Cattle

Cattle are woven into the material and emotional life of Lipce: they provide milk, labor, breeding stock, and a reserve against poverty, yet remain exposed to hunger, sickness, theft, neglect, and sale. Their recurring presence makes the farm’s condition legible. A sound cow can keep a household going; the threat of losing one can turn economic pressure into intimate grief, while the work of feeding and milking them continues even when people are exhausted or absent.

Household wealth and the work of care

Cattle belong to the daily account of the farm rather than standing apart from it as mere property. On Maciej Boryna’s farmstead, Kuba watches the grazing livestock while tending Witek’s prayers, and the animals feed beneath a tall hayrick. The scene places cattle within a working landscape of stubble, barn, hay, and young rye: their care is one of the tasks through which people inhabit and maintain the farm.

Winter preparations likewise show that livestock require planning, labor, and fuel. As rain threatens, Antek and Witek fetch brushwood from the forest, using some for the byre and stacking the rest against the house to insulate it. At the same time, Józka Borynianka and Hanka prepare animals for the coming season, while Maciej Boryna and Kuba finish threshing wheat. The household’s food stores, shelter, and animals are managed together, with the turn of the weather setting the pace.

The work of milking is intimate and physical. In a dark, stuffy byre, Jagusia searches for a stool, crouches beside a cow, massages its udder, wipes it with her apron, and leans her head against its belly as she milks. The scene gives the animal a bodily presence—its warmth and stillness are part of the labor—while showing that care depends on repeated, close contact rather than abstract ownership.

The village’s seasonal movements put cattle into public view. As people prepare for a fair, they lead cows and calves on ropes, drive pigs and piglets, herd sheep, and load animals beneath hay or wicker frames on carts. The crowded road barely accommodates the people and livestock moving toward the market. About a week after the imprisoned men return, the village again prepares for a fair: cows are milked and driven from the yards, and a cow in calf is led to fallow land. These scenes connect domestic animal care to exchange, breeding, and the shared agricultural calendar.

Poverty, sale, and the value of a cow

The prospect of sale makes a cow a measure of how close a household has come to destitution. Before winter, villagers argue over whether to sell cattle, grain, or smaller livestock, even as clothing, tools, and farm supplies must be bought. Some owners try to make a poor cow look saleable by rubbing its dirty flanks with straw and feeding it clover or boiled barley with potatoes. The preparation is a practical response to a market in which a family’s need for cash collides with the need to keep productive animals.

Hanka’s distress over her household’s cow makes that collision personal. With potatoes and salt as their food and no money to spare, she sees the animal as a mainstay that may soon be led away. Antek will not seek work, and credit is unavailable; even a day’s threshing could bring a small wage for salt or lard. Hanka’s anguish is not simply about losing an asset: selling the cow would also mean losing milk and narrowing the household’s already meagre means of surviving until spring.

At that point the household’s entire livestock holding is described as a cow, a heifer, a pig, two geese, and a few hens. Hanka knows that merchants are coming, and the cow’s likely sale gives the inventory its emotional weight. She embraces the animal and imagines it being tethered and led into the wider world. Her attachment does not remove the financial pressure, but it shows what a market transaction costs beyond the price received.

The heifer later becomes the focus of a different response to scarcity. Hanka insists that it must not be sold, and Jagustynka offers money she had saved for her burial: three roubles in zlotys, to be repaid after harvest if she lives. She remembers the heifer’s birth and judges it to be good milking stock. The loan turns kinship into material support and preserves an animal whose future usefulness makes it worth protecting. The episode contrasts the urgency of selling a cow for immediate necessities with the possibility of keeping a younger animal through a temporary crisis.

Cattle also enter disputes over ownership and the manor. News arrives that villagers have been summoned to court over a cow in a case against the manor; the speaker insists that the manor is at fault, while another voice answers that the cow itself makes the case plain. The evidence identifies a contested cow and collective summonses, but does not settle the dispute here. Elsewhere, a complaint about pasturage frames the grazing ground as village property claimed by the manor. Livestock thus make land rights concrete: access to pasture is not an abstraction when animals need somewhere to feed.

Seasonal risk, illness, and absence

The cattle’s condition registers environmental hardship. During the summer drought, grass burns away, cows return hungry from the pastures, and they bellow in the byres. They cease giving milk as the heat dries wells and streams and damages the crops. This is more than a change in the landscape: drought reduces both the animals’ nourishment and the milk available to households, tightening pressure on people already dependent on the harvest.

The village’s labor crisis brings a different danger. When the men are imprisoned, women must manage fields, gardens, livestock, and household work, while births, calving, hatching, and farrowing coincide in spring. The burden includes feeding and watering animals, chopping feed, splitting logs, and carting wood, alongside sowing and planting. The account stresses that the work exceeds what the remaining labor force can manage. Cattle are among the living dependants whose needs persist through the men’s absence, not passive background to the village’s crisis.

Illness and damage at the household level also threaten livestock security. Dominikowa describes a run of misfortune in her family: their cow has fallen sick, potatoes have rotted and must be bought for planting, and a storm has brought down the byre. The sequence joins animal health to the farm’s capacity to shelter and feed its stock. Later, as Jagusia drifts through life in a stupor and Dominikowa grows half blind and struggles to work, the farm declines further: cows are sometimes sent to pasture unmilked, pigs go hungry, and horses feed from hayracks. Neglected cattle mark the breakdown of household management as well as the frailty of the people responsible for it.

Maciej Boryna’s failing condition is also set against the familiar farmyard. He wanders among the open doors, pats the horses, looks in at the cows lying side by side, and then forgets what he meant to do. The livestock remain within the ordinary geography of his farm, but his inability to continue his task makes that setting a measure of his confusion and decline.

Exchange, communal conflict, and animal agency

Not every cow changes hands through ordinary sale. Szymek recounts finding a cow tied to a tree at dawn, with clover placed before her and full udders. At first he thinks she has strayed from the herd; when he understands that someone has given her to him, he tries to thank the donor, who draws away. Szymek resolves to protect the animal, bring her indoors until he can build a byre, and have a dog guard her. The gift supplies a new household with an immediate source of security, but its secrecy and the practical problem of sheltering the cow remain part of the scene.

The animal also has a presence that exceeds its economic use. Szymek calls the cow his greatest joy, embraces her neck, and kisses her muzzle; the dog barks and the chickens cluck around them. The episode does not make the cow independent of human need—the new homestead plainly needs her—but gives the animal a particular place within an emerging domestic world, one of affection, protection, and daily care.

In another farmyard encounter, Jagusia sits at the byre threshold and lets a brindled bullock suck her finger. The Voyt approaches, comments on the animal as something that could sell well, and begins to unbutton his coat. The bullock’s presence anchors an encounter that turns toward the Voyt’s advances. Elsewhere, a remark that a heifer is caked in dung calls attention to the ordinary standard of care expected in the byre; such a practical observation can also expose neglect or tension within a household.

Cattle figure, too, in the village’s wider contest over resources. At a gathering against the manor’s forest felling, villagers cry that the forest is theirs, while the dispute is linked to lost work and accumulated grievances against the manor. The forest provides material for farms, including brushwood for byres and winter insulation, and the conflict concerns the means by which households sustain themselves. The narrative repeatedly places these collective claims beside the needs of animals and the land on which they depend.

A brief exchange about people from Rzepki connects cattle breeding to credit and local trade. They have taken their cows to the priest’s bull; a seller refuses to extend credit to them and says they should ask the priest for it instead. The reference presents breeding and borrowing as intertwined village transactions, while revealing how easily a practical need becomes a judgment about who should bear another household’s risk.

Cattle as a measure of communal hardship

Across the story, cattle make economic vulnerability visible in specific forms: a cow prepared for market with straw and extra feed, a threatened loss of milk, a heifer preserved by a relative’s savings, a sick animal and a damaged byre, or cows left unmilked when a household can no longer keep up. Their condition often tracks the condition of the people around them, but the animals are not only symbols. They need pasture, shelter, water, feed, and regular attention, and those needs continue through drought, imprisonment, and poverty.

That tension reaches a brutal conclusion in Jagusia’s expulsion. The mob throws her, bound like a sheep, onto a cart piled with pigs’ dung; two black cows are harnessed to draw it away. The same animals that elsewhere sustain households and invite tenderness are made part of a public act of humiliation. Their ordinary labor carries Jagusia out of Lipce, turning farm equipment and livestock into instruments of collective violence. The scene concentrates the double character of cattle throughout the narrative: indispensable to village life, yet subject to the purposes imposed on them by human power and need.