‘I might be the cow’s mother, or more, for the way she asks,’ she said. She poured meal and bran into a large pail and made water ready for the mash. ‘I might be like what the farmers keep a-wanten in long dry spells when they say, “If it would only rain!…” Or like what we mean in a cold time when we say, “Oh, if it would only get a little warmer, or nohow if the wind would only lay!”’

After she had fed the mash she took the cow and calf to the barn and asked Ben for a stall to stable them for the day. Five other calves were born to the herd that month. The wheat fields were green and they caught yellow lights out of the March sun when it shone. Winds blew cold from the west. New lambs ran about in MacMurtrie’s pasture, little shapes of fleece on dark legs, Miss Cassie MacMurtrie’s flock. In the Wakefield pens eleven pigs were littered, and then five more, all fresh and clean, lying against the great brown wrinkled mothers. Ellen helped Ben make a hot slop for the sows, carrying pails of it up the pasture hill to the pens behind the mule barn. Her head was tied in an old black head shawl and her feet were in large high overshoes. A faded brown coat, marked by sun and rain and wind, flapped loosely about her. Blown by the wind, the colour of the earth, standing on the rails of the pigpen high above the great sows – the dispensing spirit of the swine had risen out of the brown wallow.

‘A hog is one thing, just one, like I said a Sunday to Elmer,’ she said when she turned back from the pen, ‘and that one thing it points out at his nose. His back points. His nose points at the air, a-waiten to hear something and to smell and to see.’

Nellie had told her that she might have a new light coloured dress, ‘You must have a light coloured dress for summer.’ Ellen came down from the pens smiling, for Jonas had laughed when he had heard her tell Elmer about a hog. Sundays were bright days. Then the whole troop of them, Dorine, Rosie, Elmer, Jonas, Sebe, Eli, all would come stamping into the little porch, all talking at once and laughing. ‘We came to get Ellen. We aim to go a-walken to the top of MacMurtrie’s old hill.’ She could have a pink dress or blue, whichever she pleased.

She piled more stones on the plant bed hill and dragged brush to the new clearing. The wild plum thickets burst into white flowers and the cherry boughs shook on the cherry tree, twisted in the late March gales. The peach orchard on Gowan’s hill came into blossom. Horse colts and mule colts stood stiffly about the barns, long-legged and innocent, conceited and suspicious. Three more calves came to the herd. Ellen found one of the fine Jersey cows strayed into the hill field, a little premature calf lying under her side. The calf was too weak to stand on its feet and Ellen held it up so that it could nurse milk from the mother. Then she carried it to the barn in her arms and made it a bed of fresh straw to lie in. Several times during the day she went to the barn and held the calf to the mother until it was able to stand on its feet. The story of the little calf went over the farm, for the cow mother had come to the herd with blue ribbons on her horns.