“HERDIN’ THE COWS“
by John Brewer Gibson (1907-1983)
“Hurry up an’ git ole Jers outa that clover patch!” “That gap’s down! Don’t let ’em in Wilder’s wheat!”
So strident treble voice sometimes lashed out at a younger brother of the caller while they “grazed” the family milk cows along the roadside.
When a summer dry spell parched the over grazed home pasture, our neighbors often entrusted the cows to the care of the boys too young to work in the field. And as the boy next door, I often went with them. Usually it was a sleepy sort of job, but in some such emergency the kids quickly came wide awake and urgently got things again under control.
Northern Illinois – even way back then – was not free range – you did not have to fence against others’ stock. So I suppose that in the strictest sense of th© word it was illegal to pasture the roadside. But no one cared — so long as you kept your animals out of his
crops.
In those long, lazy July forenoons, the cows busily filled their rumens with fresh dew-drenched bluegrass white or alsike or “volunteer” red clover. The clover was a delicacy – not plentiful enough to cause bloating yet in sufficient supply to lend its heavenly scent, now and then, to soft air.
As the morning advanced’, the cattle in variably gravitated to a shady swale where grasses were greenest and a little spring-fed babbling brook provided cool, clear water.
A half hour or so in this retreat permitted the cows to complete their feeding and to quench their thirst. Then the kid purpose fully drove them home for the day.
In whiling away the languid, earlier hours we had recourse to observing Nature’s varied bunty. On the dry clay of the road-shoulder, tumble bugs plied their trade, and it was surrising how big a ball they could move, and over such relatively rough terrain – for a mere horseshoe track to us was a ravine to a tumble bug.
The air a few feet above the ground teemed with innumerable wildly gyrating whirling dervishes made up of millions of gnats. In the
wale, red-winged blackbirds came and went or simply swayed on a convenient cat-tail beside the brook. Above it, snake feeders (dragon
lies) floated. And now and then a vagrant ‘bumbly” bee droned in, or a lone frog daringly croaked, or a sinister serpent slithered away.
Where the stream pooled up, the boys sometimes made and sailed a tiny boat powered by a corset stay. And back in the yellow hillside, we constructed different stationary steam engines and placed them in miniature caves which we hollowed out of the clay bank. We used a five or ten gallon cream can for a boiler and mounted a three-inch paddle wheel above it. When we released a thin, fine jet of steam it activated the paddle wheel as though it were a turbine.
In the permanent pasture, here adjacent to the road, we sometimes feverishly sought gophers. They were circumspect, wise little rodents, though, and I do not now recall ever having caught one. But we liked to believe that we had perhaps one chance in a thousand of
snaring him. And when that infinitesimal hope finally vanished, we no longer bothered the wily little beasts.
Sixty years have come and gone. And we are at the other pole of this spectrum that we call life. Yet dare we venture the opinion that in a sense we are any nearer heaven now than we were during those innocent, very real pastoral days when we were herdin’ the cows?
(from Remember Me, John Brewer Gibson 1907-1983, Book #823, Richland County Genealogy Society, Olney, Illinois)