I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures
completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852
I would rather
watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day
project their course carefully on a chart
and report all their behavior faithfully.
To have the leisure
to see the parallax of
cows in a pasture.
zphx
February 13. Saw half a dozen cows let out and standing about in a retired meadow as in a cow-yard. February 13, 1851
April 28. Perhaps the greenness of the landscape may be said to begin fairly now. For the last half of this month, indeed, a tinge of green has been discernible on the sides of hills. Saw yesterday some cows turned out to pasture on such a hillside; thought they would soon eat up all the grass. April 28, 1854
April 29. I am surprised to see how some blackberry pastures and other fields are filling up with pines, trees which I thought the cows had almost killed two or three years ago; so that what was then a pasture is now a young wood-lot. April 29, 1857 April 30. Cattle begin to go up-country, and every weekday, especially Mondays, to this time [sic] May 7th, at least, the greatest droves to-day. Methinks they will find slender picking up there for a while. Now many a farmer's boy makes his first journey, and sees something to tell of, — makes acquaintance with those hills which are mere blue warts in his horizon, finds them solid and terra firma, after all, and inhabited by herdsmen, partially befenced and measurable by the acre, with cool springs where you may quench your thirst after a dusty day's walk. April 30, 1860
May 4. Cattle are going up country. May 4, 1853
May 6. Road full of cattle going up country. May 6, 1855
May 7. For a week the road has been full of cattle going up country. May 7, 1856
May 8. I hear the voices of farmers driving their cows past to their up-country pastures now. May 8, 1854
May 9. Cattle going up country for ten days past. You must keep your gate shut. May 9, 1860
May 10. This Monday the streets are full of cattle being driven up-country, — cows and calves and colts. May 10, 1852 .
May 15. Here are ten cows feeding on the hill beside me. Why do they move about so fast as they feed? They have advanced thirty rods in ten minutes. May 15, 1853
May 20. How suddenly, after all, pines seem to shoot up and fill the pastures! I wonder that the farmers do not earlier encourage their growth. To-day, perchance, as I go through some run-out pasture, I observe many young white pines dotting the field, where last year I had noticed only blackberry vines; but I see that many are already destroyed or injured by the cows which have dived into them to scratch their heads or for sport (such is their habit; they break off the leading shoot and bend down the others of different evergreens), or perchance where the farmer has been mowing them down, and I think the owner would rather have a pasture here than a wood-lot. A year or two later, as I pass through the same field, I am surprised to find myself in a flourishing young wood-lot, from which the cows are now carefully fenced out, though there are many open spaces, and I perceive how much further advanced it would have been if the farmer had been more provident and had begun to abet nature a few years earlier. May 20, 1857
May 22. Sorrel reddens the fields. Cows are preparing the milk for June butter . . . The pastures on this hill and its spurs are sprinkled profusely with thorny pyramidal apple scrubs, very thick and stubborn, first planted by the cows, then browsed by them and kept down stubborn and thorny for years, till, as they spread, their centre is protected and beyond reach and shoots up into a tree, giving a wine-glass form to the whole; and finally perchance the bottom disappears and cows come in to stand in the shade and rub against and redden the trunk . . . You see the cow-dung every where now with a hundred little trees springing up in it. Thus the cows create their own shade and food . . . The country people walk so quietly to church, and at five o’clock the farmer stands reading the newspaper while his cows go through the bars. May 22, 1853
May 26. Cows in water, so warm has it got to be. May 26, 1859
May 29. I mistook dense groves of little barberries in the droppings of cows in the Boulder Field for apple trees at first. So the cows eat barberries, and help disperse or disseminate them exactly as they do the apple! That helps account for the spread of the barberry, then. May 29, 1858
June 28. I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced. June 28, 1858
July 5. How many virtues have cattle in the fields! They do not make a noise at your approach, like dogs ; they rarely low, but are quiet as nature, — merely look up at you. July 5, 1852
July 5. Such a habit have cows in a pasture of moving forward while feeding that, in surveying on the Great Fields to-day, I was interrupted by a herd of a dozen cows, which successively passed before my line of vision, feeding forward, and I had to watch my opportunity to look between them. Sometimes, however, they were of use, when they passed behind a birch stake and made a favorable background against which to see it. July 5, 1853
July 12. It is exceedingly sultry this afternoon, and few men are abroad. The cows stand up to their bellies in the river, lashing their sides with their tails from time to time. July 12, 1857
July 13. In Hubbard's euphorbia pasture, cow blackbirds about cows. At first the cows were resting and ruminating in the shade, and no birds were seen. Then one after another got up and went to feeding, straggling into the midst of the field. With a chattering appeared a cowbird, and, with a long slanting flight, lit close to a cow's nose, within the shadow of it, and watched for insects, the cow still eating along and almost hitting it, taking no notice of it. Soon it is joined by two or three more birds. July 13, 1856
July 16. The color of the cows on Fair Haven Hill, how fair a contrast to the hillside! How striking and wholesome their clean brick-red! When were they painted? How carelessly the eye rests on them, or passes them by as things of course! July 16, 1851
July 17. Cows in their pasture, going to water or elsewhere, make a track four or five inches deep and frequently not more than ten inches wide. July 17, 1856
August 3. Looking down into the singular bare hollows from the back of hill near here, the paths made by the cows in the sides of the hills, going round the hollows, made gracefully curving lines in the landscape, ribbing it. The curves, both the rising and falling of the path and its winding to right and left, are agreeable. August 3, 1852
August 6. I then looked for the little groves of barberries which some two months ago I saw in the cow-dung thereabouts, but to my surprise I found some only in one spot after a long search. August 6, 1858
I notice that cows never walk abreast, but in single file commonly , making a narrow cow-path, or the herd walks in an irregular and loose wedge. They retain still the habit of all the deer tribe, acquired when the earth was all covered with forest, of travelling from necessity in narrow paths in the woods. At sundown a herd of cows, returning homeward from pasture over a sandy knoll, pause to paw the sand and challenge the representatives of another herd, raising a cloud of dust between the beholder and the setting sun. And then the herd boys rush to mingle in the fray and separate the combatants, two cows with horns inter-locked, the one pushing the other down the bank. My grandmother called her cow home at night from the pasture over the hill, by thumping on a mortar out of which the cow was accustomed to eat salt. August 1850
August 24. I see cattle coming down from up-country. Why? August 24, 1853
August 25. In Dennis’s field this side the river, I count about one hundred and fifty cowbirds about eight cows, running before their noses and in odd positions, awkwardly walking with a straddle, often their heads down and tails up a long time at once, occasionally flying to keep up with a cow, over the heads of the others, and following off after a single cow. They keep close to the cow’s head and feet, and she does not mind them; but when all go off in a whirring (rippling?) flock at my approach, the cow (about whom they were all gathered) looks off after them for some time, as if she felt deserted. August 25, 1855September 6. Hear the sounds nowadays — the lowing, tramp, and calls of the drivers — of cows coming down from up-country. September 6, 1859
September 20. Droves of cattle have for some time been coming down from up-country September 20, 1852
September 21. I see some cows on the new Wheeler's Meadow, which a man is trying to drive to certain green parts of the meadow next to the river to feed, the hill being dried up, but they seem disinclined and not to like the coarse grass there, though it is green. And now one cow is steering for the edge of the hill, where is some greenness. I suppose that herds are attracted by a distant greenness, though it may be a mile or more off. I doubt if a man can drive his cows to that part of their pasture where is the best feed for them, so soon as they will find it for themselves. The man tries in vain to drive them to the best part of the meadow. As soon as he is gone, they seek their own parts. September 21, 1851 September 27. The pastures are so dry that the cows have been turned on to the meadow, but they gradually desert it, all feeding one way. . . We scared a calf out of the meadow which ran like a ship tossed on the waves, over the hills toward Tarbell's. They run awkwardly , red oblong squares tossing up and down like a vessel in a storm, with great commotion. We fell into the path, printed by the feet of the calves, with no cows' tracks. September 27, 1851
October 5. It is well to find your employment and amusement in simple and homely things. These wear best and yield most. I think I would rather watch the motions of these cows in their pasture for a day, which I now see all headed one way and slowly advancing, — watch them and project their course carefully on a chart, and report all their behavior faithfully, — than wander to Europe or Asia and watch other motions there; for it is only ourselves that we report in either case, and perchance we shall report a more restless and worthless self in the latter case than in the first. October 5, 1856
October 12. This town has made a law recently against cattle going at large, and assigned a penalty of five dollars. I am troubled by an Irish neighbor’s cow and horse, and have threatened to have them put in the pound. But a lawyer tells me that these town laws are hard to put through, there are so many quibbles. He never knew the complainant to get his case if the defendant were a-mind to contend. However, the cattle were kept out several days, till a Sunday came, and then they were all in my grounds again, as I heard, but all my neighbors tell me that I cannot have them impounded on that day. Indeed, I observe that very many of my neighbors do for this reason regularly turn their cattle loose on Sundays. October 12, 1858 November 3 I notice that the cows lately admitted to the meadows and orchards have browsed the grass, etc., closely, on that strip between the dry hillside and the wet meadow, where it is undoubtedly sweetest and freshest yet, and where it chances that this late flower the gentian grows. There, too, grows the herbage which is now the most grateful to the cattle. November 3, 1858
November 4. Cattle seem to stray wider for food than they did. They are turned into the meadows now, where is all the greenness. New fences are erected to take advantage of all the fall feed. November 4, 1855
November 7. Stedman Buttrick, speaking of R. W. E.'s cow that was killed by lightning and not found for some days, said that they heard a “bellering” of the cows some days before they found her, and they found the ground much trampled about the dead cow; that that was the way with cows in such cases; if such an accident happened to one of their number, they would have spells of gathering around her and “bellering.” November 7, 1857
November 15. As I returned over the Corner Bridge I saw cows in the sun half-way down Fair Haven Hill next the Cliff, half a mile off, the declining sun so warmly reflected from their red coats that I could not for some time tell if they were not some still bright-red shrub oaks – for they had no more form at that distance. November 15, 1859
November 20. I observed this afternoon how some bullocks had a little sportiveness forced upon them. They were running down a steep declivity to water, when, feeling themselves unusually impelled by gravity downward, they took the hint even as boys do, flourished round gratuitously, tossing their hind quarters into the air and shaking their heads at each other, but what increases the ludicrousness of it to me is the fact that such capers are never accompanied by a smile. Who does not believe that their step is less elastic, their movement more awkward, for their long domesticity? November 20, 1857
November 20. Who are bad neighbors? They who suffer their neighbors’ cattle to go at large because they don’t want their ill will, -- are afraid to anger them. They are abettors of the ill-doers. November 20, 1858
November 21. I saw a herd of a dozen cows and young steers and oxen on Conantum this afternoon, running about and frisking in unwieldy sport like huge rats. Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. They even played like kittens, in their way; shook their heads, raised their tails, and rushed up and down the hill. November 21, 1850
November 29. About three inches of snow fell last evening, and a few cows on the hillside have wandered about in vain to come at the grass. They have at length found that place high on the south side where the snow is thinnest. November 29, 1858
Snow sugars the ground
to reveal a cow-path in
the distant landscape.
"A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."
~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2025
https://tinyurl.com/HDT-simplicity
