Canvas Tents and Cows

By Peter Bowden

 


The boys had pitched their tents the evening before in the far corner of the pasture where the grass grew soft and the trees leaned together like quiet conspirators. They had cooked hot dogs over a fire that popped and snapped and talked about the kinds of things boys always talked about when the night grew bigger than the field; baseball, ghosts, the possibility of treasure somewhere just past the fence line. The cows had been far off then, dark shapes moving slowly in the twilight, hardly worth noticing. The boys zipped themselves into their canvas tents and fell asleep believing the world had settled for the night.

Morning came quietly, the way it often does in the country, not with noise but with fog. It rolled across the pasture and laid itself down over the grass until the whole field seemed to float in a pale gray sea. One of the boys woke first. He heard breathing that was not the breathing of boys. Slow. Heavy. Curious. He unzipped the tent flap and pushed his head into the fog. There, not three feet away, stood a cow. Then another. And another. The entire field had gathered.

Cows stood in a wide circle around the tents, their large patient faces leaning forward through the mist, eyes dark and thoughtful as old philosophers. They looked down at the boys as if the tents had sprouted overnight and required careful inspection. One cow snorted softly. Another flicked its tail. None of them seemed frightened. They were simply interested in this strange new arrangement of fabric and startled children.

The boys crawled out slowly, rubbing their eyes, staring at the wall of cows and the quiet fog that held everything in place. For a long moment nobody moved. The cows stared at the boys. The boys stared at the cows. Each seemed to wonder how the other had come to be there. It was the kind of morning the world sometimes gives you, where surprise belongs equally to everyone.

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