“Well, you know, there was this cow...”
“Excuse me for interrupting, but you keep forgetting one thing: when I was a child, there was always a group of seven or eight men around saying, ‘Let’s go hunting wolves,’ or ‘Let’s go and do this or that...’”
“All right, but you only listened to the story, a fairytale, while I was the one who experienced it.”
Now, in this last valley, Ivan Valley — there are seven or eight valleys, a whole stretch of land consisting only of valleys — there was one cow, out of four or five, who insisted on staying in the valley and wouldn’t leave.
So I went over to drive her out, because the sun was already setting behind Klek, near Ogulin, and I needed to get back home.
I reached the valley, and there was the cow, standing perfectly still and ruminating, ruminating.
And what did I see? A viper was sucking milk from the cow!
“And the cow was frozen still!”
“No, she stood still, just as she would when being milked. The viper had risen up, standing tall on his tail, about half a metre off the ground, and he was swallowing, and swallowing, and swallowing.
The way they had explained it to us, when he does that, the cow must not move until he has had his fill and drops off on his own. Only then can she move normally.
And that was exactly what happened. The cow moved on, and droplets of blood trailed behind her.
A viper always sucks from one teat; he never moves on to another. But he sucks it dry, until it bleeds, until a capillary bursts and blood begins to flow. Only then does the snake know that it is over.”
And then the cow moved on peacefully, following the other animals in the herd, with me walking behind her and crying. First because I thought the cow had lost all her milk, then because of how sad she had looked standing there while I waited, and also because the sun had already gone down and I still had a long way to go before I reached home.
For a good part of the way back I walked along the Mrežnica, and then followed the stream that springs from Jeznovac, which led me almost all the way home.
But I arrived later than expected. Everyone was already having dinner.
“What happened?” they asked me.
But I was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t utter a word to explain what had happened.
They comforted me: “Oh, but that’s nothing, nothing. How could you not know?”
What did they mean, how could I not know? Of course I knew. Otherwise I would have prodded the cow and forced her to move. Instead, I waited for him to finish what he was doing.
And those are the moments when you need patience. You have to wait for the beast, that nasty crawler, to feed himself. Let him have his will and his way, wait until the very end, and then move on without panicking.