Cows

Cows are among the most consequential animals in the farms of Lipce: they provide milk, require daily care, and represent wealth that a household may be forced to surrender when food, fodder, or cash runs short. The novel repeatedly places them at the meeting point of practical labor and emotional attachment. A sick cow can draw neighbors into the farmyard, a sale can expose a family’s distress, and Christmas customs can treat cattle as beings capable of understanding and sharing in human religious life.

Farm Animals and Household Work

Cows belong to the daily working order of the farm, not to a separate pastoral idyll. When Antek Boryna and Kuba cart potatoes, Hanka Borynowa and Józka Borynianka attend to the household’s other work: geese must be gathered for the night, pigs fed, and cows milked. Witek brings the rest of the herd back from pasture and puts hay behind the racks so the animals will stand quietly for milking. The sequence makes animal care part of a larger, closely timed labor routine, in which feeding, tending, and fieldwork have to be coordinated.

That work continues through small, easily disrupted tasks. One woman worries that she has left her milking pails where the cows might break their legs. Elsewhere, a cow’s hunger prompts someone to call for it to be fed, and Józia is told to give oilcake to a grey animal expected to calve soon. These brief moments show that the herd is not an anonymous mass: individual animals have immediate needs, and their care requires attention to food, safety, and the stages of their lives.

The cows’ importance becomes especially visible in spring, when calving adds to an already crowded season of labor. The village is struck by illness as the ground thaws; children and older people fall sick, while cows begin calving and women give birth. When the men are imprisoned, the burden grows sharper. Women are left to manage sowing and planting, drainage, manure, firewood, livestock, and childcare, while cows calve, poultry hatch, and sows farrow. The narrative’s list of simultaneous demands makes clear that tending cattle is one element in a much wider crisis of household labor.

Illness, Loss, and the Value of an Animal

A large red-and-white cow’s illness turns a farmyard into a scene of collective helplessness. A girl leading a big red cow along the forest road passes a priest, but the animal jerks her aside and bellows. Later, a crowd gathers at the farm of Maciej Boryna, where women confer over a red-and-white cow lying on dung in front of the byre. Their remedies vary: salt and water, milk, wax from a blessed candle, soap and whey, or bloodletting. None works. The cow stretches out, raises its head to bellow, and eventually grows too weak to do more than lick Hanka Borynowa’s hands.

The scene measures the animal’s suffering through bodily detail and through the failure of every attempted cure. Its heavy head droops, its eyes grow dim, and the farmyard’s collective attention cannot change the outcome. Maciej Boryna looks at the cow and grieves both for the animal and for the household’s loss, reckoning its value at three hundred zlotys. He complains that people gathered around the pot have not looked after the cow. His anger links the immediate death to the precariousness of farm life: a valuable animal can be lost even while the household is occupied with other necessities. Antek observes the bloody aftermath calmly, while a dog laps at the blood before turning to bark at the horses. The different responses place grief, practical observation, and the ordinary movements of farm animals side by side.

A separate account of a cow dying of swine fever in summer widens the picture beyond one household. The disease has made pigs scarce, and buyers have travelled as far as Prussia to find replacements. Livestock illness therefore affects both the value of animals and the availability of animals for purchase. The cow’s vulnerability belongs to a wider rural economy in which disease can reshape what families can keep, buy, or afford.

Sale Under Pressure

The sale of a skewbald cow shows how economic need can turn attachment into a painful necessity. Antek Boryna negotiates with Jewish buyers, holding to a price he considers low but fair because the animal could bring fifty roubles from another farmer in spring. The buyers know the family has little room to wait; they raise their offer in small increments, and Antek gives ground only slightly. The bargaining is not simply a contest over the animal’s abstract market value. It takes place under the pressure of immediate need.

That pressure is stated plainly: the household requires money and does not have fodder enough for two animals. Maciej Boryna accepts that they must sell, and his quiet, kind manner changes the emotional tenor of the moment for Hanka Borynowa. She is moved by his tenderness even as the practical decision remains painful. Once the buyers pay, Maciej leads the cow to the sleigh waiting at the inn. Hanka and the children accompany it as far as the road; she strokes its muzzle repeatedly and drapes herself over it, unable to part from it without grief. The scene gives the animal a place in the family’s emotional life while showing how little that attachment can protect it from the necessities of household survival.

Ritual and the Cattle’s Place in the Household

At Christmas, cows are included in a religious custom that temporarily alters their relation to human beings. On the night of the Birth, a household member tells Witek to bring a lantern so they can visit the cattle. According to the belief described, cattle understand human speech that night and can answer in human voices; because the Lord Jesus was born among them, they are treated as equal to people and as kin. They are to share the Christmas blessing wafer.

The custom is also practical. Dominikowa tells Jagna that, as woman of the house, it is her place to distribute the wafer to the animals, which are expected to thrive and avoid sickness as a result. She also warns that they must not be milked the next day until evening, or they will lose their milk. The ritual thus joins sacred observance to the work of managing the herd: a prescribed act of blessing sits alongside instructions about milking and animal health. Cows receive a moment of ritual recognition, but that recognition remains embedded in the household’s material dependence on them.

Animals, Necessity, and the Peasant World

Across these episodes, cows are neither mere background nor symbols detached from practical life. They are living bodies to be fed, milked, protected from injury, treated when ill, and accompanied when sold. Their value is expressed in money, but the scenes also register the labor and feeling involved in keeping them. Hanka’s hands, the threatened pails, the hay placed behind the racks, the late pregnancy of a cow, and the skewbald’s muzzle all make care concrete.

The novel’s wider account of village hardship reinforces the stakes of that care. Hired workers face a hard winter, frozen potatoes, and little income; poor households may lack food and credit before harvest. Meanwhile, the forest work expected to provide employment is denied to men from Lipce. In such circumstances, a cow is simultaneously a source of milk, a demand on scarce fodder, and a reserve of wealth that can be converted into cash. The animals’ recurring presence therefore reveals the close connection between agricultural rhythms and economic vulnerability. Their lives are bound to human decisions, but their needs and suffering remain visible in their own right: in the bellow of a sick cow, the effort of a resisting animal, and the care with which Hanka sees one taken away.