A Reassuring Stripe
Cattle in the mountains of Uzbekistan provide a recognisable reminder of home in a landscape which can otherwise feel dizzyingly unfamiliar.
There are cattle like mine in the mountains of Uzbekistan. I saw them and was delighted, because the famous “lineback” motif offered an echo not only of my riggit galloways but every breed with a white line along its back, from the Irish Droimeann to the Austrian Pinzgauer. This one of the ancient cattle colourways, and I shouldn’t be surprised to find it four thousand miles from home – but I will admit that it was one of several reassuring anchor-points as I moved across the confusing splendour of Central Asia.
If we suspend our disbelief and assert that Edinburgh and Mumbai can exist in the same universe, it follows that there is a gradual continuum of change from one place to the other. The rising luminescence and passion of continental Europe is not just measured in the distance we move away from Scotland, but also in the narrowing approach to the East. If Turkey and the Black Sea are a fulcrum beyond which Europe becomes Asia, grey areas occupy a broad margin on either side of the continental divide. Even in Uzbekistan and the final descent towards India, there are still markers and reminders of home – opportunities to say “I know about this”, and comfort ourselves with tiny gestures of familiarity.
Above the desert and the shocking azure band of a distant inland sea, the Nuratau mountains rise suddenly into walnut groves and stands of wiry aspen. Fed by rheumy, weeping springs, the dust is fattened into fertile cakes of mud and footprints. There are vines and ropes of climbing creepers; aubergines swell on the roadsides, and crab apple trees are beaten for the ball-bearing patter of fruit quick which falls like tiny ammunition. It’s rich, productive land; you could almost imagine monkeys in trees like these, but there is something gently standoffish about these former Soviet bloc places. South and East of the Himalayas, monkeys accompany a helter-skelter feeling that “anything goes”. In Uzbekistan, there’s a reassurance of frost in the distant snow-capped peaks; the mood is gravitas and green tea, swept verandas and calm discretion.
The lineback cow I saw was reaching up to pull at hawthorn berries which had grown and were ripening in the trees overhead. These are hawthorns as we’d recognise them in Dalbeattie, but supercharged and each as big as a grape; familiar and strange in a land of giant fruit. Elsewhere, drooping bouquets of tan-brown olives mimicked the old Mediterranean groves of Sicily and Greece, but these are “Russian olives”, crumpled and powdery as talcum. It’s possible to eat them – they’re actually sweet – but the texture is powerfully unpleasant, like eating a mouthful of ash from the stove, and so dry that you’re dumbstruck with desiccation.
I’ve read that the colour of a cow is determined during foetal development. The smallest embryos start without any pigmentation - they’re white, but their tiny, developing bodies are covered by a pattern of pigmented nodes. These nodes are distributed like the detail of a butterfly’s wings, perfectly symmetrical on either side of the spine. I can’t explain where they are, but there’s certainly one on the point of each hip, another on each shoulder and more on the knees and hocks. As the embryo develops, these nodes leak pigment like ink-blots. The process of growing pulls the colour out further across the skin like blotting paper, and when the nodes produce lots of pigment, the “blotches” expand to a point at which they all join up. The animal is therefore born in a single solid colour. The opposite is also true - if the nodes don’t work at all, the animal simply defaults to being white.
Line-back cattle like riggit galloways represent a midpoint in this process. Because their colouration is incomplete, we’ve caught the colours in the act of expansion. It makes sense that the animal’s spine is the furthest point from the colour nodes and it’s therefore the last to be stained by colour. Even the darkest riggit galloways still have a flash of white above their tails, and often a flash of white on their breast. These are the last surviving islands of whiteness in a tide of colour which almost completely drowned them out. It seems likely that most cattle markings are caused by various playings of this game - certain nodes acting excessively or switching off according to breeding and selection.
Before they went extinct, ancient Eurasian species of wild cattle seem to have been linebacks. The effect can provide good camouflage when moving in a herd, and it becomes very difficult for predators to see how many animals are in a group. It’s also hard to gauge the size of individuals - everything’s as big as the biggest one. It’s interesting that the more we’ve domesticated cows, the less symmetrical their markings have become. The splodgy black-and-white markings of dairy cows are linked to their docility - lots of wild animals have spots, but these are always oriented according to symmetry or design. Only domesticated animals wear them at random, even down to the crazily splattered colours of pet cats and dogs.
A thousand miles to the south, this dainty little Uzbek lineback cow would be an oddity in heaving Indian cities where brahman cattle lounge with their humps on the down-sag. Between two drooping ears, their fly-trampled eyes are weepingly passive; Indian cattle hardly seem like cows at all – and when I showed a photograph of my galloways to a brahman specialist in Jaipur, he laughed and said “they look like little dogs!”
It turns out that eastern and western cows are descended from different species of wild cattle. Far from line-backs, brahmans are largely uniform in colour – a gentle sandy grey or chocolate brown. The shortfall is made up with a flush of floral garlands and the startling motley of painted handprints and zig-zagged lines. They’ll mosey casually through an uproar of traffic, mixing their cud with carrier bags and wraps of fallen rubbish. Framey as bicycles, langurs will tease them for the weight of their religious significance, concealing their own weights with sweaty gestures of impudence and pride.
On the approach to India, even my clearest understandings fail me. The swell of emotion is overwhelming, and I’m left without a leg to stand on. It can be an exhilarating feeling to fling yourself out of all familiarities, but in the mountains of Uzbekistan, there is a comfort of common ground to reassure a cowardly, sip-taking traveller like me.
