This chapter’s first/featured image reveals what was going on in the previous episode’s picture of bovines, swimming.
It was very late on the afternoon of 23 February 2023, as our little group strolled along the resort/village side of a river in Kerala – India’s southwesternmost state.
Grass was more plentiful on the river’s other (national park, I think) side.
Accordingly, earlier in the day, a local grazier had directed his herd to cross over to the grassier bank.
Now, it was time to call them home.
If leopards and tigers lived in the area, they would almost certainly favour the river’s “far” (unsettled) side; tigers and leopards prefer to hunt by night.
Led by the large white cow, all cattle and buffalo speedily responded to their (waterborne) owner’s call.
This was the only time I have ever seen a coracle deployed in the herding/calling of livestock!
“Coracle” is a Welsh word, but coracle-type boats are not peculiar to Wales.
According to the relevant Wikipedia entry:
The oldest instructions yet found for construction of a coracle are contained in precise directions on a four-thousand-year-old cuneiform tablet supposedly dictated by the Mesopotamian godEnki to Atra-Hasis on how to build a round “ark”.
Such boats have likely been paddled in southern Indian waters since long before the invention of any script to provide written instructions to their makers.
As was evident on 23.02.2023, cattle are competent swimmers, but they do not relish “immersion” in the way that water buffalo do.
When the herd had crossed the river’s deepest waters, its cattle members had a rest; thereafter, they waded rather than swam their way home.
The buffalo “pushed on”, and continued to swim, until wading was their only available option.
Attendant egrets went where the herd went.
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Musical bonus
Unsurprisingly, more than a few of the world’s “folk musics” have many cattle-calling songs.
My alltime favourite recording of any such song appeared on En Mana Kouyo, the 1993 album by the late (1956-2019) and great Kenyan musician Ayub Ogada.
On his arrangement of a traditional song of western Kenya’s Luo people Ayub Ogada sang, and played the emblematic Luo instrument – a plucked lyre, known as nyatiti.
Lyric, in translation:
Kothbiro (rain is coming)
Auma do you hear what I say
The rain is on it’s way
Return our cattle home
Yaye the children
What is it that you think you do?
The rain is on it’s way
Return our cattle home.
Inexorable
Where have I heard it before? A movie sound track?