As summer heightened, the cattle wandered further off each day in search of newer and sweeter grass, or to avoid the plaguy flies. Now to his workday of milking and haying my grandfather added a long hike every afternoon to find and fetch the herd. When they had been out all night they never wandered so far, but clustered for the morning’s milking at the barn-end of the pasture, their swollen udders dripping. However, at four in the afternoon they seldom left the pleasures of pasturing to return to the barn. He knew the forest places where they were likely to be, but these sweet clearings were not adjacent. He climbed and called, a long piercing call of “Ke-bosh, ke-bosh, ke-bo-o-o-o-sh,” which I assume derived from “Come, Bossie.” (Maybe not; the sheep-call was “Ke-day,” which I can connect with nothing.) He listened for one stroke of a cowbell. When finally he found the cattle nosing a bosky dell with white drops oozing out of them, they turned and filed to the barn.

Only one device induced them to return to the barn on their own: reward. Every year my grandfather grew, on a home field, an especially tasty acre: maybe millet or a sweet grass he called “Hungarian.” After haying, before milking—with no cows visible—he would scythe-mow a heaping wheelbarrow-load of special grass and stow a good swatch in each cow’s feeding trough, which they would find waiting for them on their tardy return. A few days of this treat—this grass must have tasted like strawberry-rhubarb pie—and the cattle would file down the hill by three-thirty or four, eager for treats.

One September polio boiled from the Connecticut beaches through city to suburb; schools delayed opening, and I stayed longer on the farm, long enough to see the culmination of the summer’s work in the harvest of fieldcorn and its translation into ensilage. My grandfather cut his three acres of fieldcorn behind Riley pulling the mowing machine: thick-stemmed grass. We stacked it into the hayrack and piled it in front of the barn like skinny green cordwood eight feet long. Then a crew of three men with a gasoline-driven machine set up near the silo, which was just inside the barn door, and chopped the long cornstalks and blades and ears into smithereens and blew them into the silo where my grandfather all winter would serve them each day like vitamins to barn-bound cattle.

The cattle continued to graze while there was green grass to eat. While hay still grew my grandfather hayed. Then in autumn came a relatively calm time in the farm’s work year—before harsh January and its logging on the hill. Wesley brought in the sheep, and lambs went off in the butcher’s truck as the bull calves did. He patrolled his fences, sheep pasture and cow pasture, rolling stones or cutting brush or nailing wire where he spied holes. Summer’s work was always interrupted by errant sheep who, for all their stupidity, were quick to find and file through any gap. Cattle were less apt to wander; in the pursuit of sweet grass they filed up-mountain instead of investigating perimeters. One summer his two heifers—tucked away in a special pasture by themselves to feed while they bulked out before breeding—broke loose and went wild. We spent a whole day chasing them.