Highland Cattle Quotes

And so he and Ian—who, it turned out, could also knit and was prostrated by mirth at my lack of knowledge—had taught me the simple basics of knit and purl, explaining, between snorts of derision over my efforts, that in the Highlands all boys were routinely taught to knit, that being a useful occupation well suited to the long idle hours of herding sheep or cattle on the shielings.

They don't have the time to take on animals with dietary restrictions and missing legs." "Do you think I don't know that? That's precisely why they're all here with me. No one else would take them. Angus, for example." She moved toward the Highland steer. "Some foolish merchant traveled to Scotland on holiday and decided to bring his wife a pet calf from the Highlands. Never stopped to think about the fact that he would grow." "Surely people aren't that stupid." "Oh, it happens all the time. But usually they make that mistake with pups or ponies. Not cattle." She shook her head. "They dehorned him in the worst, most painful way. When he came to me, the poor dear's wounds were infected. Infested, too. He could have perished from the fly-strike alone. That man was stupid, indeed. The only thing he got right was his choice of calf. Angus is exceedingly adorable." Adorable? Gabe eyed the beast. The animal stood as tall as Gabe's shoulder, and it smelled... the way cattle smell. Shaggy red fur covered its eyes like a blindfold, and its black, spongy nose glistened.

The cattle raid, the creach, was not only a test of leadership and honor, celebrated in bardic song. It also paid a tidy profit, when the clan could charge ransom to return the stolen cattle. The term in Scots was blackmail—mail being the word for “rent” or “tribute,” and black the typical color of the Highlander’s cattle. Blackmail determined the rhythm of life in many parts of the Highlands. Some observers estimated that at any given moment the average chief had half his warriors out stealing his neighbor’s cattle, and the other half out recovering the cattle his neighbors had stolen from him.

ball of hair rolled in the stomach of a lion, as calculi are, is a great charm among the Arabs: it scares away other animals, they say. Lion's fat smeared on the tails of oxen taken through a country abounding in tsetse, or bungo, is a sure preventive; when I heard of this, I thought that lion's fat would be as difficult of collection as gnat's brains or mosquito tongues, but I was assured that many lions are killed on the Basango highland, and they, in common with all beasts there, are extremely fat: so it is not at all difficult to buy a calabash of the preventive, and Banyamwezi, desirous of taking cattle to the coast for sale, know the substance, and use it successfully (?).

important, it provided the bright prospect of fortunes to be made through exploitation of the land and its people. To that end, the French would transform much of the Vietnamese landscape. In Cochinchina, they carved out a complex network of canals that turned tens of thousands of acres of marshy wilderness into some of the most productive rice-growing country on earth. They developed modern ports at Haiphong and Danang and Saigon, too, so that Vietnamese raw material could more efficiently be shipped abroad and French-manufactured goods could more easily be unloaded. They also built a railroad to move French products north from Saigon all the way to China; one out of three of the more than 100,000 Vietnamese conscripted to lay its tracks is thought to have died along the way. The French hacked down highland forests as well, displacing tribal people who depended on them for their livelihood, and planted millions of rubber trees in their place; the miserably paid contract workers who tapped the trees were ravaged by malaria and “treated like human cattle,” one colonist admitted, and “terrorized by the overseers….On the rubber plantations the people had a habit of saying that children did not have a chance to know their fathers, nor dogs their masters.” In the North, tens of thousands of contract laborers risked their lives beneath the earth, mining coal, tin, tungsten, and zinc for the benefit of investors in France. They worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and those who tried to get away were often beaten before being forced back to work.

The Highlanders are not without considerable quantities of corn, yet have not enough to satisfy their numbers, and therefore yearly come down with their cattle, of which they have greater plenty, and so traffic with the Lowlanders for such proportions of oats and barley as their families or necessities call for.

Highlanders, driving their "creagh" toward Balquhidder, passed, their moccasin-clad feet leaving as little impress on the mist as they had left in life upon the tussocks of bent-grass. They urged the shadowy cattle with the ponts of their Lochaber axes; and last of all, wrapped in his plaid, his thick hair curling close about his hard-lined features, passed one I knew at once by his great length of arm and red beard, on which the damp hung in a frosty dew, just as it hung upon the coats of the West Highland kyloes that he drove before him on the rode. Though for two hundred years he had slept well in the lone graveyard of the deserted church beside Loch Voil, he seemed to know the road as perfectly as he had known it in his old foraying days. As he passed he moved his target forward and his hand stole to his sword, as if he recognised one of his ancient foes. Then he was swallowed up by the same mist that had protected him so often in his life.