Cattle

Overview

Cattle are the milk and beef beasts of the Human farmlands of the Cradle web. Basin villages graze them on the common wet meadows, and Headwater households drive them up to the summer slopes beside their sheep. They are wealth that walks: a household counts its worth partly in cows, and the livestock the Basins sell outward is mostly cattle. The castrated and yoked beasts that pull the plough are reckoned apart as oxen.

Appearance

A basin cow stands about as high at the shoulder as a grown Human's chest, deep-bodied and short in the leg, with a broad wet muzzle and short horns curving forward. Most are red-brown or dun, often splashed with white on the face and belly; black beasts are prized in some valleys and thought unlucky in others. The Headwater cattle are smaller, rougher-coated, and longer in the horn, built for climbing terraced slopes rather than standing in meadow grass.

Cattle move slowly and in a loose file, heads down. They low to one another across a pasture, bellow when a calf is taken from them, and grind their cud with a steady sideways chew. A byre smells of dung, warm hide, and sour milk, and the smell clings to the herders who sleep beside it in winter.

Habitat and Range

Cattle are kept wherever Humans farm good grass. In the Confluence Basins they graze the flood-fed meadows held in common by each village, and are brought up onto the rises when the spring water comes. In the Headwater Marches a valley household keeps a few head, grazes them on the summer slopes, and brings them down to the byre before the snow shuts the roads. There are no wild herds in the Cradle web.

Behaviour and Temperament

Cattle are placid, herd-minded, and slow to alarm. A herd follows the oldest cow it trusts and will stand in a ring with horns outward if something circles it. A bull is another matter: kept apart from the herd most of the year, he is watched, ringed through the nose, and never turned out on a common meadow without a herder near. A cow with a new calf will charge a dog or a stranger.

Life Cycle

A cow calves once a year in spring and gives milk through the summer. Calves are weaned in autumn, and the beasts that will not be wintered are slaughtered then, so autumn is the season of salting. A cow lives perhaps fifteen years if she is kept that long; most are not.

Uses and Dangers

Cattle give milk, butter, and cheese, beef fresh in autumn and salted through the year, hide for leather, horn for cups and lanterns, tallow for candles, and dung for the fields. Salt meat goes up the Headwater roads to the Dwarven holds of the Ironspine, who grow too little of their own. As with all beasts, husbandry and beast-derived medicine draw on the animal's own living pattern and work for real (see Biological Affinity).

The cost is in grass and in loss. A wet year rots the hooves, a bad winter takes the weakest, and a cattle sickness can empty a village's meadow in a season.

Lore and Belief

Basin farmers say a cow that lows at night has seen a death on the road. Many villages bless the herds at the turning of the year and walk them past the shrine before they go out to the meadow, and a household that loses its milk cow is held to have lost more than a beast.

Cattle are what raiders come for: a border feud is reckoned in herds driven off and driven back, and the songs of the march country are full of night raids, burned byres, and the herdsman who followed his stolen cows across three valleys and came back with them and a raider's sword.

Where It Appears

• The Confluence Basins
• The Headwater Marches