Flocks

CONTENTS

Foraging

Grazing and Watering

Besides the wide steppes of the Great Plain and the permanent pastures of the mountain region, the fallow fields of rotation farming assured the possibility of grazing for the animal stock. In the Great Plain, directly on the edges of the settlement, lay those fields to which the stock that spent the night at home was driven every day. Beyond that came the belt of ploughed fields, and then the vast pastures grazed by the stock stayed out from spring until autumn, or throughout the entire year. However, this was the case only in the towns and villages of the Great Plain possessing widely-spread boundaries, while elsewhere during the last two centuries it has been primarily the fallow fields that have constituted the ever-decreasing pasture area.

The grazing of extensively kept stock took place in a definite order. First horses and cattle were let on because they grazed only the higher meadows; then came the sheep, which ate the grass down to the root. Pigs could never go to the common pasture, because the other animals would not graze after them. Their area lay near the rivers and swamps. Here they could root the rush, get fish to eat, and lie about in the water.

The cold was very hard on the stock that spent the winter outdoors. At this period they drove the horses to the pasture first, because they could most easily cut up the snow cover with their hoofs. The Hungarian sheep are said to have quarried out the meagre fodder hiding even under the deepest snow. Cattle are the most helpless, because they can obtain little food with their cloven hoofs, which are easily damaged. Therefore fodder was laid in first of all for cattle. If the stock was really starving they even gobbled up the walls of the wind screen or the roofs of the huts, piled up with weeds of all kinds, just to survive somehow until the grass sprouted in the spring.

{254.} During the first half of the 19th century, the pastures were not sharply divided from each other. The herdsmen of the Kiskunság talk even today of the happy times of their grandfathers, when the stock drank out of the Tisza one week, and out of the Danube the next. The herdsmen of Transylvania started their descent at the beginning of winter toward the lower-lying Great Plain regions. The records prove that in the early 19th century many such flocks were outwintered in the vicinity of Nagykunság and Debrecen. There were also some herdsmen from Transylvania who drove their flock over the Carpathians into the plains of Wallachia and returned to the mountain pastures only in the spring.

The swineherds of the Great Plain set off for the oak forests of Upper Hungary usually in September, so that they would be there by St. Michael’s Day (September 29), when the grazing prohibition is lifted from the acorning areas. Feeding on acorns lasted mostly until St. Nicholas’ Day (December 6), so that by Christmas they could drive home the fattened, or at least improved, herd and perhaps feed them well for a few weeks more at home. The stock spent the 8 to 10 weeks outdoors, the herdsmen raising a hut only for themselves, making it out of wood and covering it with soil.

The occasion when the half-extensive stock, and the stock that {255.} returned home regularly, were first driven out was a real holiday. In Catholic areas they said a Mass in honour of St. Wendelin; then, after they had drunk briefly, they turned the stock loose. The herdsman carried out those superstitious acts by which he hoped to assure the health of the stock and to hold them together. He would put smoke around the pasture, and draw a circle around it with a stick, so that no animal could wander out of it. On the night of St. George’s Day (April 24) the witches tried to collect the profit of the cows by gathering it in the form of morning dew and carrying it home.

The herdsman had a great deal of trouble other than grazing the animals. In particular he had problems with watering. This was relatively simple in forest and mountain pastures, because the flock could be driven to a nearby stream or spring. Watering is much more difficult on the pastures of the steppes. Formerly the Great Plain herdsmen watered the stock from the so-called kopolya or sírkút. They dug a huge pit into the ground down to water level, then cut a path into the bank on both sides leading to it. They drove the animals down on one path, and, after drinking, they climbed up on the other.

The characteristic watering place of the Great Plain is the gémeskút (cf. Ills. 14, 50), a well with a steep. It was dug wide, so that water could be lifted out of it with several buckets at the same time. Formerly they put reeds on the inside of the well fastened on with spars. But if there was not enough wood in the great plains to line the well, they shored up the sides with clods of earth, and tussocks. The roots of the grass entwined in the wet {256.} well and held with such force that it was difficult to cut through them even with a hatchet.

Drawing water is the hardest work of the Great Plain herdsmen. The stock, especially on hot summer days, drink four to five times. Each time the bojtár has to pull up several hundred buckets of water. There are two or three buckets to a well. A board is placed inside the well, and standing on it, the water is poured into the long trough.

Flocks

CONTENTS

Foraging