined, some dead-ended. Some were land-mined with giant plops that, if you were lucky, were weeks old and hard. If you were unlucky, well, you took your shoes off before you went in for chicken and dumplings.

My mother recently gave me a large jingle-like bell. It was one of two her father had put on his work horses. Mom had one bell, Ruby the other. Aunt Ruby’s bell had been put on the lead cow, decades ago, so the cow collector could hear her and know where to begin the roundup. But that bell was somehow lost in the pasture.

The writer, senior associate editor of this newspaper, daydreams of revisiting the old pasture, following the paths and discovering the old bell, so there’s a pair again.