But that’s just us. The cow (identified in the end credits as Evie) may be the only bovine in the territory, but she is part of a nonhuman cast that includes at least one owl, an assortment of very good dogs, an apparently tame crow and a typically amoral cat whose mischief kicks the plot toward its climax. The people believe they have dominion over the animals, the land and its products, but their sovereignty is an illusion. We are, for the most part, big talkers with meager destinies, at the mercy of luck, global capitalism (which was a thing even then) and one another.

Though it surveys a grim, Hobbesian struggle for survival, “First Cow” has more on its mind and in its viewfinder than the nasty, brutish war of each against all, or the systems of domination intended to keep that war in check. Even in the harshest circumstances, there is still room — still a primal need — for sweetness, for companionship, for art.

Reichardt, who wrote the script with Jon Raymond, her frequent collaborator (his novel “The Half-Life” provides the source material), introduces the story with one of William Blake’s Proverbs of Hell: “The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” We build our homes out of fellow feeling, in other words. King-Lu and Cookie, roommates as well as business partners, illustrate this wisdom. They meet in the wilderness, while Cookie is miserably employed as the cook and chief forager in a gang of trappers on their way to Fort Tillicum. (His real name is Otis Figowitz). King-Lu is hiding out in the woods, running for his life after a murderous bit of trouble with some Russians. They strike up a conversation that carries an unspoken current of curiosity and budding affection.

The possibility of violence hovers in the air around them like a damp chill. Cookie’s companions can barely exchange words without coming to blows, and the same ethos seems to govern Fort Tillicum. (The actual governor, owner of the titular cow, is a noble rotter known as the Chief Factor, played with suitably repellent panache by Toby Jones.) But what develops between Cookie and King-Lu is an exception to this rule of universal antagonism, an instant bond that 19th-century American writers might have described as natural sympathy. It can also be called love.