Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Robert Frost
Last Saturday my wife and our children walked down the lane to the neighbors house for dinner. The wife is four generations out from the man who owned our farm at the turn of the 19th century and over the course of the past seven or eight years we have established a genial friendship; her teenage sons work on the farm over the summer break, we look out for their home in the off season when they reside in the Boston area and we get together and grill the bounty of the harvest whenever our schedules make it possible. They are the very definition of good neighbors and we look forward to seeing them whenever they come up to visit. Dinner that night was laid back and just after dark we began to say our good-byes when the local police drove into their driveway.
“Cows are out.” he said with a smile.
I jumped up and headed to the house for the dogs and a bucket of grain. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, but instinctively I knew it was my fault. I had been slowly replacing several miles of old fence with new high tensile wire and had ended the day with a section no more than ten feet long incomplete along a rock wall on the southern boundary. I had to remove the electric that had previously contained the border field in order to string the line and failed to secure what I hoped- in vain- would escape the notice of the herd for one night.
We were in the midst of calving, six cows bred from a new bull we brought in last winter and the herd was, due to this, restless. A cow that calves on free range will often seek out a spot away from the others and the existing relationships between mother/daughter pairs will become erratic and unstable. Cows are matriarchal in their social organizations and maintain deep bonds with their female offspring for their entire lives. When they go into labor those dynamics change and the younger heifers from previous years will be pushed away.
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