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.