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When they came around the corner, Ellen laid her eyes for the first time on the homestead that would be her home for the rest of her life.
The little sod house sat half buried into the hillside. Grass sprouted from its roof and from the mud chinks between the logs in those walls exposed to the elements. The stone chimney stuck out between grass and wild flowers growing on the roof. Not far away, two placid brown cows stared out at the wagon from behind a split rail fence surrounding a log barn. A motley collection of sheep grazed out in the field.
Sure enough, there was Laird on the doorstep to welcome them. He surveyed the scene as if it was his own domain and they were his invited guests. When the wagon pulled up to the barn yard fence, he left his post and sauntered over next to Elliot, who ruffled the dog behind the ears.
Ellen got down from the wagon.
“Do you know how to milk a cow?” Elliot asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Ellen confessed.
“Well, then,” Elliot replied. “Take your bag inside and then come back out. I’ll put the wagon away, and then I’ll show you how. No time like the present to get started.”
Ellen flushed to the roots of her hair. This was it, the start of a life so foreign to her, she had to learn the most basic skills from scratch. She hurried away to the house so Elliot wouldn’t see her embarrassment.
The sight that met her eyes when she opened the door to the house gave her another shock. Inside, the floor was hard-packed dirt, and it looked like it hadn’t been swept in months. Some class of animal hide covered the narrow bed against the wall. And instead of a cast iron stove Ellen was used to cooking on, an open fire burned on the hearth with nothing but an iron hook to hold the kettle above it.
Ellen took a deep breath and let it out. There was no turning back now. She was married, and this was her home. She entered the room. Sunlight flooded in through a single window in the front wall of the house, but no glass or anything else covered the opening. Only a wooden shutter hung on the outside of the wall to close the window.
Mud covered the spaces between the logs in the front half of the house. The back half was solid dirt. Crooked logs made up the bedstead and the table legs, and the table top itself was nothing but a solid slab of wood with the wood grain trailing through it.
Ellen set her handbag on the table. She had no time to change out of her travelling clothes or to settle into the house. She had to get back out to the barn for her first lesson in milking a cow. Well, at least that would get her out of here.
Elliot was just feeding and watering the horses in their stalls when Ellen came in. Laird streaked around the barn, poking his nose into everything. Ellen shivered whenever she saw him. Hopefully, she could avoid him enough to make her life here more bearable. She would probably start having nightmares about him mauling her.
Elliot finally finished tending the horses. He picked up two wooden buckets from the doorway. “Come on. Let’s get milking.”
Ellen followed him into another stall, where the first of the two cows waited for them. The cow stared at them until Elliot dumped a handful of grain into her trough. Then she fell to munching and paid no more attention to them.
Elliot knelt down in the straw and put his bucket under her udder. “Watch me now. You pinch off the teat with your forefinger. Then you roll your other fingers down, like this. Do you see what I’m doing? You create pressure with your forefinger, and shoot the milk out with the other fingers. Here, you come and have a try.”
Ellen hesitated only a fraction of a second, worried about getting her travelling clothes dirty by kneeling in the dirty barn but she saw no alternative. Elliot stood there, waiting for her to follow his orders.
She knelt down and groped around under the cow until she felt something like a large bag of warm water hanging underneath the animal. She had to press her cheek against the coarse hair on the cow’s flank just to reach it. She grasped it and squeezed, but nothing happened. The bag just swayed in her hand.
“Squeeze,” Elliot ordered. “Squeeze hard.”
Ellen squeezed with all her might. She squeezed and squeezed until her arm burned from the effort, but not a single drop of milk came out. The cow finished her grain and started kicking at Ellen’s hands.
The cow lost patience with Ellen’s attempts to wring some milk from her udder and tried to make her escape. She started backing out of the stall. Elliot slapped her hard on the rump and snapped, “Keep still!” The cow kept still for maybe half a minute. Then she tried again to get away.
Elliot stuck his head up over the partition of the stall and called out, “Laird! Come here!”
Laird trotted around the corner and entered the stall. He went straight to the front of the stall and sat down in front of the cow. He locked his eyes on her and stared at her with the ferocity of a predator mesmerizing his prey. The cow stood stock still.
Elliot knelt down again. “Now, watch me. Pinch off the top of the teat, like this. Can you see what I’m doing?”
Ellen knelt down and craned her neck to peer underneath the cow so she could see exactly what he was doing.
“Now roll your fingers down, one after the other, like this.” He demonstrated again, and a strong squirt of milk shot out of the teat. It streamed into the bucket with a resounding spray. Again and again, he shot the milk into the bucket.
“Now, you try again,” he told her.
Ellen took her place again. She grasped the teat and squeezed. This time, a few sad drops trickled from the end, but she couldn’t make it squirt the way Elliot did. After a short effort, her hands were so worn out, she had to shake them loose between attempts.
Elliot lost patience. “Well, you’ll just have to keep trying until you get it.” He knelt down again and started milking fast, with both hands pumping the cow’s udder like the pistons of a steam train. “Stand behind her so you can see what I’m doing.”
“Won’t she kick me?” Ellen asked.
“Not with Laird standing there,” Elliot replied. “She won’t move a muscle until he lets her go.”
Ellen stepped behind the cow and watched Elliot’s two hands squeezing the teats, one after the other, in rapid succession, sending streams of milk down into the bucket. Her wrists ached and her forearms burned.
“You’ll have to get it, sooner or later,” Elliot told her. “I want you to take over the milking chores. This will be your job.”
Ellen gulped. “Okay.”
“It’s not as hard as you think, once you get the hang of it,” he told her. “It’s like any other skill. Once you learn how to do it, it becomes second nature.”
“You make it look so easy,” Ellen mumbled.
“That’s because I’ve been doing it, twice a day, for more than eight years.” Elliot stripped the last milk from the cow’s udder. Then he stood up. “Once you’ve had that much practice, you’ll think it’s easy, too.”
He saw her flexing her wrist.
“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You have special muscles that you only use for milking. You’ll develop them, and then it won’t be so hard. Trust me.”
Ellen glanced at the cow. She still stood perfectly still, staring at Laird. Elliot turned to the dog. “Let her go.”
Laird blinked and skimmed out of the stall. The cow quivered all over. Then she came to life, backed out of the stall, and walked away. Maybe she didn’t even remember that the wolf was there, keeping her entranced with his primal stare.
Elliot brought the other cow in, and this time, he milked her by himself. He finished emptying her udder even before she finished eating her grain, so he didn’t need Laird’s help. Ellen watched in wonder at his forearms flexing and clenching with every squeeze. The milk poured out of the cow effortlessly.
Elliot picked up his frothing bucket of milk and waited until the cow left the stall. “Come on. Let’s go inside. You can get supper started while I bring your trunk in.”
