When the threshing-floors are done, autumn goes and winter comes; the snows wrap our plains and mountains; thereafter the field-labors of husbandry cease, and all the beasts are tied in the stables before the mangers — sometimes three months, and sometimes as much as four months and more they stand so tied; and we must fodder them with straw and hay, which is the scanty portion they have of their own labor, while the noble part remains to us: the wheat, the milk, the madzun — the curdled yogurt — the cheese, the butter and the rest.
But you must know, Tornik, that winter begins first from the heads of the mountains: one morning when we rise we see the mountain crests covered with snow, and that is a sign; it shows us that winter is near — down from the mountain it will come to the plain; and then must the village people see to its winter preparations.
You know what our villagers' houses and stables are — shaky, infirm buildings; every year in autumn they must be repaired. Do you think, Tornik, that the village people has well understood the vanity of this world's life, and for that cause will never build a lasting thing? No — judge not so. First, he has no timber of his own planting and tending; and if he had, he has no money; and if he would build, he knows not the way of building. And of all this I shall speak again in its own place.
It is the harsh winter climate of the land we dwell in that has given cause to build stables for the beasts. From this labor the warm southern provinces are free and exempt, where there is neither cold nor snow; the husbandman people's labor there is far less: for the wintering of the beasts they have neither care nor thought at all, and twelve months of the year their beasts graze abroad. So they never have need either to build a stable or to make ready fodder for the beasts, neither hay nor straw; nor ever need to grow hay, to cut it and to stack it: the self-sown grass springs up so abundant — above all on Cilicia's wide-spread deep plain (the Chugur Ova)1 — that in autumn they set fire to it and burn it off, whereby the soil gains the more strength, and the next year the growth of grass comes on twice as strong.
But the cold winter season of our land compels us to make ready stable and fodder for the beasts. You see, Tornik, what our stables are, and what their making-ready must be: if some beams of the ceiling are rotted, they must be changed; if the mangers are broken down, they must be built up; likewise, if the stable floors are worn into pits, they must be leveled with flagstones, and so on.
Only so far can the peasant husbandman prepare his beasts' stable. He who takes no care for his own natural hut — shall he take thought for the poor dumb beasts? And he has reason; for a man measures all things by the measure of his own life.
Let us leave the stable, Tornik, and speak upon the beasts' fodder. And if you would know it, our poor beasts' fodder is the dry straw; hay they keep only for the sheep — unless sometimes, toward spring, they give the buffaloes and the oxen hay apart, once in the day. But the breeding buffalo-cows, the milch cows and the cows in calf, the calves — these are not worthy to eat hay! There is a wrong for you: the cows, which give milk and butter for man's sustenance, and give the calves that grow to be oxen for the husbandman, count for nothing with our villagers of Van; perhaps the villagers of other provinces do not deal so. You have seen it, Tornik: by spring our wronged cows are brought to such a pass that they cannot rise from where they lie, but are hauled up by the tail; and the cows in calf, many a time, come to hard travail at their calving. Then you may see the housewife visited by her conscience: making ready a vessel of warm mash, she brings it to the calving cow. True it is that the women are the more willing to profit by the cows and to fodder them, that they may take the more milk, make madzun, boil tanapur, which is the village fare. But the poor cows — what do they eat, that they should give milk? Can they give milk on the eating of dry straw alone? A little straw scarce holds the substance of one kash2 of milk — and this the naturalist husbandmen have proved by analysis.
Now the turn is come; let me tell you, Tornik: I have heard that the husbandmen of Europe do not feed straw to their cattle, but rather hay and other green-growing things. By ingenious trials they have found out such devices for the fattening of beasts that a man, hearing it, marvels and cannot believe — that an ox or a cow should weigh as much as seventy or eighty litra, while our fattened oxen and cows come at the very most to a scant twenty or twenty-five kash. Consider then what those beasts eat, and in what daily quantity they eat it, out of which a full twenty kash of milk's substance is formed. And the wonder is that those cows, summer and winter alike, are kept tied in the stable and foddered there; it would seem that all that land is tilled country, and pasture-grounds there are none. Eh, Tornik — then our beasts, in summer at least, are happy indeed, that ramble and frisk upon the breeze-cooled mountains, in the flower-filled valleys, over the green-decked meadows — and then those cold, cold waters that they drink! Evening comes; the village herd turns home from the field; the cows, their udders filled, heavy-heavy, proud-proud, come swaying and lowing along, and each one goes to her own master's house. Housewife and brides take up the milking-pail and run; the cow stands quiet, and they fall to milking. The housewife of conscience knows the measure of the milking, and leaves a sufficient share for the calf; but there are women without conscience, who wring and strain the cow's teats so hard that they leave the poor calf but the scantiest share.
Sometimes there are cross-grained red cows that deal a very upright judgment: when the housewife squeezes the teats with harshness, the cow flares up, kicks, spills the milk, and breaks the pail into the bargain — and so sees justice done for her wronged calf. Would that men might take example, and deal judgment even to the measure of a crooked cow! You see it, and you know, Tornik: grazing in pastures so abundant upon abundant, how much milk do they give? — scarce a kash in the day, or at the very most two kash. And in winter, when they live on bare straw, their milk shrinks hard, and it is by force that the calves are satisfied.
No doubt, Tornik, you will be curious to learn why our cows — battening in a garden-land of Eden on flowers and grasses of every kind — are not milk-yielding like the cows of Europe, nor bind so much flesh as they.
I will tell you, Tornik. First, our cows are not of noble breeds; you see them, what little dwarfish things they are — while the stock-keeper of Europe puts every effort and every ingenious trial to work to ennoble the breeds, not of the cows only, but of every kind of beast. We have neither that wit nor so much care: we believe it a thing of nature, that the cows of our land should be dwarfish. Second, I have heard from a man of the craft that with beasts that range the pastures — as our milch cows roam without cease — the overplus of milk in the udder changes to another quality, or turns to water. If the custom were that as the sheep come at midday to the milking-ground and are milked, so the cows too were milked, then perhaps, the milk gathered in the udder being emptied, it would fill again by evening and be milked anew. The trial of it were easy enough; but upon our village families, laboring without pause, can we heap this new labor besides?
Leave that. If we should say to our villagers, Keep the milch cows in the stable, cut green grass in spring and feed them, and dry hay in summer — hold your peace, Tornik! if we spoke any such thing, all the villagers would laugh at us: seeing we have grass-rich mountains and valleys so wide, which lying untilled are pasture-grounds and nothing more — is it not folly to forsake those noble pastures, where the beast grazes of itself with its own mouth and costs us no labor, and turn out from spring onward to cut grass for the milch cows, hay being winter's store and nothing else? This judgment of the villagers is very just. If the European stock-keeper keeps his cows in that fashion, he has his reasons: first, he has no pasture-ground; second, from the cows' abundant milk he drives a great trade, selling milk every day in huge quantity. But our villagers, if they had milk in abundance, to whom should they sell it? True, they can make butter and sell it to the townsfolk; but that is for them a trifling gain. And do you see, Tornik, the peasant's wit and reckoning? — he loads up from the village his little curds and his thin flat loaves, carries them to town, sells them, and counts it great gain.
Let us come back to our first matter, Tornik. Of the milch cows I have spoken enough and to spare; and my mind is to show you that our village people is far behindhand in the keeping of beasts. It does not know that the raising of stock is a weighty branch of agriculture, the more gainful and fruitful; for the keeping and the fodder of the stock there needs no such grinding toil as watchful care, and its profit, it may be, is greater than tillage itself. Here, Tornik, let me give you a short reckoning, that you may be the better persuaded.
If we have five cows, five breeding buffalo-cows, five mares and five she-asses, together they make twenty head of four kinds. It is likely that of the twenty, fifteen will always bear; and after three years the young come to the state of working or of selling; and bearing year upon year, one after another — look how they multiply, and by so much the profit multiplies with them. True it is that in the first years this small capital shows no such great gain; but it is a self-growing capital of the kind that grows as it goes, and the more it grows, the more it multiplies its gain. There is upon this earth no other manner of trade whose profit equals the profit of cattle-raising. Would you have example and proof, Tornik? See our neighbor Kurds, who in this matter are shrewder-witted than we, and give their strength rather to the keeping of stock than to bare tillage, for by trial they have understood what it brings in. See: they keep sheep by the thousands, black cattle by the hundreds, horses many past number, in the droves they call ylkhi, and so on. We look on, and we neither feel nor reckon that the wealth of a whole rank of the Kurdish chieftains is from the keeping of beasts. Say it, Tornik: they have wide, breeze-cooled pasture-grounds; they have the opportunity; and at the pinch of need they can defend their beasts from enemy marauders. Yes, Tornik, that too is a weighty observation; but I speak upon the principle only, that the raising of beasts is the more gainful. That present observation of yours holds today, it may be, and tomorrow will have an end; for time goes and time comes, and brings with it peace and security, by the grace of our realm-building state.
Eh, Tornik, this lesson has run very long, and in many places matters of different kinds have been mingled together; now I shall speak to you upon the sheep, its profit and its keeping.