The water down by the old fort was all wagtails and thrushes. They were bobbing along from one flat stone to the other, making their way along the spring-time buffet, picking off aphids from thin branches and then muscling in on the worms or nymph larvae on the slick river floor. The cows screamed all day long. I could hear their bellows echo from hill to hill. I was sitting at the lip of an old clay deposit that has been dry and grey for many years and there on the ledge I thought about the panicked hot breath of the mother cows as they are shunted through farm tracks. I thought about how the calving was probably happening and that in the morning small babies, new and shiny with amniotic fluid, will be seeing the sky for the first time.
Looking down there’s a shallow dome that cuts through the valley, making a small slope above the river that provides shelter for the birds and voles who burrowed into the wall when it was new and malleable. These nests and burrows have been here for decades, crumbling in the sun, compressing in the freezes and being opened again by the tiny claws and beaks that return after winter. Old trees stood lopsided on the hill, felled by February storms. Now that it’s spring the vegetation is still, only moved by velvet noses or the young deer who strut along the path. In the face of all this new life I am a weak shade of olive dissolving into the bright green banks.
Life and death is a noisy messy thing, but the sound of calving is primal and beautiful. As with most things in life, a lot of it is the movement of breath from one animal to the other. The new calves will flop out onto clean dry hay and be flipped to have their umbilical cords dipped in iodine so they can match with the rows of daffys next to the fields.
From dry clay there are warrens and shelter. And from the darkness of winter we all are a part of this yearly universal shift. While the calves egress from the water of the womb to the soil of the earth we too exit from the watery emotion of winter into a more solid way of living. The earth has woken and we too are thawing and ready anew.
– Robin
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