Steak - Mark Schatzker [116]
For a time, I was. For a time, I walked around under the mistaken impression—a delusion, really—that Fleurance had, in a matter of weeks, become tremendously fat, that by the end of the summer she would have to be rolled off the pasture and over to the abattoir, where she wouldn’t fit through the door. I sent a photo of her to Allen Williams, expecting him to respond with the e-mail equivalent of a standing ovation.
He did not. His assessment was painfully blunt. “She is quite a ways off from being finished yet.” Visions of bulletproof lean meat appeared in my mind. I imagined a large table surrounded by friends and family, every last person choking on my signature shoe-leather beef. Fleurance was going to taste livery and disgusting. Grain, all of a sudden, had tremendous appeal. Grain was easy. Grain was risk-free.
Michael Stadtländer showed up at Carla’s farm with some flax pressings, the stuff that’s left over after you make flaxseed oil. Fleurance ate it; Florimonde did not. Carla bought another crate of apples, and we gave Fleurance as many as she wanted. (We also gave Florimonde as many as she wanted, which amounted to zero.) I had read in an old farming manual that too many apples will give a cow diarrhea, but if this were true, it was certainly not true for Canadiennes, because Fleurance’s turds remained firm, shapely, and herbal.
I visited whenever I could. Since the arrival of Fleurance and company, Carla had bought three more Canadienne calves and a lactating mother cow whose impressive supply of rich milk—her udder hung like a medicine ball between her legs—quenched the thirst of all four calves. I would wander out into the field to study the herd. When I got too close to Fleurance, she would bolt, becoming momentarily undomesticated and deerlike. Carla phoned me one morning and reported that Fleurance had charged a pack of coyotes that were eyeing the calves. I called the dairy farmer who had sold me Fleurance and related her act of valor. “Good for her,” he said. “That’s my girl.”
Anthropologists tell us that humans evolved on the African savanna, a vast plain covered in tall grass and well-spaced trees. Here, we hunted early ruminants and scurried up trees when lions came stalking. This may explain the soothing effect of prairie and why an afternoon spent lingering in a sunny meadow is as pleasant as one spent on any beach. By midsummer, I could get close enough to the cows to actually stand among them. I would spend long stretches studying them, listening to birdsong, inhaling the sweet aroma of wildflowers in bloom, and wishing I’d brought a lawn chair. The experience is something like scuba diving. Events take place in slow motion, language ceases, and any sudden hand movement will scatter the animals you are raptly observing. (Unlike in scuba diving, you never run out of air.)
Cows, I learned, don’t actually bite off grass. They wrap their tongues around whole clumps, jerk their heads back, and tear it off. Cows are not clippers. They don’t have a single tooth on the upper row, only a bottom row that they use to grind food against a bony upper palate. (Sheep are the clippers, not to mention rabbits, which ought to be working for golf courses because they chew grass down to the level of suede.) Stand next to a grazing cow and close your eyes, and you will think someone is ripping the stitching out of an old couch.
Cows are also picky. They will select a particular clump of grass and then pointedly ignore apparently identical grass growing all around it, walking about for several paces before they again find appealing grass. Cows will disregard a stand of nettles for months, then wipe it out in a single afternoon,