Cattle Murrain
The running plague of cattle and oxen that passes from herd to herd along the droving roads and can empty a village's meadow in a season.
Overview
The murrain is the cattle sickness the basin villages mean when they say one "can empty a village's meadow in a season" (see Cattle). It runs through a herd in days and leaves the common meadow empty, the milk gone, and the ploughing undone. A household can bear a wet year that rots the hooves. A murrain takes the plough team, and with it next year's bread.
Cause
A contagion that lives in cattle and passes between them. It travels with beasts on the move: a drove bought at a market, a dealer's string, oxen hired out from another valley, the hides of a dead herd. It is not the hoof rot of wet years, nor the fatal bloat of a hungry beast gorged on fresh green fodder (see Fodder), though villages often call any mass death of cattle a murrain.
Who It Strikes
Cattle and oxen of every age; calves die fastest. Sheep and goats take it seldom and lightly. Horses, which fall sick easily of their own ills, are spared, and so are the peoples.
Signs and Course
A beast stops eating and stands apart with its head low, hot to the touch, its coat staring. Within a day or two its eyes and nose run, its breath stinks, and raw sores open inside the mouth and on the gums. Then comes a foul, bloody scour, and the beast weakens, lies down, and grinds its teeth. Most die within a week of the first sign. By the time the first cow is dead, the rest of the byre is already sick.
The few that live are thin for a season, and never take it again.
Contagion
It passes on the breath between beasts that share a byre or a pasture, by their dung and discharge, by the water they drink, and on the hands, boots, and carts of those who tend them. A herd separated before the first beast sickens may be spared.
Treatment and Its Limits
No herb or drench is known to cure it. Husbandry and beast medicine draw on the animal's own living pattern and work for ordinary ills (see Biological Affinity), but they do not turn a murrain. A healer can pour enough life into one prized plough ox to bring it through, at a high cost for a beast of another kind (see compatibility bands), and no healer can do that for a meadow. What works is separation: a sick herd kept apart, droves turned back at the village boundary, the dead burned or buried deep with their hides, and the byre left empty until the season turns.
Mortality
Most of a herd it enters. A village that loses its oxen in spring loses its sowing with them, and the harvest after that; the murrain kills people only through the hunger it leaves.
Lore and Belief
Villages blame a stranger's drove, a dealer from downriver, a witch, the evil eye, or a bad conjunction. Many drive their surviving beasts through the smoke of a fire lit at the village edge, which does nothing for the murrain. Farmers who keep the rest-year pray to Anvelle the Harvest-Mother, and some say a murrain is her answer to a district that has stopped resting its fields.
In a murrain year the march-country raids for cattle to replace the dead, and a whole valley's feuds can be dated to the murrain that started them; drovers whose herds carried it are sometimes hanged by the villages they passed.
In the Medieval Era
The murrain comes every few generations to the wet meadows of the Confluence Basins and the valley farms of the Headwater Marches, most often in the years when beasts are bought and moved in numbers. When word comes up the road, villages close their droves and set watchers at the fords, and a lord may forbid the cattle markets for a season. Ox-carts stop, and grain waits on the threshing floors for teams that are not there. Where Ogre burden bands can be hired to haul instead, they are, at a price.