The area where we live was once made up entirely of family compounds — you wouldn’t exactly call them farms — and to some extent still is. Livestock would be corraled here and but herded elsewhere in the neighborhood, like up on the mesa or down in pastures in the valley. It looks sort of like a little Vermont over that way. Well, a dry Vermont, but there is a river, trees, and green pastures with grazing horses and cows. You could come to Taos as a tourist for years without ever knowing such scenes existed, but there they be.

There’s just something about a cow

This fine specimen and a couple of dozen others are currently domiciled about 200 yards away in a corral just over the top of the hill from here. Most of the year, that corral is empty, but then on a few occasions and without warning, suddenly it’s full. They must drive the animals in from somewhere close by, which would be a sight to see, but I’ve never been there when it happens. We do see a neighbor on a horse herding a flock of sheep every once in a while, and that’s pretty cool. So far, I’ve never encountered the animals on the road and had my camera at the same time. I do like living in a place where I might have to stop to let sheep and goats go by. And for now, we have the cows.

Boy, do I have a lot of cow stories. We can start with this one, an excerpt from an old column for MacAddict, of all things, called “Spanish Cows.” The setting is San Cristobal, New Mexico, sometime in May, 2000.

“Those are THE cows,” his landlady explained.

He’d wondered about them, the small herd of a dozen or so rough-edged beasts he saw nearly every day. They were not quite like any others he’d ever seen, with their thick, curly, dust-colored hair, “nappy” as she described them, and their nasty-looking horns. They usually hung out just behind the rusty wire fence on the south side of the dirt road leading up the valley. Every evening a woman came down the hill with a bale of hay in a wheelbarrow and heaved their dinner into the near end of the narrow little pasture. The ground here was bare except for cowflops and a few rusty pieces of machinery — an old truck axle, a wheel or two, and three-fourths of a dead tractor. But the cows didn’t seem to mind.

“They’re descendents of the original herd brought over by the first Spanish settlers,” she continued. “An old breed they’ve kept going all this time.” Well, no wonder! That accounted for the scruffy, wild, yet tired look these bovines had. THE cows indeed. (The much larger bulls lived next door in an adjacent pasture and sometimes got loose. Once he’d encountered a rhino-sized good ole boy blocking the road and was glad to be in the truck instead of his Nissan two-seater!)

Hmm. Take a look at these. A couple of them bear a resemblance to the above.