kine

The kine are all dead and under 7 cubits
of snow. The antlery tribes are stuck numb in drifts.

Your duds freeze stiff as you stand by the elm log blze.
Brazen knick-knacks from Brum burst asunder with cold.
Icicles crackle in uncombed hairies' beavers.
It's really really rotten to be Rhyphaean.

Oenophiles give you Grands Cru by weight, not volume,
cleaving the frozen Lafite with their tomahawks.

- Peter Reading, Englished (iii. 349-83), from Diplopic, 1983

"Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were. It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think. In spite of wandering kine and other adverse circumstance, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blossom-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small." - 'Wild Apples', Henry David Thoreau.

Assuming that Hawaiian version is pronounced "kee nay"?

"Da kine" is Hawaiian slang for "the best," "top flight," "creme de la creme" etc.

Bizarre. I've never heard that before. Kine? Crazy.

This follows the same pattern as swine.

The only plural in the Enlgish language which doesn't share a single letter with its sigular form. :) (Plural for cow, by the way, Archaically.)