Cow-Tow

Only in the good old days could everyone be friendly without getting into trouble over it

By Gregory Clack, Illustrated by James Frise, August 20, 1938.

“It’s a pretty good old world,” said Jimmie Frise.

“If it weren’t for the people in it,” I modified.

“I mean the people too,” said Jim, as he gazed with deep feeling over the ripe fields, the matronly trees in their full garments of the last summer. “I mean everything. She’s a pretty good old world.”

“I really don’t think,” I submitted, “that the world was intended to hold so many people. It would be perfect world if the people were more scattered.”

“You’ll end up a hermit,” warned Jimmie.

“No, I’m sociable enough,” I explained. “But you don’t see nature cluttering up the earth with other species. The birds and deer and other creatures aren’t crowded into space the way humans are. Nature spaces all creatures out, pleasantly. Did you know, for instance, that in the bird world, each pair of birds selects a precise area in which to live, and they don’t depart from it? Maybe an acre or two, in which only one pair of wrens, one pair of robins, one pair of warblers, and so forth, are organized into a sort of bird society.”

“I never knew that,” admitted Jim.

“Oh, yes,” I stated. “It’s called distribution. There can be a number of different kinds of birds in each of these little areas, but if another couple of the same species as any of those already settled there tries to intrude or trespass, there is a fierce fight.”

“How about starlings?” asked Jim. “They live in vast mobs.”

“Only after the nesting season is over,” I informed him. “During the nesting season, they are scattered just the same as all other birds, one pair to so much acreage.”

“The passenger pigeon lived in rookeries,” stated Jim. “Millions all nesting together.”

“Yes,” I cried, “and where is the passenger pigeon today? Extinct. Like the buffalo and all other creatures that live in herds. It is fatal, under nature laws, to live in herds.”

“Humans are different,” commented Jim, as we drove along the side road. “Humans aren’t bound by the rules that govern birds and animals.”

“I think they are,” I replied, “and I think that is one of the big truths science is going to hit on in the coming century. Science is going to discover that there are far too many people in the world.”

“And what,” enquired Jim, “will science do about it?”

“Weed us out,” I declared, “before nature does. Nature weeds out a little more thoroughly and painfully than science.”

“Birth control?” enquired Jim.

“Far better than birth control,” I stated. “I am willing to bet that fifty years from now, you will have to petition the government for a permit to have a child.”

“A permit?” cried Jim, scandalized.

“Certainly,” I decreed. “A permit. A man and wife will have to go before a board of examiners, who will not merely give them a thorough going over as to their physical fitness to have a child, but an intelligence test and everything else, check up on their political views and opinions, just to see if the world needs any more of that kind of opinion and intelligence.”

“Talk about dictators,” breathed Jim.

“Then, if you get a good report,” I explained, “you apply to the government for a permit to have a child. Most of the applications, of course, will be refused. Very few people will have the joy of having children. In a couple of generations, the human race will thus be reduced to a nice comfortable number. The world will not be overcrowded, the way it is now. It will be a very pleasant place to live.”

“It sounds like a heck of a world to me,” said Jim.

“Yes, according to present standards,” I admitted. “But what right has anybody to have as many children as they want? Nature doesn’t allow other creatures to have as many as they want, no, siree. A fish lays two million eggs, in the hope that about ten of them will hatch out and survive to be mature fish. In the bird world, for every five eggs a robin lays, only one robin survives to come back the next spring.”

“How do you know?” demanded Jim.

“Oh, well,” I said, “I was giving you round numbers.”

“That’s the trouble with science,” declared Jimmie. “It deals in round numbers. In fact, it deals in numbers of any kind and that is where it is wrong. Life is not to be solved by numbers. Life is a riddle, a mystery. Strange and beautiful forces drive us all, beasts, birds, insects, plants, to multiply and replenish the earth. Life is beautiful. It must be as beautiful, in its way, to that bug that just smacked against our windshield, as it is to us. A bug lives five days, we live three-score years and ten. But I venture the opinion that that bug crams as much excitement and adventure and strangeness and beauty into its five days, in proportion, as we do into our three score and ten years.”

“I wish the world weren’t quite so crowded,” I insisted. We could ride on the highways in peace, instead of having to be doping along these side roads.”

“Yeah,” said Jim, “and who would pay the taxes for highways? You and who else?”

“People are so pushing, so greedy,” I pointed out. “Each generation seems to be getting greedier and more pushing. Now you take in my grandmother’s time. They had bees. Barn raisings, sewing bees, threshing bees. People all helped one another, just two generations ago.”

“They had to,” explained Jim. “They couldn’t afford to hire anybody, so they had to gang up for the benefit of each other to get certain big jobs done.”

“Nowadays,” I continued, “we live unto ourselves. We do not know who our neighbors are. We nod to them, politely, in the garden, that’s all. How do we know what insuperable problems those neighbors are wrestling with? How do we not know that if we were neighbors in the old-fashioned way, what a godsend we might be to our next door neighbors?”

“Necessity is the mother of most social inventions,” said Jim. “We’ve worked out our present system of everybody living unto himself as the most comfortable way to live. We’d soon get sick of busybodies who would keep coming and ringing the bell at all hours of the day, asking if there was any little neighborly thing they might do for us, like helping to hang curtains or mend a tap.”

“I hate to see such a sudden change,” I stated, “in only two generations, from the husking bees of my grandmother to the cold shoulder we exhibit today, along miles and miles of streets in countless cities, towns and villages.”

“Ah, the villages aren’t so bad,” interposed Jim. “And the country too. It’s pretty neighborly right around here, I would say. Look at these lonely little farms, on this rocky soil. I bet you the people who live around here know where they can find a helping hand nearby.”

Ahead of us, an elderly man was standing on the side of the road, mopping his brow with a red handkerchief.

“There’s a fellow,” said Jim, “who doesn’t find the world too crowded. Why don’t you move up into this neighborhood, if it is a little seclusion you want?”

“He’s holding up his hand,” I remarked. “Will we stop?”

“Be old-fashioned,” suggested Jim, “like your grandmother, and see what help you can be.”

I slowed the car and rolled to a stop beside the old chap. He put one foot on the running board and leaned on the side of the car.

“You didn’t see nothing,” he asked, “of a cow back up the road that way, did you?”

“What kind of a cow?” I inquired kindly.

“Oh, just a red and white cow,” said the farmer, “with some black speckles on her back. I never rightly studied her. Her name is Bella.”

“Well,” said Jim, “we’ve passed a lot of cows along the road. How far would she be?”

“Well, sir,” said the farmer, shifting his position on the running board, “I couldn’t say. I milked her this morning and I ain’t seed her since. She’s got the habit of wandering off. I must put a bell on her one of these days.”

“I’m afraid,” I said, “we can’t be of much help to you. It’s hard to tell one cow from another if you are a stranger.”

“Well, sir,” admitted the old boy, “that’s a funny thing. I had this cow now about four years. I see her every day, but I never rightly took a good look at her. I’d know her when I see her, but if you was to ask me to describe her, I wouldn’t know exactly whether she was mostly brown or white or black. She’s a kind of combination of them all. I’ve owned so many cows, in my time.”

“Well,” I said. “I guess….”

“How would you like,” suggested Jim, “if we drove you a ways up the way we’re going? We might run into her.”

“Much obliged,” said the old boy, as if he had been awaiting this suggestion and he started trying various ways to open the car door.

“Hop in,” invited Jim, swinging the door open for him, and I gave Jim a sideways look. Jim is always making generous gestures like this, especially when I am driving.

“This is very kind of you,” said the old boy, leaning back with a big sigh.

So I drove slowly along the country road, not going too fast because after all, a cow doesn’t stray too far.

We drove leisurely along one whole concession, and no sign of Bella. We saw several cows idly chewing in the roadside, and my heart leaped as we approached each of them, but the old boy cried, “not her, not her.”

I slowed the car at the corner of the concession road, but the old boy made no move to get out.

“I kind of thought,” he mused, “that she would have come this way, but I guess I was mistaken. She must have gone up the side road instead of along here.”

“We’ll take you around the concession,” invited Jim, heartily. “It’s only a few minutes in a car but a long way on your feet.”

“Old feet like mine,” agreed the old boy. “And the rheumaticks, too.”

I turned the car north to go around the concession, while Jim and the old boy chatted about the rheumaticks and how they began to get bad about the end of summer. I did not go so slow this time. I stepped on it and slowed up just long enough, as we came to a cow along the roadside, for the old chap to call out, “not her.”

We made the complete tour of the four sides of the concession without seeing any signs of Bella. When we came back to the corner where we had picked up the old boy, I slowed the car with a sort of finality, which I was sure would serve for a hint.

But Jim again spoke up, ignoring a nudge I gave him.

“I bet we weren’t ten minutes going around that whole concession,” he said. “Now, figure out the likeliest way she went. What way does she usually go?”

“Well, sir,” said the old farmer, “it’s half a dozen of one and six of the other. I find her as often one way as the other.”

“All right,” smiled Jim, “you choose which way now. Will we go around this concession or that one?”

The old boy sat, cogitating. He took off his hat and scratched his head.

“Well, sir,” he said, “I kind of got a hunch that she went this way today.”

He indicated the south-eastern concession, an area two miles and a half by a mile and a half.

“We’ll take the east road first,” said Jim.

I turned the car and drove smartly down the east road. This was a swampy road and we met no cows at all. At the end of the concession, we turned on to a better road and we saw cows in the distance being slowly driven along the road by a little girl, going home for the evening milking. I slowed the car as we passed and the old boy called out to the child if she had seen Bella.

“Yes, Mr. Brown,” said the little girl. “She went past here about noon.”

“Ah, getting hotter,” cried Jim, and I put on the gas and we chased with more interest after the elusive Bella.

Around the concession we raced at a good clip, but by now the cows were fewer and farther between and we saw no sign of Bella.

“Try,” suggested the old man, “off this way. Two weeks ago she strayed and I found her away down here.”

This was in a new direction entirely, and a good three miles from where we had found the old man.

“There she is,” cried Mr. Brown, delightedly, after we had gone only a hundred yards. Bella was feeding along the roadside with a perfectly easy conscience. “The rapscallion. I’ll have to sell her to the cattle buyer if she keeps this up.”

I slowed alongside Bella and let Mr. Brown out.

“It’s a long walk home,” said Jim. “Leading a cow.”

“It’s a long walk,” agreed the old boy, taking a rope halter from his hip pocket, “without any cow.”

“Jim,” I hissed, “are we going to spend the night around here?”

“We’ll tow the cow,” said Jim.

“We will like heck,” I said, starting to change gears, while, Mr. Brown, in the friendliest, fashion, tied the rope on Bella who looked around lazily.

“You can’t abandon an old man like that,” charged Jimmie. “What would your grandmother think of you, driving a poor old boy miles away from his home and then leaving him with a cow?”

“My grandmother,” I informed him, “stayed at home. She didn’t go traipsing about the country in a motor car offering to tow cows home.”

“Mr. Brown,” called Jim, silkily, “climb aboard and we’ll give you a lift. You can lead Bella.”

“I was hoping you’d suggest that,” admitted Mr. Brown, hauling Bella over the ditch and getting eagerly back into the car.

So in low gear, we rode along, with Bella hauling and dragging behind, while Jimmie and Mr. Brown talked about all kinds of country subjects and I sat thinking about my grandmother and the good old days when men could be neighborly without getting into all kinds of trouble.