The Morning We Walked the Herd Home

I picked our lead cow on purpose. She was number nine, a big eight year old with a white face, the oldest cow in the herd, and the calmest animal I have ever known.

I unhooked her neck chain and talked to her the whole way out.

She stopped in the doorway and looked at the sunlight like she had never seen it. Then she stepped down onto the gravel, swung her head once toward the road, and walked.

I got out in front of her and started walking backward. You have to, with cows. You have to look at them so they know where you are.

I waved her on with one arm and kept talking, the way you talk to a horse or a baby.

Behind her came the second cow, and the third. Nate let them out a few at a time so they would not bunch up in the door.

Once a dozen were on the road, the rest wanted to follow. Cows are like that. So are people.

Nate came out last, behind the last cow, in his green coveralls and seed cap with a sorting stick under his arm. He did not have to use it once. He just walked.

It was a bright May morning, the kind we wait for all winter in Clark County.

The alfalfa was just coming green on both sides of the road and the oats were barely up. The sun was warm on my face and I could smell the ditch grass.

At every field lane there was a neighbor. At every gap in the fence there was a truck parked across it.

Nobody waved anybody on with any fuss. When we passed them they just stepped in behind the herd and walked the rest of the way with us.

At the county highway, the two men with flags stopped a gravel truck, a school van and a woman in a car with Minnesota plates.

The woman got out and took a picture. The gravel truck driver turned his engine off and leaned on his door to watch.

Sixty-four black-and-white Holsteins crossed the blacktop nose to tail. I counted them under my breath the whole way. Number nine never missed a step.

When the last cow cleared the far shoulder, the men lowered the flags and the gravel truck driver tipped his cap.

Behind us I could see our own red barn and its silo at the far end of the road, getting smaller.

I had looked at that barn every day for six years. I had never seen it from the road, with the whole herd walking away from it.

Elmer was standing in the open barn door when we came up the lane. He had on his good bib overalls and a clean seed cap.

He had swept every one of those sixty-eight stalls himself that morning and spread fresh lime on the walk.

He did not say a word to me. He just stepped aside and let number nine walk past him into the barn.

She went down the walk, sniffed a stall, sniffed another one, and stepped into the third one on the right like she had lived there all her life.

I have thought about that a good deal since.

We tied them in one by one, the neighbors helping, every person in that barn knowing exactly how to hook a neck chain.