Dairy farmer Pertti Salmi couldn't believe his eyes when he saw a cow named Vilukas standing outside his barn last Monday morning.
"It was a total shock," Salmi says.
The cow had escaped from Pirttilahti Farm around May Day. It jumped over the fence and ran into the forest in Sinettä, a village in the northern municipality of Rovaniemi. Salmi suspects that the young heifer may have been bullied in the pen by other cows.
The heifer was sighted a few times in May. Villagers tried to bring her back to the farm, but to no avail. The heifer would not let herself be captured.
"As soon as she saw anyone, she immediately disappeared," he said.
As spring turned to summer, the heifer vanished without a trace.
By the time September rolled around, Salmi had given up hope that she would ever be recovered. He heard from locals that there were predators in the area.
"I thought she had drowned in the river, or been eaten by a bear or wolves," Salmi recalls.
Salmi knew that the heifer was pregnant and due to calve in late October. However, he suspected that she might have given birth prematurely, or in any case been unable to provide her offspring with enough nutrition in the wild.
Last Monday, Salmi was baffled to see Vilukas accompanied by a calf, who was about a day old.
"I was speechless," he says.
Vilukas had apparently found enough to eat in the forest, as both she and her calf were in good condition, he says.
"She just looked at me from under her eyebrows as if to say, would you start feeding me?"
Marjukka Mattio, a dairy expert at the Central Union of Agricultural Producers (MTK), tells Yle she has never heard of a cow returning to a farm after such a long time. She thinks the heifer was lucky – or wary enough – to avoid encounters with predators during her escapades.
Both Mattio and Salmi cite an old Finnish saying: "frost drives the pig home".
As autumn turns into winter, there is no longer enough grass to eat in nature, and as cows nurse, their nutritional needs increase even more. The cooler weather also increases their nutritional needs.
"It must have been a new situation for the heifer when she had the calf," Mattio muses. "She probably figured that it was better to go somewhere familiar and safe, where there was more food and shelter available than in the forest."
