BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 53

2012

DAVID

Eight years old, I had herded the cows to milking for a couple years, morning and night in the summer, in the evenings during the school year. I had some experience with cattle, then, finding it simple and leisurely but exasperating when an animal got loose. So long as herding came regularly, the herd needed little more than someone to the rear to push them toward the barn. They remembered. A couple cows might lag to take a last bite of clover, preferring for the moment to eat rather than be relieved of their milk—that was a hassle. Anyone could have done my job, but I nonetheless felt myself to be of some great importance.

It was a pleasant task, but when a fence fails, herding loose cattle turns chaotic. There is one place you want the cows to go—through an opened gate, or the same break in the fence they escaped from—but they often scatter anywhere. If you fail to turn their attention in the proper direction, subsequent efforts increase in difficulty—I dreaded those times. Hence, when my father decided to drive the dry stock to a just acquired piece of ground a mile and a half away for fall pasture, I faced a wealth of trepidation far outstripping what the task deserved.

The drive would be difficult since we had to push the steers and young heifers first east, to a gate at the end of the pasture they currently foraged in, then immediately southwest once they got through the gate. It was a U-turn. The tail end of the herd, then, would be going one way as the lead end was heading the other—on the other side of the fence. This might confuse the lagging cattle—like children, cows are easily distracted; those in the rear, seeing those in the lead, might decide to follow them before they exited the gate—unable to, their intention precluded by the fence, anything might happen.

My dread proved undeserved. The cattle turned the sharp V at the gate and headed where we intended, with little prompt save my distant presence—I was stationed at a remove to funnel any strays back to the proper path. There were none. We had expected the untrained herd to head south, to the road reaching toward the river bottoms, and had planned for the contingencies of that event. Unnecessarily.

Only recently—just now, in fact—after seeing the original 1879 government survey that Doyle dropped off, did it occur to me—and I am not mystically inclined, I assure you—that our herd followed the path of the McTucker Springs to Blackfoot road of that earlier time, which was nothing but a wagon trail but one that bottoms grazers used to drive their herds to town for sale. It was as if our stock remembered the trail, though they were eighty years removed from those times. An alternative explanation comes to mind—an admittedly outlandish thought: the trail itself emanated information, had a lingering essence of some sort, one that humans might not sense but which cattle could.

Neither thought seems plausible, but I suffer from the intrigue of wild conjecture: perhaps memory lives outside us and not within, as most of us believe.

© 2025 Ralph Thurston