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contact with his own species is another story). She is showing a herding instinct at about the right age.
    Steele and Cagney, Samantha’s sire, made some beautiful puppies. There were two, though, that broke my heart to let go. Both were prettier than Steele or Samantha, with their mother’s brains and their father’s handsome elegance. One, I heard from Jake Bryden, who trucks livestock every day up and down these country roads, is already bringing in cows at Liddle’s farm in Andes. I had seen him inpassing one day, thinking, oh, what a nice dog, before I realized it was he.
    I’m sitting in one of the most beautiful spots here at Greenleaf. The morning brings glory to the color of the flowers. There is a stone window in my outdoor living room with a view of the barn and an apple tree and newly framed leafed ash. The willow against the dark gray carriage house gleams in the sun, gold and green. The wind moves the leaves, making it all almost too dazzling to look at. I’d love to photograph that willow, mornings. It is so enchanting with white fog behind it or as now many shades of green. I’d forgotten how much I’ve loved to sit here. It’s been too long.
    Steele, Samantha, and I walk each morning to my neighbor Nina Juviler’s mailbox and then back home. I’m teaching Sam to heel. She does most times. We look at the progress Henry Kathmann and I have made on my most interesting sheep fence, and at the neighbor’s geese, and enjoy being together. It’s our time.

COWS
    T HE RAIN comes, tin sounds on the porch, the buzz and sizzle of cars driving by, a rat-a-tat-tat on the porch roof, a plaintive wail from a drenched lamb looking for her mother. The sounds usually bringing comfort and joy here in the grass crop country somehow today bring despair. Last year’s hay was unaffected by the decent snow of the prior winter and very much affected by the drought. I couldn’t find hay throughout the summer or fall and was forced into buying hay by the week all winter. This year we have had rain. Days or, rather, nights on end. Major storms accompanied by twisters, tearing branches from maple trees along the creek. Thunderstorms turning the sky slate gray, small steady drizzles. And today’s steady rain.
    Grass is growing quickly in the fields where growth has been slow. The sheep spend their midday naptime directly behind my barn. The runoff has sweetened the field beyond it, and it has become a dark, rich green. But what it all means is that the hay I customarily buy in June is not in the barn. And the July crop was not dry enough, in my judgment, although dry enough in the seller’s.
    The week has had some comic relief, however, in one or two forms. I raised a Jersey calf a couple of winters ago, from the time she was a week old. She had been trained to a pail and had her own spot in the barn. When it got cold I put a hooded sweatshirt on her, and once, when she got too cold, Falvius Mauer took her back for a week to his warm and dry cow barn. I bought a beautiful rolled leatherhalter lead for her and taught her to walk like a lady. And that was part of her name: Lady Francesca Cavendish. She was lovely. My only mistake was in not disbudding the horns. They grew. At first I looked for pictures of Swiss cows with garlands around them. I even found a beautiful picture of a French sheep with an elegant straw headdress. Oh, to know how to braid that!
    Lady Francesca lived with the sheep and seemed to think of herself as a sheep, albeit, a gradually bigger and bigger one, but a sheep nonetheless. Then one day my sweet docile calf became a heifer. And as her life changed, so did mine.
    The sheep were fence and stone wall climbing in those days over to Tom Connelly’s. Lady Francesca, lumbering along, would follow. But sheep could scoot between barbed wire when encouraged back home, and Francesca just couldn’t. She finally learned to duck her head between