Cattle herd

The Cattle herd marks both the continuity and the vulnerability of mountain life in the novel. First encountered around Bruno’s childhood grazing ground in Grana, it later becomes the center of his effort to establish a dairy farm: twenty-eight pregnant cows are brought up the valley, tended by Bruno and Lara, and worked into an exacting routine of milking and cheese-making. The herd revives abandoned pasture and gives daily structure to the farm, but its care also demands labor without weekends, while the business remains exposed to economic pressures that Bruno cannot resolve by devotion alone.

Early Life and the Mountain Farm

As boys, Bruno and the narrator wander around Grana without straying far from the cows Bruno is grazing. The herd belongs to the ordinary geography of his childhood: it sets a practical boundary around their roaming even as they explore disused stables, haylofts, granaries, and other abandoned buildings. The contrast is already present. The animals are part of ongoing work, while much of the village bears the marks of lives and livelihoods that have ended. In 1984, only fourteen people live in Grana, compared with as many as one hundred in the past.

The pressure behind that decline is made explicit when Bruno’s uncle, Luigi Guglielmina, discusses the economics of small Alpine farmsteads with the narrator’s father. He calculates that low prices and regulations imposed on cattle breeders have made his work economically unviable, though he continues because he is passionate about it. He predicts that within ten years of his death the land will revert to forest. His account gives the herd’s later importance a difficult context: keeping animals in the mountains is not simply a matter of affection for rural life, but a livelihood caught between demanding work and poor economic prospects.

Bringing the Herd Uphill

After spending months at Barma, Bruno decides to buy his uncle’s farmstead. He has saved money for a down payment, while his cousins are willing to sell the property and leave behind their unhappy associations with it. The time at Barma has served as a trial of whether Bruno can manage mountain life. His plan is to rebuild the huts, buy cattle, and establish a working farm over the following years.

The plan becomes tangible on the first Saturday of June, after a winter with little snow. Bruno has bought twenty-eight dairy cows, all pregnant, and they arrive by cattle truck in the piazza in Grana. Unsettled by the journey, they hurry down the ramp, lowing and jostling one another. Bruno, his mother, Lara, and the narrator position themselves around the square to contain and calm them. Once the truck leaves, the group starts up the mule track with two dogs of Grana shepherding pedigree. Bruno leads the ascent, his mother and Lara follow, and the narrator brings up the rear. The dogs retrieve cows that fall behind, barking and nipping at their flanks until they rejoin the herd.

The ascent carries the animals past ruined huts, weed-riddled stone walls, and the gray stumps of felled larches. For the narrator, their movement resembles a circulation returning to a body: the neglected valley seems to become active again as the herd climbs through it. The image captures what Bruno’s enterprise can restore, but not what it can guarantee. The animals’ arrival is a visible beginning, not proof that the farm will endure.

Labor, Milk, and the Farm’s Daily Rhythm

Bruno insists on milking by hand because he considers it the proper method for cows he regards as delicate and easily startled. Each cow takes about five minutes to milk, yielding roughly as many liters as the minutes of work; at that pace, he can milk twelve cows an hour and needs two and a half hours for the herd. The work begins before daylight. There are no Saturdays or Sundays, and the routine leaves little room for sleeping late or lingering in bed. Yet Bruno wants to do the milking himself. He experiences the repeated work as intimate care, waking each cow in turn as the hours pass between night and day.

At seven, Lara brings coffee and biscuits. She takes the herd out to pasture twice a day, while Bruno combines about one hundred and fifty liters of fresh milk with the same quantity from the previous evening, after skimming off the cream. He heats the milk with rennet; by nine it is ready to strain through cloth and press into wooden molds. The yield is five or six cheeses, about thirty kilos of toma from three hundred liters of milk. The figures make the scale of the enterprise plain: a large volume of milk and repeated, careful work produce a comparatively modest quantity of cheese.

The outcome of cheesemaking remains uncertain to Bruno. Although he follows the process he has been taught and cares for the cows, he cannot be certain whether the cheese will form properly or turn out well. He makes butter from the cream, then cleans the boiler, churns, pails, work surfaces, and stable, washing dung into the gutters. At noon he eats and rests for an hour, sometimes worrying in sleep about grass that will not grow, cows that will not give milk, or milk that will not churn. Later he may build a calf enclosure or dig a drainage ditch in pasture made waterlogged by rain. At four the cows return to the stable for a second milking; in the evening Lara takes them back out, and the workday eases toward its close.

Care, Decline, and Significance

The herd’s care is shared, though not evenly described. Lara works among the animals while pregnant, continuing to pasture them despite an ankle injury, sunstroke, backache, and swollen legs. When Bruno suggests hiring someone to take over her work, she refuses, reasoning that the cows are pregnant too and that their calm presence helps her relax. The comparison places her pregnancy within the farm’s animal life without making the labor easy: both the human and animal bodies remain part of the work around which the mountain household is organized.

Years later, Lara explains that when the farm was clearly not viable, she believed there were alternatives. She was prepared to sell the cows, rent out the farmstead, and take ordinary employment until circumstances improved. Bruno would not consider those options. For him there was no alternative life to pursue, and Lara came to feel that neither she nor their daughter, Anita, mattered as much to him as the mountain. Her account establishes the herd as more than a source of income: it is bound to Bruno’s chosen way of life, and thus to a conflict that strains his family. The evidence does not establish what ultimately happens to the cows, only that selling them was one possible response to the farm’s failure.

The Cattle herd therefore holds together the novel’s pastoral promise and its corrective. The animals bring movement back to a valley of ruins, and the careful rhythm of tending and milking gives Bruno’s project a daily, physical reality. Yet the same routine reveals its costs: long hours, uncertain production, and economic conditions that care alone cannot change. The herd is neither scenery nor a simple emblem of rural renewal. Its presence makes the work of sustaining that renewal visible—and the possibility of losing it inseparable from the people who depend on it.