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  ‘Get rid of that dog and you can tag along,’ he said as he rode off. After he’d trotted a few paces away, he looked back and shouted, ‘Just don’t expect anyone to stop and pick you up if you fall!’

  The Shepherd hurriedly handed Max into the care of her friend so she could join in the hunt on the pony. It turned out to be one of the greatest rides of her life to follow the Kilkenny Hunt that day. Back then farmland still remained very old-fashioned, full of small fields and meadows enclosed by stone walls, thick hedges and big ditches and often divided by streams and rivers. These rural parts of the landscape, some man-made and others natural, served as boundaries to contain livestock and sheep. Farmers had not yet fenced off meadows and fields to keep livestock from drinking and wading into streams and rivers. Very few farmers had sheep wire or thin electric wire to fence off their fields. Rarely one might meet a strand of barbed wire across a stone wall or on the inside of a hedge, but generally fields had not yet been made into small grazing paddocks contained within a thin strand of electric fencing wire.

  The Connemara pony that The Shepherd had been schooling for several months was a solid, game little fellow and testament to the hardiness of the famed Irish breed. He jumped well clear of any hedge, wall, ditch or fence that The Shepherd faced him with. He was an unsung country Pegasus, a pony who flew with wings. The most exciting episode occurred when The Shepherd and the Connemara had to swim across a body of water. Riding the wet pony suddenly became like clinging to the back of a squirming, slippery eel. The Shepherd squeezed her legs tight as he galloped after the swim and pursued the hunt with leaps over ditches and banks and big stone walls. Luckily for her, The Shepherd balanced well enough to stay on board until the pony’s back dried out from the friction between the body of the pony and the strong legs of the rider.

  As the day drew to a close, The Shepherd realised that she had ridden many miles from home, so she had a long way to go in the dusk before she could end their day and rest the pony and herself. As she rode past a friend’s farm, she calculated that she had a six-mile hack ahead of her and the dusk was turning to darkness. She thought she might dismount and walk a while as her body felt like it had been split up the middle and all sorts of muscles ached from so much fast, furious riding. She was about to jump off the pony when a young girl on a bicycle peddled up to her.

  ‘Are you Suzanna?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘My da said to tell you to come back to our house as someone is going to give you a lift home.’

  With a great sigh of relief at the proffered gift of a lift home, The Shepherd turned the Connemara off the road home. She followed the young bicycling girl up the lane towards her family’s farm, only half a mile away. The girl showed her into a warm stable, where the tired pony could rest and recover. Although exhausted, The Shepherd grabbed a brush and a handful of fresh golden straw to rub him down. As a typical Connemara, after a hard day’s work, he snorted with pleasure as his head plunged into a big bowl of feed next to a pail of fresh water and a pile of last summer’s beautiful hay.

  Mr Hughes, the father of the girl, was very pleased, and welcomed The Shepherd as she walked into the farmhouse. ‘Here she is, here she is!’

  A great shout of ‘Hello! Well done, well ridden. That was quite a ride’ arose from a room full of people who had ridden on the hunt or who had viewed The Shepherd and the Connemara riding in the hunt from the road.

  ‘What will you have to drink?’ Mr Hughes asked. The exhausted Shepherd could barely think, so she just said the first thing that popped into her head … ‘A gin and tonic, please.’ Mr Hughes then poured a tall glass with three-quarters gin and a splash of tonic. The Shepherd sat relaxed. She hadn’t realised how thirsty she had become and downed her drink much too fast. Before she knew it, a second had been placed in her hand. By the time her automobile ride home was ready to depart, she could barely stand after the quantity of unintended drink she had taken.

  The Shepherd no longer hunts because she feels too old. She no longer needs the adrenaline kick of a race across the countryside following the melodious sound of hounds in full cry. However, for many years afterwards, friends and hunting people remembered The Shepherd as someone who had ridden bareback with the Kilkenny Hounds. They recalled how she had not only kept up with the hounds but also stayed mounted, no matter how difficult the going. After that long hunting ride the owners of the Connemara heard about The Shepherd and the pony’s endurance. They sold the pony on the strength of that day’s achievement. Well, if someone can ride a pony and follow the hunt bareback, the pony has to be a very good one indeed.

  The lambing season in Counties Wicklow and Carlow was The Shepherd’s best earning gig she tells me, and where she learned the lessons that would stand her in such good stead when she became manager of Black Sheep Farm. She was fed and watered, but earned only £50 a month – a pittance, really. I do better with my endless supply of crunchy cat biscuits, mixed with the occasional – delicious – raw egg. Not owning a car, she couldn’t go anywhere to spend her hard-earned cash. Because money was so tight, when she walked to the local pub, she chose the nights when one could sing for a drink.

  The first farmhouse in which she worked had flagstones that covered the entire ground floor. Everyone had a set of wooden clogs they put on to insulate their feet from the cold stones after removing their muddy outdoor boots. The Shepherd was encouraged to ride a small horse that belonged to the farmer’s children, which she rode bareback around the fields to inspect the turned-out ewes with new lambs. This farmer had such a large flock of sheep and so much land that he had employed a permanent shepherd, a farm manager and several other farmhands full-time.

  One day, after The Shepherd had been on the farm for four weeks, a herd of cattle needed to be moved to a new field. To reach this new field the stock had to be walked between unfenced woodland and a large field of unfenced winter wheat. All hands were called to help keep the cattle on the track and not permit them to stray into the woods or graze the young crop of wheat. The plan was for the tractor and trailer to lead the herd with cattle feed while the men and The Shepherd were to follow and flank the cattle. The farm shepherd, Noel, who had worked with The Young Shepherd for a month, suggested that she ride the horse to help herd the cattle. As they set out across the farm, the men all walked in a group while The Shepherd rode behind them. Noel walked in their midst. They chatted away together, laughed and slapped hands. The Shepherd sensed something was about to happen but she didn’t know what that might be. When they moved the cattle onto the farm track behind the tractor and trailer, the men spread out widely to contain the stock. The Shepherd rode after the herd and watched to see if she would be needed to keep cattle from straying off the lane. As they approached the area where the unfenced woods were on one side and the unfenced young crop of winter wheat on the other, one of the road men who flanked the winter wheat side slipped, fell down the track’s bank and spooked the cattle. They fled briskly away from him into the unfenced woods. The bareback-mounted Shepherd squeezed her horse’s flanks, leaned forward and galloped into the woods to head off the cattle and herd them back onto the track. She galloped, weaving and dodging branches, trees and whippy young saplings, to get to the head of the herd. She gracefully turned the herd back towards the farm lane, where the men stood watching.

  After that episode nothing more exciting occurred as they completed the walking of the cattle into their fresh fenced field. Then the men and Noel piled onto the tractor’s trailer. The Shepherd rode behind and they turned to go back to the farmyard. Noel seemed very happy and he appeared to be collecting money from all the men.

  ‘What’s going on?’ The Shepherd asked.

  ‘Sure didn’t I bet the lot that you would stay on the horse? They bet agin you, even tried to get you off by spooking the cattle, so I bet more when you set off into the woods. I won a packet!!!’

  ‘Maybe you should give me some of that cash as I stayed on for you for two
bets,’ remarked The Shepherd.

  ‘Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,’ replied Noel.

  Noel taught The Shepherd a great deal about looking after sheep, but it’s true to say that The Shepherd is no stranger to sexism in the farming world. She has become quite an advocate for women farmers in this very male domain. In fact, like the explorer Isabella Bird, she has always sought work that some might have considered the preserve of men. She tells me that she once applied for a job to work in one of the clean-up crews, who were paid very high wages to go to the Middle East and clean up burning oil fields after the First Gulf War. This became impossible for her as women would only be employed as cooks or laundry staff, and this was not something The Shepherd ever wished to do. She was never able to see why a woman shouldn’t do the same job as well as a man.

  Now, to live in Ireland as a woman farmer with a flock of sheep has taught The Shepherd that, even though her farming colleagues and neighbours are nothing but helpful and kind, only occasionally, will they roll their eyes at her. Often The Shepherd recounts the story of a male visitor who asked her if ‘The Boss’ was in, and how she quickly put him straight despite the strong, outdated current of misogyny that still flows through some of the Irish farming community. Much like how I, as a Shepherd Cat, strive for parity with my canine crew, The Shepherd seeks to be equal to men within the farming community.

  In response to this anachronistic bias against agrarian women, The Shepherd recently helped to found a support group for female farmers called Women of the Land. They named their local chapter South-East Women in Farming Ireland, or SEWIF. When the group met to consider what a logo for their group should look like, The Shepherd proposed sheaves of grain draped in the shape of a woman’s eyebrow. This logo reminds farmers, female or male, of Áine, the Irish goddess of grains, grasses and early agriculture.

  The Shepherd has continued to encourage agrarian women to rise above and beyond the role of seeing themselves as ‘just’ the unpaid bookkeeper or ‘just’ the calf-feeder, or the one who ‘just’ stands in the gap to keep the flock or herd moving along a chosen path. Instead she has encouraged these enlightened women of the land to assume the honourable primary title of ‘farmer’. They are not ‘just’ anything, they are farmers in their own right.

  One day The Shepherd was asked to speak at a SEWIF meeting to help women in her community summon up the courage to assert their sense of pride as farmers. To inspire them, she spoke about the history and evolution of agriculture. She reminded them that long ago, their ancestors belonged to tribes that roamed across vast lands and hunted and gathered within the wilds of nature. The women with children gathered grains, fruits, nuts and roots. It struck The Shepherd that it may well have been these early females, who had made food gathering a useful art, who also developed skills in caring for animals. Women who were breast-feeding their own babies might well have shared their milk with animals – orphaned lambs or goats, for example – it is a common theme historically and was practised by many tribes in many countries. So, it makes sense, The Shepherd knows, that the suckled animals would happily have followed these women gatherers. After all, orphaned lambs today follow dog-like whoever feeds them a sup of milk. Much like my many fellow female felines, who have raised clutches of baby egg-makers or baby rabbits and hedgehogs.

  It seems likely that as humans moved from place to place, more animals would have been kept, tended and harvested to support the tribe. Women would have continued to gather grains while males kept their responsibility of hunting and tribal protection. This division of labour would have enabled women to become shepherds to small herds or flocks of animals, which would have followed them for feeding. So began the dependence of animals upon these early female agrarians who, according to The Shepherd, domesticated their newly acquired livestock. And these shepherds would eventually have observed that where animals had left behind their manure, grass would grow richer, greener and sweeter. So why not drop some seeds of grain in soil near manure? They would return to find stronger bigger grains growing, thanks to the naturally laid-down fertiliser.

  So, to become a ‘farm-her’ became ingrained in women’s blood, part of their evolution, if you like. Whether or not they agreed with her, the women present at The Shepherd’s talk found themselves greatly energised with confidence by their central role in agriculture, and confident that they could still take up the reins to run their own farms and agri-businesses. Women may only own 13 per cent of Irish farms (and this figure excludes jointly owned farms), but this proportion of female agrarians doesn’t nearly reflect their considerable contribution to Irish farming. Also, many men have the farm and herd number in their names but work off-farm, while the women do the farm work and still don’t call themselves farmers.

  Sexism aside, her work with Noel taught The Shepherd a lot about caring for sheep. She learned to recognise the difference between a ewe about to lamb and a distressed ewe who had a problem lambing. One time, while she inspected ewes and lambs two fields away from the lambing sheds, she was riding bareback with one of the farm manager’s daughters sitting in front of her. She heard a ewe call out in distress and right away, she brought the horse around the fields towards the huge sheep shed. She swung her leg over the horse’s rump and leapt off, landing on the ground with great ease. She then reached up and lifted the girl down. She pulled the horse’s reins over its head and told the young girl to hold the horse while she climbed over a gate into the shed. She discovered and tended to the ewe’s difficult lambing, put the fresh-born lambs with their mother in a nursery pen and gave her hands a quick wash. Then she remounted and resumed riding in the fields within twenty minutes, with the farm manager’s daughter again in front of her.

  The girl asked, ‘How did you know something was wrong?’

  ‘I was listening,’ said The Shepherd. ‘After a while you get to know the different sounds and tones a sheep’s baa makes. They sound one way when food is coming and differently when food is late. When a mother ewe calls her lamb and when sheep friends call each other from separate pens, they make distinctly different noises. If a ewe has trouble lambing, she makes her own clear sound of distress. These are ways that sheep use to speak to each other and to us. As shepherds, we must learn to understand the different calls. Just listen carefully and you will learn the different accents and tones and what they mean.’

  Part III

  AUTUMN

  7

  Mackerel Skies

  The changing of the seasons reminds me of the old phrase, ‘Mackerel sky, mackerel sky. Never long wet and never long dry.’ Mackerel skies tell us rain is on the wind. The other saying that The Shepherd often quotes is, ‘Mackerel skies and mares’ tails make tall ships wear small sails’ – in other words, we’ll be in for some windy weather, or so she says. She also tells me that in France, a mackerel sky is called a ciel moutonné, or ‘fleecy sky’, in Spain, a cielo empedrado, or ‘cobbled sky’. In Germany it is known as schäfchenwolken – ‘sheep clouds’ – and in Italy they are pecorelle – ‘little sheep’.

  When one works on land or with livestock ’tis good to know what weather is to come. It prepares us for whatever job we should do next, like spreading lime to help the soil grow good grass, or to expect that rain will soften the earth to ease our jobs, such as digging hardened dry ground.

  September also reminds The Shepherd, and therefore me, of a perennial – and inescapable – problem on our land: dogs that stray into sheep fields. Now, you might well think that I would say this just because I’m a cat, but The Shepherd would like me to explain why it’s very serious. We have had several incidents of dogs killing sheep in our farming neighbourhood. A few years ago, in a two-mile circle around our farm, three flocks lost sheep, killed by ‘sweet, harmless’ pet dogs. Only one farmer was at hand when two dogs entered his field, where they killed some of his sheep. Luckily, he shot and killed both – an act which might strike you as cruel, but which sadly is absolutely necessary. And it’s the agrarian law:
livestock farmers in Ireland are legally permitted to kill any dog that comes into their fields and disturbs their animals.

  It’s not just the sheep that are killed who suffer. Those who escape the canine attacks become so traumatised by the attacks of their flock-mates that they abort lambs. They are never able to breed again. They lose their nerve and deteriorate into sheep that are difficult to manage, since they’ve been made permanently susceptible to the tiniest stress. Just like a dog that has attacked once, felt the excitement of its wolf heritage course through its body and will no doubt attack again, a sheep will revert to her instinct of being prey, a hunted animal. And, as The Shepherd has told me, although sheep have been selectively bred for centuries into a multitude of different shapes and sizes, and that universally, all sheep have been bred to become flocking animals, deep within their DNA they still retain their ancient trait of scattering rather than flocking when predators advance.

  Once, The Shepherd witnessed this phenomenon when she was with her granny, visiting a group garden project not far from Black Sheep Farm. When they arrived there seemed to be utter chaos, with people and sheep running all around the garden. The sheep refused to flock and persistently scattered in all directions. It turns out that these gardeners had grown marijuana. When several sheep had escaped their field, they wandered into the garden, found the ‘Mary Jane’ particularly delicious and ate it all. It seems that sheep will return to their ancient non-flocking instinct when they feel a desire to get stoned on marijuana …

  Not long ago a neighbouring farmer called into our yard to chat to The Shepherd. Because I lounged on a generous soft snatch of stray hay in the yard, I overheard his story. He had noticed dog owners who stood and watched their tiny rat of a Yorkshire Terrier run after a flock of his sheep. They laughed as their tiny dog wreaked havoc among heavily pregnant ewes.