The Cows Would Not Go Down to the River That Morning

My family have farmed the same river valley for four generations, and if there is one thing you can set your watch by it is cattle going to water. Ours went down to the river meadow every morning of their lives. You did not have to drive them. They knew the path better than I did.

The morning of the flood they would not go. I came out at first light to move them to fresh grass and found the whole herd bunched together on the top of the far slope, up by the treeline, as far from the river as they could get and still be in the field. They were restless, treading, some of them bawling, their heads up and turned toward the water. When I opened the gate to the meadow they would not take it. I pushed them and they broke around me and went back up the hill. I have never had cattle do that. Cattle are creatures of habit to the point of being dim about it. But not one of them would go down.

It had rained for three days but no worse than usual for the time of year. The river was up but it was often up. There was nothing in the look of that grey morning to tell you what was coming. My father came out and we stood there scratching our heads at the cows, half annoyed, because we had work to do and they were being contrary.

We were still arguing about it at about eleven when the water came. Not a slow rise. A wall. There had been a cloudburst up in the hills overnight, miles away, out of our sight, and a bank had given somewhere upstream. The river meadow went under in minutes, brown and fast and full of broken branches, right up over the gate where I had been standing at dawn. If the herd had been down there, and they always were, we would have lost most of them. You cannot get forty cattle off a flooding meadow in the time we had.

They stood up on that high ground and watched the water take the field they had grazed every day of their lives, and they had known. Hours before there was anything to see or hear, in the dark before dawn, they had known to climb.

I have read since that animals feel things we do not. Changes in pressure, in the ground, a trembling too low and too far off for us. Maybe they felt the hills let go, miles away, through their feet. Maybe there was a smell to the water coming, or a sound under the sound of the rain. My father, who is not a fanciful man, says the beasts felt the flood in their bones before the flood knew it was a flood. That is as good an explanation as I have.

What I keep is the picture of them up on that hill in the grey light, all facing the river, all refusing, and me down at the gate calling them fools. They were not the fools that morning. I was.

We lost fences and a good deal of grass and one of the sheds went. No animals, and no people. My father says we got off light because the cattle carried the warning up the hill for us and all we had to do was read it, and we very nearly did not. Now when the herd does something strange, when they bunch or bawl or turn from a path they have always taken, I do not push them. I go and look at what they are looking at. They have earned that.