The Cow That Forecasts

A Tale of Sogmarsh — Mr Prewitt is proved right, to no one's benefit including his own.

Goodwife Muckle's cow lay down before rain. Everyone knew it. Dorcas was her name, and when you saw Dorcas fold herself down into the grass by the gate, you got the washing in, and you were seldom sorry.

Enter Hollis Prewitt, Mucklecombe's man of reason, who could not abide a belief without a mechanism under it. He set out to disprove the cow. There were tallies. There was a borrowed weather-glass. There was a full month of dawn observations set down in a notebook in a small determined hand. And he proved — to his own satisfaction, and that of a modest crowd at the Mucklecombe Arms — that Dorcas lay down when Dorcas was tired, chewed when Dorcas was hungry, and had no more commerce with the sky than the gatepost she leaned on. He read the figures aloud. It was a triumph. Goodwife Muckle said nothing at all, being a woman content to let weather and men make their own points in their own time.

The season turned. And the parish began to notice that Mr Prewitt, man of reason, had lately taken to carrying an umbrella. Not every day. Only — they checked, because it is that sort of parish — on the mornings Dorcas was down in the grass by the gate. He would set out under a dry sky, umbrella furled, and by noon, sure as the tax, it would come on to rain.

Asked about it, Prewitt explained, with dignity, that he carried the umbrella on days of low barometric pressure, which a man of science could read for himself, thank you very much. And when it was gently put to him that the days of low pressure were, to the very day, the days Dorcas lay down — that the cow was, in plain fact, his weather-glass with a tail — Prewitt declared the correlation spurious, and carried his umbrella out into the rain.

He was right, mind. That is the joke of it, and the mercy. The cow had no gift. She felt the wet coming in her joints, as any heavy beast will, and lay down; and it happened to rain, the pressure working on cow and cloud alike, no wonder in it anywhere. Hollis Prewitt disproved the magic entirely, and correctly — and then, being a sensible man, used the cow every day for the rest of his life, and never once called it what the parish called it, which was Dorcas being right again.