Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

When I heard about Yvonne, the runaway Austrian cow, I was reminded of Mattie’s notes about the family cow in her memoir on childhood. Nebba, a black and white Holstein, was named after a mountain in Norway. Such a grand name, according to Mattie, gave the cow an inflated sense of herself.

Nebba

Alice and I recently discussed Yvonne, the runaway.

An Yvonne look-alike.

Yvonne was scheduled for slaughter (and soon), but she escaped and now two different bands of people are after her: hunters who intend to shoot her on sight (police have told them she’s a traffic hazard even though she seems to be hiding out on forested land), and animal rescuers, who want to save her from both the hunters and from her original captivity.

No expert animal trackers or animal psychic communicators can locate Yvonne. The rescue people staked her son, Friesi, to various spots in the forest so that he would wail for her and she would come running to him out of a mother’s undying love for her calf. But maybe Yvonne never liked Friesi that much. In any case, she’s not responding to his cries. So far she’s only taking to heart the call of the wild.

Alice was a baby during Nebba’s reign, so she does not remember how partial the cow was to Martha, mother of the brood of children.

Martha

Alice doesn’t remember that Nebba’s only wandering was in the fenceless yard, tethered by a very long rope. She was too little to understand that her father, Martha’s husband Ludwig, was often away driving a buckboard wagon to deliver mail around the countryside (though she would come to know that later), and so a cow might think a woman needed a defender.

In summertime the older children took off to be outside in the little prairie town where they lived, heading in all directions. Marie, the oldest, took a book and wandered along the town’s edge among wildflowers until she dropped down to lie in the tall prairie grass and read; LaRue liked to go downtown and see what she could see, developing a bad reputation along the way as a singer and a whistler, two forbidden activities for girls to do as they walked; Mattie and Lillian ran off to pick juneberries on Antelope Hill where the antelope roamed, or at least a few had been spotted roaming there once upon a time.

Credit: National Park Service

While the older girls were away, Nebba had Martha more or less to herself. Of course, baby Alice crawled around after her mother, but a baby was no real competitor. The cow rested in the shade of a cottonwood in the yard, deeply contented, while Martha hung clothes out to dry or made cubes of lye soap in the big tub in the back yard, or washed windows.

When the children returned, Nebba refused to let them enter the yard. She chased them off the property and Martha had to go get them and provide escort. This always happened despite the fact, as Mattie pointed out in her writings, that the household had a dog by the name of Bounce. How much protection did their mother need? Nebba made no exception for any family member. She was, Mattie wrote, “as cross with us children as she was with strangers.”

Eventually, everybody got safely back inside the house with their mother and their baby sister, and Bounce. Outside, Nebba mooed at the closed door with disgust. She was a great cow, a mountain of a cow, and by no means should she be shut out.

Nebba’s wildness was the opposite of Yvonne’s. She tried to chase away the children so she could be alone with the woman she loved. Yvonne, on the other hand, isn’t interested in loving anyone in this merciless human kingdom. She wants only the freedom to wander the Bavarian forest in peace, on her own.

Yvonne's approximate location.

Go, Yvonne! Go deep into the trees, stay in the shadows, lie low.

For an update on Yvonne, click here.