Sylvester the Bull

by LOUIS BROMFIELD

1

SYLVESTER is a Guernsey bull. He is the biggest Guernsey bull I have ever known and one of the handsomest. He is also the biggest baby I have ever known.

He came to us from George von Penen who has a farm near Kalamazoo, accompanied by a harem of thirty-four lady friends, of all ages from six months to an old girl of thirteen. At Malabar he found another twenty-seven ladies awaiting him. From then on he occupied as Lord and Master the big stall and bull pen in the dairy barn at the Big House save for occasional periods when he was allowed a holiday in lush pasture with the cows and young heifers.

On his arrival he was a young fellow, not quite two years old, and he continued to grow and put on weight and muscle for almost another year, but from the first he revealed the fact that there was a broad streak of ham actor in him. He was always a poseur, and as if aware of his own good looks, he spent a great, deal of time in the bull pen, striking attitudes and showing his profile to anyone who cared to stop and look at him. Occasionally, the plastic pose would be interrupted by pawing and snorting and playing with the big iron oil drum which was given him as a plaything.

I think he made up stories about the oil drum, converting it most often into a rival, when he would give it an unearthly drubbing. At times he would butt it uphill on the slope of the bull pen. When it struck the wall of the barn it would rebound and start rolling downward back toward him. At just the right point he would give it another almighty butt so that it repeated the action. This game would go on for sometimes as long as an hour. It began, I think, as his own idea of fun and exercise but gradually, like all his other actions, it took a show-off form. The spectacle was exactly like t hat of a middle-aged businessman playing handball and showing anyone concerned or interested that he was just as young as he ever was.

In the meanwhile he developed as well some of the characteristics of a spoiled Persian cat. Unlike most bulls, he appeared to enjoy petting. Inside his stall he would come and thrust his head over the edge of the barrier to be petted and talked to. I think it was the sound of my voice he liked more than the petting. You’d say to him, “Well, how’s the old stinker today?” and there would be a kind of answering deep rumble from his throat. And then “Want some attention, do you? and again a rumble. The eyes which a moment before had been showing the whites, in his performance in the role of the big, bad bull, would half-close with pleasure. Usually the petting and conversation were accompanied by a treat of some kind — a handful of grain or a fresh ear of sweet corn or an apple. He knew perfectly well what “Do you want an apple?” meant.

Only one t hing tempted him away from the pleasure of being petted and talked to and that was the presence of ladies, who frequently took a timorous attitude toward him. The moment they would start, back and, in a feminine way, cry out, “But aren’t you afraid of that big brute?” all the ham in him would come to the surface and he would begin at once to arch his neck, to snort, show the whites of his eyes, and to flex all the great muscles of his handsome neck. The performance was so impressiv e that I once had a letter from a lady visitor on her return home begging me “not to trust that ferocious bull” for a moment.

Of course I didn’t trust him, nor did A1 or Jim, because no sensible farmer ever trusts a bull. Many a farmer has been killed by a playful and friendly bull who wasn’t ferocious at all but “simply didn’t know his strength.” Any farmer knows the playfulness of a bull calf and how he will put his head against you and push. A lot of calf remains in a lot of bulls after they arc grown, only by that time the pushing ts no fun any longer, at least for the farmer. Sylvester has a lot of play in him but I wouldn’t want to play with him if 1 were sandwiched between the wall of his stall and his big head.

Copyright 1048, by Louis Bromfield

He carries his clowning, his hamming, and his posing with him into the lush green ladino and bluegrass pasture. I think he realizes that here, in grass up to his knees, the blue sky and the woods for a background, he is at his best, and certainly he is a handsome beast. As if he knew it, he plays the Lord to all the cows and heifers. When you first turn him out he does not, like many an eager, unwise male, run wildly to join the cows and heifers. Instead, he steps inside the gate and, striking a pose like the Bull Durham advertisement, lets out two or three ungodly bellows and waits. There are both lordliness and assurance in his manner and he has never had reason to change his tactics, for within two or three minutes the silly cows and heifers all appear out of a clump of bushes or over a hill, hightailing it toward him.

2

SYLVESTER has an infallible instinct for those who are afraid of him and bullies them unmercifully. Only last autumn he discovered he could bully Jesse. Now Jesse, who is himself a character, is sixty-five and a man of all jobs with all the raciness and profanity of the Tennessee hills, and an account of his encounter and feud with Sylvester cannot be set down here with any degree of literalness.

Jesse and Sylvester occupied the same pasture while Jesse was engaged with the Ford tractor in ripping it up for reseeding and Sylvester took to leaving his harem and following Jesse about. So long as the tractor was moving, it was all right, but once it stopped, Sylvester closed in on him. I doubt that he meant any real harm but he knew he could rouse from Jesse a fine stream of Tennessee four-letter words and he also knew that he could keep Jesse on the move. So for Jesse there was no peace. He had to keep on the move from the time he entered the field until he left.

But. worst of all, Sylvester wouldn’t let Jesse get a drink at the spring. It. was unseasonably hot October weather and Jesse got thirsty but during the week he worked in the field he never once had a drink from the spring. Each time that Jesse turned the tractor in that direction Sylvester, as if divining his purpose, got there first. He even went further than that; when ho tired of following Jesse about, he simply went back to t he spring and lay down beside it. He knew perfectly well, all the time, that Jesse was scared of him.

But his behavior with AI and Jim and myself was quite different. If we encountered him in the field from the safety of the jeep or on the opposite side of the fence, he would begin his best Bull Durham performance. After you had watched with amusement for a time, all you needed say was “Aw, Nutz! Come over here and get your head scratched!” And at once the snorting, the pawing, and the eyerolling stopped and he would walk over to the fence or the jeep and have his head rubbed like a pet calf.

Sylvester has never quite understood the jeep. He dislikes all machinery and puts on a terrific show whenever a truck or a tractor comes into the barnyard. I think trucks and tractors and jeeps puzzle him because he cannot figure out why AI and Jim and I can be his good friends on foot and then suddenly become part of a noisy chugging behemoth. In the pasture lie will come up to the jeep and after his usual show-off performance smell it, regard it from all sides, clearly and profoundly puzzled. He could of course demolish it if he chose and once or twice he has put his big head against the radiator with every intention of doing so, but a single blast of the horn sets him back on his feet and back again into bis chronic state of bewilderment.

His pasture behavior eventually resulted in a climax, however, when he went berserk and apparently decided that the only sublimation of his dislike for machinery was to break it up. There came the day when Sylvester actually attacked two tractors and chased Jesse and Kenneth from the field. Both were small-sized Ford tractors and Sylvester, instead of merely following them about bellowing and pawing, act ually went for them. With his tail high in the air, the whites of his eyes showing, and with tremulous bellows he put his head under the back end of the field cultivator and lifted it off the ground. Jesse, seeing himself and the tractor rolling down the hill, jumped free and took to the woods.

Flushed with his victory, Sylvester set out after Kenneth and repeated the performance with the same results. Then while Jesse and Kenneth watched from the safety of the woods on the opposite side of the fence, he put. on a show of regal triumph, posing, arching his neck, pawing the earth and bellowing; and at last when he felt he had shown off sufficiently, he rushed up the hill and out of sight to rejoin his harem, leaving Kenneth and Jesse to return sheepishly and rescue their tractors.

It is a pity that Sylvester could not hear Jesse’s subsequent account of “The Battle of the Tractors.” With each retelling, it grew in detail and horror until Sylvester had attained the size of an African elephant and the ferocity of a saber-toothed tiger. Fire came from his nostrils and sparks from his eyes. The tractor, in Jesse’s later versions, was lifted in the air so high that he had to jump several feet to the ground, just in time to save himself. Indeed, Jesse’s account of the Battle has reached such proportions that beside Sylvester, Paul Bunyan’s Blue Ox is no more than a sucking calf.

Sylvester developed a lot of idiosyncrasies in his stall and bull pen. The one thing he cannot bear is lack of attention or being ignored. If you pass him without rubbing his nose or at least speaking to him, he will put down his head and pout and grumble like a small child. And at some period and for some reason no one has been able to divine, he took a dislike to the top bar of the gate to his bull pen. At first this was a plank which he proceeded to break in two. When it was replaced he broke the second one, and when a steel pipe was substituted he proceeded to bend it and force it out of position. Finally Al left the top bar off altogether and there remained only the lower bar less than three feet from the ground.

Despite the fact that he could step over the remaining bar he has never attempted to do so nor made any effort to leave the pen, even though the cows pass him on their way from the milk parlor. It is useless to replace the top bar, for he proceeds at once to smash or bend it. Apparently the top bar seems to present what psychiatrists refer to as a “psychological obstacle,” which appears to be all that is necessary. Visitors, seeing him with nothing between him and the outside world, take alarm and say, “Aren’t you afraid he’ll get. out?” He never does. Perhaps some day he will and we shall have to take other measures.

The day finally came, however, when Sylvester got his comeuppance and made a complete fool of himself. My first knowledge of his predicament came when I began to hear the most prodigious bellows coming from the dairy barn as I was working in my office. He has a good voice, Sylvester, and is never hesitant about using it, but on this occasion the bellows were more like those of a bull elephant ringing from hill to hill in the jungle. Realizing something terrific must be happening, I went toward the barn, and as I reached the corner in sight of the bull pen, I discovered a spectacle which set me laughing so much that I could not act.

The head of the oil drum which Sylvester used in his version of handball had apparently rusted out, and in some way he had got his head inside the drum, where it became firmly stuck. Blind and helpless, he grew madder and madder, and the madder he got the more he bawled, with variations basso profundo, tenor, and even coloratura. No bull — not even the Bull of Bashan — ever bellowed louder.

It was no use trying to get the oil drum off without aid. It was really stuck over his horns. It finally took two of us half an hour to free Sylvester.

Once freed, he appeared momentarily dazed. Then he gave us both one of the most baleful looks I have ever received from an animal, grumbled once or twice, turned his back, and went into his stall, where he sulked the remainder of the day.

Since then, although I have not relaxed my caution, I feel that I have Sylvester under control. I need only say, “Remember the oil drum!” to cover him with confusion.

One of the most remarkable things about animals is the variety of their personalities and the fantastic tricks which, untaught, they will develop. To the average town dweller and even to some farmers all cows or hogs or horses appear to be alike and indistinguishable in characteristics and behavior, but nothing could be less true. A good stockman must have, it seems to me, three characteristics: (1) He must know and love his animals and divine the fact that they are sick or off their feed and what is the matter with them. (2) He must have a “feeling” for them so strong that he can virtually divine what they are thinking and what they are up to. (3) And in a broad sense he must treat them as companions.

The4-H Club boy showing his prize steer or lamb or hog in Kansas City or Chicago or Omaha or Cleveland will know what I mean. Many a t ime I have seen a boy sound asleep in the clean straw of the cattle pen beside the prize steer which he will not leave, and twice at least 1 have seen tears in the eyes of a farm boy when the moment came to put the steer up for auction. Any good dairyman knows every cow in his herd and knows that each one of them is different in personality from all the others and that the understanding of this fact and t reatment based upon it mean money in the milk pail.

The forty-cow dairy at Malabar is located only a hundred feet from the Big House and I spend a good deal of time there, so that I have come to know all the cows pretty well, although nowhere nearly so well as Al and Jim, who milk and care for them. In some remarkable way, beyond my own powers, Al and Jim know by sight all the forty milking cows and the twenty-odd which in rotation are dry and awaiting calves. They know them by name and personality, and when the boys open the door of the loafing shed many of the cows will come forward at the calling of their names.

There is Irene who will take on the milking machine peacefully until she is three-quarters milked and then begin to let fly with rabbit punches which could break your leg. And Essie, a big Holstein, who outdoes even the other Holsteins in her greed and will rattle her stanchion violently until she gets an extra handful of grain. And Mary and Martha and Jean who will follow you about to be petted. Each one is capable of her own set of tricks. Some will not have their heads touched and others will rumble and purr like cats when you scratch their ears. Jean, who clearly has a sense of rhythm, will chew her cud in time to the music from the milk parlor radio, alternating waltz time with rhumbas and fox trots. I think she takes pride in entertaining visitors with her performance, for she gives occasional backward glances (without losing a beat) at a sudden outburst of mirth.

Ellen, my youngest daughter once put it, “The animals on this farm all think they’re people.”