Lydia Davis: The Cows

Lying down, seen from the side, her head up, feet bent in front of her, she forms a long, very acute triangle.

Her head, from the side, is nearly an isosceles triangle, but with a blunted angle where her nose is.

In a moment of solitary levity, as she leads the way out across the field, she bucks once and then prances.

Two of them are beginning a lively game of butt-your-head when a car goes by and they stop to look.

She bucks, stiffly rocking back and forth. This excites another one to butt heads with her. After they are done butting heads, the other one puts her nose back down to the ground and this one stands still, looking straight ahead, as though wondering what she just did.

Forms of play: head butting; mounting, either at the back or at the front; trotting away by yourself; trotting together; going off bucking and prancing by yourself; resting your head and chest on the ground until they notice and trot toward you; circling each other; taking the position for head-butting and then not doing it.

She moos toward the wooded hills behind her, and the sound comes back. She moos again in a high falsetto. It is a very small sound to come from such a large, dark animal.

Today, they are positioned exactly one behind the next in a line, head to tail, head to tail, as though coupled like the cars of a railway train, the first looking straight forward like the headlight of the locomotive.

The shape of a black cow, seen directly head-on: a smooth black oval, larger at the top and tapering at the bottom to a very narrow extension, like a tear drop.

Standing with their back ends close together, now, they face three of the four cardinal points of the compass.

Sometimes one takes the position for defecating, her tail, raised, in the curved shape of a pump handle.

They seem expectant this morning, but it is a combination of two things: the strange yellow light before a storm and their alert expressions as they listen to a loud woodpecker.

Spaced out evenly over the pale yellow-green grass of late November, one, two, and three, they are so still, and their legs so thin, in comparison to their bodies, that when they stand sideways to us, sometimes their legs seem like prongs, and they seem stuck to the earth.

How flexible, and how precise, she is: she can reach one of her back hoofs all the way forward, to scratch a particular spot inside her ear.

It is the lowered head that makes her seem less noble than, say, a horse, or a deer surprised in the woods. More exactly, it is her lowered head and neck. As she stands still, the top of her head is level with her back, or even a little lower, and so she seems to be hanging her head in discouragement, embarrassment, or shame. There is at least a suggestion of humility and dullness about her. But all these suggestions are false.

He says to us: they don’t really do anything.

Then he says: But of course there is not a lot for them to do.

Their grace: as they walk, they are more graceful when seen from the side than when seen from the front. Seen from the front, as they walk, they tip just a little from side to side.

When they are walking, their forelegs are more graceful than their back legs, which appear stiffer.

The forelegs are more graceful than the back legs because they lift in a curve, whereas the back legs lift in a jagged line like a bolt of lightning.

But perhaps the back legs, while less graceful than the forelegs, are more elegant.

It is because of the way the joints in the legs work: Whereas the two lower joints of the front leg bend the same way, so that the front leg as it is raised forms a curve, the two lower joints of the back leg bend in opposite directions, so that the leg, when raised, forms two opposite angles, the lower one gentle, pointing forward, the upper one sharp, pointing back.

Now, because it is winter, they are not grazing, but only standing still and staring, or, now and then, walking here and there.

It is a very cold winter morning, just above zero degrees, but sunny. Two of them stand still, head to tail, for a very long time, oriented roughly east-west. They are probably presenting their broad sides to the sun, for warmth.

If they finally move, is it because they are warm enough, or is it that they are stiff, or bored?

They are sometimes a mass of black, a lumpy black clump, against the snow, with a head at either end and many legs below.

Or the three of them, seen from the side, when they are all facing the same way, three deep, make one thick cow with three heads, two up and one lowered.

Sometimes, what we see against the snow is their bumps — bumps of ears and nose, bumps of bony hips, or the sharp bone on the top of their heads, or their shoulders.

If it snows, it snows on them the same way it snows on the trees and the field. Sometimes they are just as still as the trees or the field. The snow piles up on their backs and heads.

It has been snowing heavily for some time, and it is still snowing. When we go up to them, where they stand by the fence, we see that there is a layer of snow on their backs. There is also a layer of snow on their faces, and even a thin line of snow on each of the whiskers around their mouths. The snow on their faces is so white that now the white patches on their faces, which once looked so white against their black, are a shade of yellow.

Against the snow, in the distance, coming head-on this way, separately, spaced far apart, they are like wide black strokes of a pen.

A winter’s day: First, a boy plays in the snow in the same field as the cows. Then, outside the field, three boys throw snowballs at a fourth boy who rides past them on a bike.

Meanwhile, the three cows are standing end to end, each touching the next, like paper cutouts.

Now the boys begin to throw snowballs at the cows. A neighbor watching says: “It was only a matter of time. They were bound to do it.”

But the cows merely walk away from the boys.

They are so black on the white snow and standing so close together that I don’t know if there are three there, together, or just two — but surely there are more than eight legs in that bunch?

At a distance, one bows down into the snow; the other two watch, then begin to trot toward her, then break into a canter.

At the far edge of the field, next to the woods, they are walking from right to left, and because of where they are, their dark bodies entirely disappear against the dark woods behind them, while their legs are still visible against the snow — black sticks twinkling against the white ground.

They are often like a math problem: 2 cows lying down in the snow, plus 1 cow standing up looking at the hill, equals 3 cows.

Or 1 cow lying down in the snow, plus 2 cows on their feet looking this way across the road, equals 3 cows.