Free No Man's Dog by Jon A. Jackson Page B

everywhere as if in a daze, treading down the banks of the stream, dirtying the hot springs, leaving their splattered crap everywhere, bringing flies. If Frank had cows, Joe necessarily had cows. He didn’t like looking out of his window and seeing cows. Well, he wouldn’t have cows anymore, but he couldn’t leave without doing something about it.
    “Why do cows get out?” he’d asked Anders Ericsson.
    “A cow is about the stupidest creature on earth,” Anders had explained to Joe. “It grazes along a fence line—for no good reason, there’s plenty of grass all around—but it’s grazed over to the fence, so now the fence is like a guide. Then, the cow comes to a hole in the fence. Maybe a tree fell on it, or a deer tripped jumping over. Anyway, the cow immediately ducks through the hole. Why? There’s no better grass on the other side, usually. But the guide line has been disrupted, so the cow goes through, looking for the next barrier. It could walk two steps and find where the barrier resumed, but it doesn’t want to do that. The cow goes through every time. Cows will not walk past a hole in a fence. They’re either committed opportunists, or mindless hammerheads.”
    Joe hated that kind of mindlessness. He was leaving, but he couldn’t let the cows win. Frank, he knew, didn’t give a damn about the cows. He’d like to get rid of them himself. They took up too much of his time. It was just Fedima. You had pastureland, you had to have cows. It was bullshit . . . or, rather, cowshit.
    Luckily, the issue had come to a head at a good time. It was fall, time to market the cows. Otherwise, you had to feed them through the winter. Fedima didn’t want to market them, not all of them. The bigger, healthier cows should be bred. They’d calve in the spring. Theywould build their herd. They could artificially inseminate or they could buy a bull. Fedima leaned toward buying a bull. She also wanted some milk cows, a couple of goats, some sheep. Even pigs.
    “Pigs?” Frank was surprised. Fedima was a Muslim woman. Why would she want a pig? But it seemed that even Muslims raised pigs where she was from. In Kosovo, as in Serbia proper, pigs were traditional market animals—the Serbs, the Croats and Slovenes, and beyond them the Hungarians and the Germans had a seemingly insatiable appetite for pork. The Kosovars ate pork too, although perhaps not these days. One of the reasons, in fact, that the Kosovars had not gotten much aid from other Muslims in their struggle for independence, at least initially, was that they had become so like their Serbian neighbors that traditional Muslims tended to shake their heads and say, These are not Believers. They eat pork.
    Frank was bound to side with Fedima if it came to a dispute with Joe, but not over a pig. He was having no pigs. Fedima relented. No pigs. But having relented on that she held firm for sheep, goats, and building up the cattle stock. She had convinced Frank, in July, that there was so much ungrazed native grass it could be mowed and picked up for fodder. He had an old barn, in which there was already some very old hay, moldering away. That hay had been in there for years. Some of it had been used to hide a rented vehicle that the ogre Bazok had abandoned near their fence line. The idea had been to conceal it in the event that cops came around looking for Bazok. Frank had dug a hole in the field with a backhoe and they’d buried the car. They cleaned out the hay and stored the fresh. So now they had hay. They could keep, say, a third of the cattle, the best ones. Fedima consented to artificial insemination, for now.
    Joe wasn’t having it. As a concerned neighbor, not a tenant, he felt compelled to insist on the primacy of security. All this agriculture and husbandry had given him a headache. At his old place, down on the Ruby, some sixty miles south, he had owned a hundredacres or so of a mountain, with his land backing onto thousands of acres of national forest