When the threshing is finished, autumn goes and winter comes, and the snows cover our plains and mountains. Work in the fields stops, and all the animals are tied up in the stables in front of the mangers, sometimes for three months, sometimes for four or more, and there they stand tied. We have to feed them straw and hay, which is the meager share they get of their own labor, while the good part stays with us, the wheat, the milk, the madzun (curdled yogurt), the cheese, the butter, and the rest.
But you know, Tornik, winter starts at the tops of the mountains first. One morning we get up and see that the peaks are covered with snow, and that is the sign. It tells us winter is close. It will come down from the mountain to the plain, and that is when the village people have to see to their winter preparations.
You know what our villagers' houses and stables are like, flimsy, unsound buildings that have to be patched up again every autumn. Do you suppose, Tornik, that the village people have understood the emptiness of this world's life so deeply that they never care to build anything that lasts? No. Do not judge it that way. First, the villager has no timber of his own planting and tending. If he had the timber, he has no money. And if he set out to build, he does not know how. I will come back to all this in its place.
It is the hard winter climate of the country we live in that has made it necessary to build stables for the animals. The warm southern provinces are spared this work and left free of it, because there is no cold there and no snow. The farming people's labor is far lighter. They have no care or worry at all about wintering the animals, and their animals graze in the open twelve months of the year. So they never need to build a stable or lay in fodder, hay or straw, and they never need to grow grass, cut it and stack it. The grass springs up on its own so thickly, above all on the wide deep plain of Cilicia (the Chugur Ova),1 that in autumn they set fire to it and burn it off, which puts strength back into the soil, and the next year the grass comes up twice as strong.
But the winter cold of our country forces us to get stables and fodder ready for the animals. You can see, Tornik, what our stables are and what getting them ready amounts to. If some of the roof beams have rotted, they get changed. If the mangers have fallen in, they get rebuilt. And if the stable floor is worn into holes, it has to be leveled with flagstones, and so on.
That is as much as the peasant farmer can do for his animals' stable. A man who gives no thought to the hut he lives in, is he going to worry about poor dumb animals? And he is right, because a man measures everything by the measure of his own life.
Enough of the stable, Tornik. Let us talk about the animals' fodder. As you know, dry straw is our poor animals' fodder. Hay is kept for the sheep alone, though sometimes, toward spring, the buffaloes and the oxen may get hay by itself, once a day. But the breeding buffalo cows, the milk cows, the cows in calf, the calves, none of these are thought worthy of hay. There is an injustice for you. The cows give the milk and butter that feed people, and they give the calves that grow into the farmer's oxen, and still they count for nothing with our villagers of Van. Perhaps in other provinces the villagers do not treat them this way. You have seen it yourself, Tornik. By spring our ill-used cows are in such a state that they cannot get up from where they lie and have to be hauled up by the tail, and the cows in calf often labor hard at their calving. Then you see the housewife's conscience wake in her. She prepares a bowl of warm mash and brings it to the cow that has calved. It is true that the women are keener to make something of the cows and look after them, because they want to take more milk, make madzun, and boil tanapur, the village dish. But what do the poor cows eat, that they should give milk? Can they give milk on dry straw alone? A little straw barely holds the substance of one kash2 of milk, and men of science among the farmers have proved this by analysis.
Now it is time to tell you this, Tornik. I have heard that the farmers of Europe do not feed their cattle straw at all, but hay and other green feed instead. By clever experiments they have found such ways of fattening animals that a man who hears of it is astonished and cannot believe it, an ox or a cow weighing seventy or eighty litra, while our fattened oxen and cows barely come, at the very most, to twenty or twenty-five kash. Think what those animals must eat, and in what daily quantity, when twenty kash of milk's substance alone is formed out of it. And the strange part is that those cows are kept tied in the stable and fed there, summer and winter alike. It seems the whole country there is worked land, and there are no pastures at all. Well then, Tornik, our animals are happy enough, at least in summer, wandering and frisking on the cool mountains, in the flowering valleys, over the green meadows. And that cold, cold water they drink! Evening comes, the village herd turns home from the field, and the cows, their udders full, come swaying and lowing along, heavy, heavy, proud, proud, each one to her own master's house. The housewife and the young wives snatch up the milking pail and run. The cow stands still and they set to milking. A housewife with a conscience knows how much to take and leaves the calf a fair share. But there are women with no conscience, who wring and squeeze the cow's teats so hard that they leave the poor calf next to nothing.
Sometimes there is a cross-grained red cow that hands down a very just verdict. When the housewife squeezes the teats too hard, the cow loses her temper, kicks, spills the milk and breaks the pail into the bargain, and so gets justice for her cheated calf. If only people would take the example and judge as fairly as a bad-tempered cow. You see it, Tornik, and you know it. For all their grazing on pastures so rich, how much milk do they give? Barely one kash a day, or two kash at the very most. And in winter, when they live on nothing but straw, their milk shrinks badly, and the calves have to be filled up by force.
No doubt, Tornik, you would like to know why our cows, which fatten in a garden of Eden on flowers and grasses of every kind, do not give milk like the cows of Europe, or put on as much flesh as they do.
Let me tell you, Tornik. First, our cows are not of good breeds. You can see it for yourself. They are small, stunted things. Meanwhile the stock-keeper of Europe puts every effort and every clever experiment into improving the breeds, and not of the cows only, but of every kind of animal. We have neither that wit nor that much concern. We believe it is simply nature that the cows of our country come out stunted. Second, I have heard from a man of the craft that with animals that range the pastures the way our milk cows do, roaming without a pause, the surplus milk in the udder changes quality, or turns to water. The sheep come at midday to the peratekh, the milking-ground, to be milked there. If it were the custom to milk the cows the same way, then perhaps, once the milk gathered in the udder was emptied out, it would fill again by evening and could be milked a second time. The experiment would be easy enough. But can we pile this new labor too onto our village families, who work without a rest?
Leave that aside. Suppose we said to our villagers, keep the milk cows in the stable, cut green grass for them in spring and dry hay in summer. Say nothing, Tornik! If we said any such thing, every villager would laugh at us. We have mountains and valleys so wide and so rich in grass that, lying unworked, they are pasture and nothing else. Would it not be folly to abandon those splendid pastures, where the animal grazes for itself with its own mouth and costs us no labor, and go out from spring onward cutting grass for the milk cows, when hay is the winter store and nothing more? The villagers' judgment here is perfectly sound. If the European stock-keeper keeps his cows that way, he has his reasons. First, he has no pasture. Second, from his cows' abundant milk he runs a great trade, selling milk in huge quantities every day. But if our villagers had milk in abundance, who would they sell it to? True, they can make butter and sell it to the townsfolk, but for them that is a trifling gain. And do you see the peasant's wit and the peasant's reckoning, Tornik? He loads up his bit of curd and his thin flat loaves, carries them from the village to town, sells them, and counts it a great profit.
Let us come back to our first subject, Tornik. I have said quite enough about the milk cows, and what I want is to show you how far behind our village people are in the keeping of animals. They do not know that stock-raising is an important branch of agriculture, and a more profitable and productive one. The keeping and feeding of the stock does not call for the same grinding toil so much as for watchful care, and its return can even be greater than tillage. Here, Tornik, let me give you a short reckoning, so you will be all the more convinced.
Suppose we have five cows, five breeding buffalo cows, five mares and five she-asses, twenty head in all, of four kinds. Most likely fifteen of the twenty will bear young every time, and after three years the young are fit to work or to sell. And as they bear year after year, however much they multiply, the profit multiplies by just as much. It is true that in the first years this small capital shows no great return, but it is capital of the self-increasing kind. It grows as it goes, and the more it grows, the more it multiplies its gain. There is no other trade on this earth whose profit equals the profit of raising cattle. Do you want an example and a proof, Tornik? Look at our neighbors the Kurds, who are shrewder than we are in this and put their strength into keeping animals rather than into bare tillage, because experience has taught them what it brings in. Look, they keep sheep by the thousands, black cattle by the hundreds, horses past counting in the droves they call ylkhi, and the rest. We look on, and we neither feel it nor add it up, that the wealth of a whole class of Kurdish chieftains comes from the keeping of animals. Say it, Tornik. They have wide, cool pastures, they have the advantage, and when they need to, they can defend their animals from enemy raiders. Yes, Tornik, that is a weighty observation too. But I am speaking only of the principle, that the raising of animals is the more profitable. And that observation of yours about the present may hold today and be over tomorrow, because time goes and time comes, and it brings peace and security with it, thanks to our state and its building of the land.
Well, Tornik, this lesson has run very long, and in a good many places different subjects have gotten mixed up together. Now I am going to talk to you about the sheep, its profit and its keeping.