Edmund went away for a long weekend, which meant I was on livestock duty and also that the animals weren’t on their best behavior. On Friday I was drinking my second cup of coffee extra slowly in the vain hope that the bitter wind that had started howling overnight would die down when I noticed that about a dozen cows were gamboling about on the hill.
“Come on, Oban,” I said to my dog, who had noticed me putting on my coat and was already waiting by the door.
He is eleven years old, which is getting up there as dogs go. When he stands after a nice long nap he has to stretch, walk a few paces, and then stretch again to work the stiffness from his hips. Around his muzzle his tawny hair has begun going white.
But he still jumps in circles and rears up on his hind legs when I step outside to go somewhere with him, and he still takes his jobs very seriously. If you’ve been reading the blog or the newsletter you know that in recent months the kids spent many hours digging elaborate fortifications into the immense snow drifts that accumulated over the course of the long winter. While they worked Oban was their constant shadow, happily sitting in the snow, keeping a watchful eye on the construction. When I am in the freezer packing orders he lies outside, patiently waiting for me to finish.
And Friday, despite his age, he was eager to help get the cows back into their paddock. They weren’t really out, not leaving-the-farm-and-heading-to-parts-unknown out. The perimeter fence demarcating the farm’s boundary still stood between them and the wide world. They had escaped the temporary fence keeping them in with the hay feeders.
They’d been lured by the very first shoots of new grass that are starting to tint the pasture with green. There isn’t enough of it for them to eat yet, and letting them nibble at it now would stunt it for the whole growing season. Still I couldn’t blame them for wanting to leave behind the boring reality of winter hay for the promise of spring, even if it isn’t actually quite here.
Getting them back in was easy enough. A ring feeder is a cylinder made of a lattice of pipes. By dropping one over a hay bale it prevents the cows from standing on their food, and it encourages them to share. The cows had pushed one of these rings into the temporary fence, which had in turn pulled loose, setting them free. But this also meant there was already a convenient opening through which to return them to their proper place once we got them moving in the right direction. Oban ran back and forth and harried the laggards a little bit, but he was mostly content to let them work things out for themselves.
That afternoon he took an even longer nap than usual, which he had earned. Though Oban has slowed down a bit as he’s gotten older, I’m amazed at how energetic and happy he remains. Perhaps with dogs, as with humans, the good life consists of having a purpose and getting enough sleep.
