Chapter 3: Lost Ox




https://kidadl.com/animal-facts/ox-facts 



     "I ain't seed Quincy since Nan left," observes Benjamin's son Daniel as he stacks a barrel onto the family's ox cart in the cold drizzle of a low cloud settling up against the ridge. 

"Come to think of it, I heard your mom say she heard a ruction up the hollow," old Benny replies while helping to heft the next keg for tomorrow's drive down along the Licking River to Covington. "That old ox has a hankering for cane so I'll take a gander up there."

"Good, cause I'll need two teams for getting a load out of these hills in this mud," Daniel calls as his father strides up the hill.



     Two teams of oxen is exactly what Benjamin Reed had used ten years earlier to transport his family and their belongings the hundred and fifty miles from the rim of the Shenandoah Valley in Tazewell, Virginia to the Appalachian foothills of eastern Kentucky. Back then John Quincy Adams, at four-years-old, was the lead ox in the front twosome of the four that had pulled their overloaded oxcart over the rugged hills of the Cumberland Gap. Now at fifteen, the one ton castrated male was still a formidable beast of burden, though no longer motivated to pull the other three oxen along. He'd rather spend his days browsing with the milk cows in the fields of big bluestem or moseying over to the canebrakes to munch on the sweet leaves.

     Like many early settlers in the mountains, the Reeds rotated their oxen stock, keeping two experienced ones for a lead team and two younger ones to follow behind and learn the literal ropes. When a new male calf arrived in the spring and survived into fall, it might be set free as a bull for the herd if particularly strong, beautiful, or assertive. The mild mannered ones were instead castrated and trained to turn a millstone or pull a plow or cart. As a young ox joined the cart team, one of the older oxen would be butchered for the fall harvest and winter stores. 

     Quincy had been saved from that fate by a fruitful first year in the bluegrass region. There were three surviving males, allowing Benjamin the luxury of keeping his lucky ox that had led the family to a new land of earthen prosperity and colorblind community. His wife Charity inherited the Anatolian pigmentation that had labeled her Albemarle family free persons of color, a census classification that deprived them of voting and land ownership rights.



     "Dang, what happened here?" Benny mumbles to himself, briefly puzzling over a muddy smear leading up from the marshy rear of the last canebrake into a dense stand of rhododendron, the dark green leaves reaching up in the mist.

Following the trampled earth up a narrowing path into the thickening fog, he just glimpses a lighter colored horn sticking up from a mound of dirt back under a mountain laurel.

"Varmint, my eye," he cries, squatting to unearth the head of his lost ox.





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