There are cows heavy with calf on the farm. Soon: long nights waiting for birth, and for calves to suck for the first time, and for dying too. One cold spring night a few years ago, I sat with a calf while its vitality ebbed as it lay curled in the fresh hay, panting, struggling to breathe. Carl, an artist, came too; he was excited by the event, something he could tell his friends about his time in the countryside. By morning the calf was dead; all that promise—a summer's idyll in grassy fields, the cattle mart, the slaughterhouse, the butcher's shop, and a bubbling pot—gone. All that remain of the calf is the memory of its huge liquid black eyes fixed on me.




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