Shreve Stockton - Meditations with Cows: What Ive Learned from Daisy, the Dairy Cow Who Changed My Life

Back in high school, I was voted Most Likely to Wake Up in a Strange Place. Ive had an adventurous life and awoken in many a strange place: tucked in to seats of Greyhounds going anywhere during my teenage years; on a boat in the Santa Barbara harbor where I lived illegally my first two years of college; alone in desolate Death Valley in the heat of early summer, reckoning with my mortality during a health crisis in my twenties. But perhaps the strangest place of all is on the warm, broad back of a two-thousand-pound Black Angus bull. I woke up on his back because I had fallen asleep there, stretched out against his heat, my body gently rising and falling on the tide of his breath as he chewed his cud in the winter sun.

I didnt grow up with cattle. Id never been face to face with a bovine until I was twenty-eight years old, newly moved to Wyoming after becoming enchanted by the Bighorn Mountains during a solo ride from San Francisco to New York City on my Vespa. Instead of moving back to New York as Id planned, I stayed a few weeks with a friend in Brooklyn, found a Wyoming rental on Craigslist, and moved, sight unseen, to a tiny town Id never heard of.

I got a job as a substitute teacher in the local schoolnot quite a one-room schoolhouse, but not far from it, with less than ten kids in each grade. After spending my days under the fluorescent lights of the classroom, I spent afternoons afoot, exploring my new surroundings. One day, on the cusp of spring, I was jogging down the dirt road north of my rental house when I spotted a baby calf nestled under a sagebrush. Since moving to Wyoming, Id seen herds of cattle grazing great pastures but had never seen a calf up close. I peered at the calf from across the fence that bordered the road, not sure if it was sleeping or sick or dead; not knowing that mother cows often hide their newborns under bushes and sagebrush, and that cattle curl up to nap in a pose similar to that of a resting dog.

A dusty pickup truck pulled up beside me. The driver rolled down his window. The two cowboys in the cab introduced themselves as Mark and Mike, both clearly amused to find someone staring so intently at a commonplace calf. Thats a baby Black Angus, Mark said. Its Mikeswanna hop in and help us feed? You can meet the big ones. The bed of the truck was piled high with hay bales. My curiosity piqued, I squeezed in with them. We drove through a gate and out into the middle of a pasture, then Mark idled the truck while Mike and I got out. Mike climbed onto the stack of bales and hoisted me up next to him. As Mark drove slowly across the pasture, Mike showed me how to cut the baling twine and kick off flakes of hay to the swarm of black cows that had appeared behind the truck. I helped Mike feed his cows the next day, and the day after that. By the following week, we had a standing hay date.

Our budding friendship bloomed into more, and when my rental lease was up in October, I moved into a little log cabin at the edge of Mikes forty-acre property with Eli, the feral cat I had adopted. The cabin was a single room measuring twelve feet by twelve feet, which Mike had built using little more than a chainsaw and hammer. Originally meant as a tack shed, the cabin had rough plywood floors and no real kitchen, no sinkjust a small countertop in one corner to which I added a mini fridge, a hotplate, and a toaster oven. A lean-to on the east side of the cabin sheltered a shower and toilet, functional in all but the coldest weather. I got drinking water from the hose that fed a cow trough nearby and washed my dishes in the shower.

The only heat in the cabin came from an old cast-iron woodstove. I learned how to chop wood and, over time, learned the character of different woods. I burned cedar on days when I worked outside so I could enjoy the deliciously scented smoke wafting from the stovepipe, perfuming the air. I banked the fire with cottonwood when I went to townthough it was abundant, I did not enjoy the smell of cottonwood. I saved the largest logs to use at night; since they burned the longest, I didnt have to wake every few hours to feed the fire. I had a special stack of heavy blocks of pine filled with crystalline pitch, reserved for the coldest mornings. The pitch gleamed like gold and was just as precious, for it was extremely flammable, and those logs burst into flame immediately and burned extra hot.

Sometimes, my fire went out in the night and Id wake to a freezing cabin with Eli curled up under the covers beside me. I learned to leave my teakettle half full of water in the evening and if the cabin froze, I clunked the ice-filled teapot onto the woodstove to thaw over the mornings fire. As the ice inside melted, I poured out a little water to brush my teeth. When the water warmed up, I poured a little more on a washcloth to wash my face. Then it would boil, and Id make coffee. Mike thought I was crazy to choose to live in the cabin and tried to talk me into moving in with him instead. But I had fallen for that tiny cabin the first time I drove past it on the road, months before I ever met Mike. It had called to me, and in answering, I found the only place Id ever lived that truly felt like home.

The following spring, Mike stopped by the cabin one April afternoon, reached into the pocket of his coat, and carefully, solemnly, held out his hand. In his palm was an orphaned coyote pup. The baby coyote couldnt have been more than ten days old, his eyes barely open. With much initial trepidation, I took the wild orphan into my home and my heart. At the time, I believed it would be temporarythat I would care for the helpless pup, who we named Charlie, until he could care for himself in the wild. But rehabbing animals for release is strategic workwork I knew nothing aboutand it does not entail allowing a coyote to sleep in ones bed or fraternize with ones cat. As the months went by, I realized it would be grossly irresponsible to release Charlie into the wildto do so would have been unsafe for those in my community and disastrous for Charlie. From the very beginning, Charlie and I were copilots, inextricably each others, bound by trust and duty and love.