I worked for a while in Southern Germany, skidding logs with horses. The man I worked for, who had quit his doctoral studies to fell trees, taught me to drive the mare and gelding in Bavarian. It was always more finesse, than vocabulary. There was a farm up the road and, when we ran out of milk one day, I took the pail up to the barn for more. Because I'd been working the horses all day, the cows seemed small and I asked the woman milking them what kind they were. She squinted at me for a minute and said, "these are black ones and those are brown ones."