Bog Myrtle & Peat

I went to the cows under the moon, knowing that they were bound for the hill and would soon be gone. This group had lain around the house since the New Year, and in that time we became familiar. I could run my hands along their backs and feel their breath in the falling dew. Months of constant contact had made them softer and more docile than any cows I had ever worked with, but it would be wrong to call them friends. We overlap a little, but I would be as far from home in their heads as they would be in mine.

Well met in a peaceful moment, they snuffed my cuffs and gazed a quiet welcome. Their calm is a comfort, but I know that centuries of domestication has only half-robbed them of their rage. Mishandled or stung by some freak of disgust, they could trample me into a thin chowder. That memory allows me to recall them as they were a thousand years ago; bullish and mercurial in the ripping of unlit rushes. In the many styles I find them, moonlit beasts are more potent than all others combined. Dim dusk in the north, and the rasp of a star-blown heron.

Then with daylight, they became something firm and binary. I pressed them into a trailer and their hooves belled on the aluminium floor. I took them to the handling pens where crash barriers stand six feet tall and the mud is baked to flour. In league with my father and the vet, we checked their tags and drove them into a crush which battered and sang on its hinges.

Cleg-minded, the vet withdrew samples of their blood and stashed the vials in a bag as if they would be her lunch. Then we recorded the number of each beast as it turned and moaned, and we gave them all a bolus which I had laid out on a jacket to keep them clean. These boluses are concentrated pegs of minerals, particularly cobalt which the scientists say we lack on granite soils. They have to be placed directly into the animal’s stomach, where they melt and leach trace elements into the body like a tonic. So I pried the cows’ jaws apart and pressed the applicator gun down into their throats, sweating and slobber-soaked for a view of tongues and teeth like marble slabs in a boneyard. Here was a different kind of intimacy, held against their will and won only by force and the aid of steel bars.

After that, we jagged and pestered them further with notebooks and the shouted recital of Government-issued holding numbers. Somebody said they looked well, and I was reminded to mark the steaks and the cuts to be made in their fattening backs some day when the slaughterman comes. It’ll be another eighteen months before they die, and that’s not long in my own terms. But who can say how long it is for beasts which might otherwise expect to live for another decade and cannot grasp the fact that their bodies have already been sold? Papers laid and movements marked, we loaded them into the trailer again; each animal pressed to a unit of commercial distinction.

When we reached the hill, we found them timid. I know that this is perfect ground for cattle, but they had to be convinced. They found wide horizons and the scent of moorland grass, and that seemed to dazzle them. Shamed, discounted and hurled into a landscape they did not choose, it was strange to see them as something new again – cowed by manhandling; pasteurised, then reinfected.

They hung in a group like bees at first. But in a day or two they cooled and recovered something of that ancient dignity I had rubbed under the moonlight. They began to heap wildness around them again in the willows and the steady scribble of whitethroat song. Sometimes I discover them unexpectedly in the deep myrtle and pretend that they belong only to themselves. But in marking, moving and medicating animals like these, I am reminded of the contract between us. It’s no surprise that my imagination should be tormented above the heads of dead beasts walking.