Cows

Age 12-15

I was afraid of cows as a very small child. The story that follows is what Daddy told me several years later.

While we were visiting at Grandpa Keaton’s house, his cow named Gail had recently had a calf. The newly born calf had laid down while Old Gail was picking grass a some distance away. The adults on the front porch decided to walk down and take a look at the new calf. I don’t remember the incident, so I was probably younger than four years old. While we were looking at the calf, Gail came running to protect her calf. The adults started walking back to the house, but nobody told me that I should go with them. Somebody saw Gail running toward me like she wanted to stomp me into the mud. I was apparently rescued at the last second.

I was not around cows very much until Daddy bought one. We had moved to the farm at Jumping Branch and Daddy decided we needed a cow. I was twelve years old. He bought one from somebody he worked with. The cow was a Jersey- Guernsey named “Pet”. The person who named her had a sick sense of humor. If that cow was a pet, I am a jet pilot.

Daddy knew somebody who had a truck set up to haul cattle, so he arranged to have Pet picked up near Sophia and delivered to Jumping Branch. It was spring, and the road to our house was very muddy. It was a warm, sunny day, but the road was very muddy. Daddy told the man driving the truck that he shouldn’t try to drive all the way to our farm because the road was too muddy. I don’t remember why, but Frank Cook was with Daddy and me. When the cow had been unloaded, Daddy told us to drive her through the Bower farm and onto our farm which was almost a mile away. I was wearing 4-buckle arctics, but Frank was wearing black slippers. He was trying to keep them clean, but it was an impossible task. “Pet” didn’t like doing what we wanted her to. She had a mind of her own. We were eventually able to get her to walk through our gate. Frank had to wear muddy shoes until he got home.

Pet wore a halter, a leather contraption that is buckled around a cow’s head so the cow can be restrained. The man who sold Pet to Daddy told him that he would have to tie a rope to a fence post and hook it to the halter before Pet would allow anybody to milk her. He was right. Getting Pet to the fence post was sometimes a problem. We usually had to lure her to the fence post with some cow feed.

Mommy milked the cow for several weeks. I can’t remember how long it was before she told me I was old enough to milk. I was assigned the chore of milking her each evening while school was in session. On weekends and while school was not in session, I was usually responsible for milking her twice each day. This is when I learned that Pet liked to kick. Mommy showed me how to put the milk bucket about ten feet away so the cow wouldn’t step in it. We milked into a pot (saucepan for some of you) and poured milk into the bucket when the pot was full. Her milk was rich and contained a lot of cream. Cream was churned to produce butter and buttermilk.

Daddy bought a device that claimed to prevent cows from kicking. It was two pieces of pipe about an inch in diameter, bent in an arc. It had a crank that could be tightened to force the bottom ends of the pipe against her belly, just in front of her hind legs. We used it sometimes when Pet got hard to control.

We did not have a bull. Whenever Pet came into heat and wanted a boyfriend, she would try to find one. There were several instances when I could not find Pet to milk her. That was my cue to walk our fence lines and try to figure out where she had escaped. If this happened in the evening hours, I would get a carbide lamp and start tracking her. Finding her was relatively easy compared to driving her back to our farm. She knew we didn’t keep any boyfriends and she wanted one. It sometimes took hours to single-handedly drive her back through a hole in our fence.

On one memorable occasion, she had been down around some cliffs in the woods behind our house. It took me most of the night to find her. It was already daylight when I was able to drive her back to our fence. The closest fence was in the upper right hand corner of our pasture field. The fence there was a rail fence about three feet high with a single strand of rusty barbed wire nailed to the top rails. I removed several rails and laid them on top of the barbed wire. I thought the barbed wire was low enough to let her walk over the wire without hurting herself. Well, I was mistaken. I was also tired of chasing that crazy cow all night. She balked and didn’t want to go through the hole in the fence I had made. I grabbed a big stick and whacked her on the behind. She snagged her right front teat on the rusty barbed wire. She had a nasty wound in the area where the teat connected to her udder.

Cows are normally milked twice a day. Pet hadn’t been milked for 24 hours, so I had to milk her right away. She didn’t like being back home and I wasn’t too happy either. She kicked a few times, especially when I milked the wounded teat. About three or four days later, she had formed a hard scab over the wound. Like I said before, she had to be tied to a fence post before she would stand to be milked. I tried to be as gentle as I could when I milked the wounded teat. It had to be milked. The pot I milked into was almost full, and the foam was getting ready to run down the outside of the pot when Pet kicked. Her right rear foot contacted the bottom of my pot. That full pot of milk was hurled into my face.

One evening, when the mosquitoes and flies were especially bad, Pet would swing her tail to make them fly every few seconds. She dragged her tail through the milk in the pot a few times. Her wet tail would sometimes flick me on the ear like a wet dishrag. I had an idea how I could solve the problem. I tied a knot in her tail. That idea was not a good one. When she next swung her tail, the knot hit me in the head and almost knocked me down. I then tied her tail to the fence using the long hair at the end of her tail. She wasn’t happy about it, but there wasn’t anything she could do but let the insects bite.

One evening Wayne accompanied me to milk Old Pet. I had read Mark Twain’s novel, Tom Sawyer, and I thought I would see if I could emulate Tom Sawyer. I asked Wayne, “Won’t you be glad when you get old enough to milk?”

Wayne’s reply was, “I could milk now if I wanted to.”

“No, you’re not old enough yet.”

“Yes I am.”

“Show me.”

He was able to get milk out of Old Pet. When we got back to the house, I told Mommy that Wayne knew how to milk. That meant that I didn’t have to be home every evening to milk. It allowed me to participate in more after-school functions. I usually had to hitchhike, but that’s another story.

After we had milked Pet for a while, Daddy decided we needed another cow. When we turned one cow dry before she was going to have a calf, we would have another cow to provide milk and butter. Daddy asked Earl Bower to buy him a calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. Old Star was a Holstein just a few weeks old. She cost $18.00. After she had her first calf, Joyce and Wayne milked her. Although her teats were smaller than Pet’s, the holes in her teats were quite a bit larger in diameter. Extracting milk from her was much easier than milking Old Pet. However, her milk had much less cream than Old Pet’s milk.

Daddy decided to keep one of Pet’s calves for a milk cow and sell Pet. We did try to make the calf a pet. It would stand in a field and let us walk up to it and pet it. However, she turned into a completely different cow immediately after she had her first calf. She wouldn’t stand so we could milk her. She would run from us. After a few days of that, Daddy sent her to the Caldwell Livestock Market.

Daddy sometimes asked Earl Bower to buy him a young calf at the Caldwell Livestock Market. We could usually get our cows to allow them to give them milk. As the calves grew, they competed for the milk we needed. Daddy bought a metal bucket that had a rubber teat connected to it at the bottom. We would mix a white powder with water, hang the bucket on a fence post, and let the calf get nourishment from that bucket.