Yet the pasture was an
excellent one, consisting of sweet uplands, fringed round with
sugar-maples, oaks and beeches, where the cleared land extended up the
hillsides into the borders of the great woods.
For some time we were wholly at a loss to know what caused all those
cows to give bitter milk.
A strange freak also manifested itself in our other herd that summer;
first one of our Black Dutch belted heifers, and then several others
took to gnawing the bark from young trees in their pasture and along the
lanes to the barn. Before we noticed what they were doing, the bark from
twenty or more young maples, elms and other trees had been gnawed and
stripped off as high as the heifers could reach. It was not from lack of
food; there was grass enough in the pasture, and provender and hay at
the barn; but an abnormal appetite had beset them; they would even pull
off the tough bark of cedars, in the swamp by the brook, and stand for
hours, trying to masticate long, stringy strips of it.
In consequence, probably, of eating so much indigestible bark, first
one, then another, "lost her cud," that is, was unable to raise her food
for rumination at night; and as cattle must ruminate, we soon had
several sick animals to care for.
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