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  The Shepherd has many happy memories of New York City too. She danced in nightclubs with Sean Penn and Madonna when they were a couple. She hung out with the writer James Purdy, whose hands looked as if Egon Schiele had painted them. She dined with, went to plays with and spent time conversing with Tennessee Williams’ last lover and secretary quite soon after Williams died. She spent time with Lou Reed as they had a mutual friend.

  While she lived in New York City, The Shepherd had a variety of jobs as a waitress, bartender, model, actor, assistant director and stage manager to name but a few of the means by which she earned a livelihood. She stage-managed and assisted many different productions in Off-Broadway theatres, located down dark alleys where one sometimes had to step around or over human bodies cavorting in carnal ways.

  The Shepherd has vivid memories of the Westbeth Artists Community Theater in the West Village, where she worked for a time. The theatre was in a building renowned as the workplace of a famous inventor, Thomas Edison. He made all kinds of new contraptions that a cat like me really doesn’t need, but one that humans depend heavily on was the electric light bulb. I never need light bulbs because I can see in the dark. As for the telephone that humans are addicted to, I don’t need one either. I simply speak out when I need something and if no one is present, I just help myself. The Shepherd tells me that the first recorded message from Thomas Edison was: ‘Mary had a little lamb’, which still takes me by surprise. Whenever I hear my own voice played back to me on a video filmed by The Shepherd, I’m pleased by my work with the sheep. I understand and appreciate how effectively I explain what I do with and for our sheep to satisfy the curiosity of my social media followers. Incidentally, Edison also invented a new type of cement, which greatly improved the older mix. This kind of cement is what we use to repair our stone walls around our walled garden and our farm’s fields.

  The Shepherd remembers Westbeth with particular fondness, because the Irish curly-haired farmer I spoke of earlier visited her there one summer and she got him a job helping to build sets for a production she was working on. This favour would come full circle years later when he provided her with her very first lambs at Black Sheep Farm.

  The Shepherd earned most of her income from her jobs at two small bar-restaurants in Manhattan’s West Greenwich Village. The Cottonwood Cafe on the corner of Bleecker and Bank Streets served a Tex-Mex menu with beer and margaritas. Automatic Slims on Washington Street always played great blues music and served Cajun orientated food, delicious smoked mesquite grilled steaks and fresh vegetables. She enjoyed serving meals and tending bar there. Once, when farm-fresh corn on the cob arrived in Automatic Slims, The Shepherd stunned everyone by grabbing an ear of the flavoursome Silver Queen corn, shucking it, eating raw the kernels and letting the delicious sweet juices dribble down her chin. It’s clear that she may have left the farm behind, but the farm hadn’t left her.

  Cottonwood and Automatic Slims were just a few streets away from the Meatpacking District, which was notorious for cheap ladies of the night and for black-leather-jacketed men’s clubs, where they wore studded collars and chains under the Manhattan Highline. It was most certainly not a neighbourhood for a cat to walk about in.

  I have been told by The Shepherd when I am feeling toooo hot during our occasional Irish heatwave that ’tis nothing like the claustrophobic oppressive humid heat of a New York City summer. She often compares it to the heat in a rainforest, where, she tells me, a jungly afternoon rain shower provides temporary cooling. OK, OK, I gather one has to watch out for leeches in the rainforest’s cool springs, streams or rivers, but the illusion of how to cool off is there.

  Once The Shepherd described the blessing of a rainstorm’s arrival in a particularly torrid spell in the city. She happened to be walking along one of the main avenues when suddenly the rainstorm pelted huge drops, nearly hissing as they splatted on the hot pavement, which began to steam. Other pedestrians fled beneath awnings or into shops to escape the torrential downpour. But instead of trying to escape the wet, The Shepherd revelled in the fresh cool earthy scent brought by the rain from whatever land its moisture had evaporated from. She ran and danced in the street and began to sing ‘Singin’ in the Rain’, as a fine memory of Gene Kelly dancing in the cinematic Paris cloudburst. She saw that people smiled or laughed at her and cheered from their protected shelters from the rain. ‘Come out, come out, enjoy this wonderful cooling wet manna from heaven!’ she shouted. Several individuals joined her dance. They lifted their faces up into the deluge, sang the chorus to ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ and enjoyed the cooling moment. Others said they would love to but hesitated because, ‘I don’t have a change of clothes’, ‘My boss would kill me if I came back soaking wet to the office’.

  Recently, The Shepherd returned from a visit to New York City and to that apartment where she had lived on a shelf over the bathroom that I told you about earlier. She found Tina, her former roommate and an actress, still living there, thirty-five years later. They reminisced about those days and how New York City had completely changed. I find that reminiscence is merely superficial nostalgia. I prefer to focus on the present: when The Shepherd next might go out to make rounds on the sheep, stable, sheds or fields, where my next mouse is coming from, and most importantly, if The Shepherd is to give me a fresh, raw egg for breakfast. But hey ho – unlike us animals, humans love to time-travel in remembrances …

  Tina and The Shepherd reminded each other of the mob hit just outside the front door of their apartment building and how, as they entered their apartment door, they heard a pop-pop-pop noise. When they looked outside after hearing the popping noise, they saw nothing unusual and thought it was just a car backfiring. The dead man wasn’t discovered until the next morning. Rigor mortis had set in. Tina and The Shepherd watched from their sitting room window and saw the man’s stiffened body being pulled from the car. The steering wheel had to be cut off to free him and it was packed with him into the body bag.

  We know all about death and injury here on Black Sheep Farm. Whenever one of our animals dies in the night, we find them the next morning frozen stiff in whatever position death overtook them. The Shepherd usually tries to cover them with a builder’s plastic sheet before crows and magpies fly down to peck at their bodies. The corvid family are notorious for plucking out the eyes of vulnerable sheep whether they are dead or alive. Sometimes when lambing outdoors, The Shepherd might find a ewe who is giving birth to twins. The first lamb is born fine and healthy and the ewe cleans and dries her firstborn. When her second lamb starts to demand her attention as it enters the ewe’s birth canal, the ewe stays close by her firstborn but her attention is diverted and fixed on pushing out her second lamb. This is when corvids strike. Essentially on its own, the firstborn is a perfect target for eye-pecking. Any corvid will hop around the healthy lamb to seek their best angle to peck an eye or a piece of tender flesh. If I am nearby, I stroll across towards the bird, which often might not see me till the last second when I leap. If I am lucky and get quite close without another corvid cackling a warning call, I may take in a mouthful of feathers or make clawed contact with a black breast, but mostly I miss catching them. If I happen not to be there as a protector, The Shepherd may find a lamb with half a skinned tail, an eye missing or its poor back passage bloodied from corvid pecks.

  It’s a funny thing when The Shepherd talks about gunshots and that ‘pop-pop’ noise that they make. I’d really prefer not to think about it, but autumn on Black Sheep Farm, when the hunting season in November is in full swing, makes that very difficult. The only noise that truly frightens me is that from a fired shotgun. My pupils dilate to big black discs; I leap to the top shelf of the press in the kitchen where only Miss Marley and Ovenmitt go. I curl up in the farthest corner, waiting for it to be over.

  My traumas took place many years ago when I first arrived in my new home as a gangly teenager. While out exploring our woods near the neighbours’ fields, I heard people talking, then the shouts of c
anine names, followed by the rustling of lots of dogs in the undergrowth. They were coming closer, so I moved quickly out ahead of them towards the fields. There I saw lone men standing silently with what seemed to be sticks in their arms. They were at regular distances from each other in the grass, intently watching the sky above the woods. All of a sudden, the sticks came to life, cracking with bangs like thunder while pheasants fell from the sky over my head and landed with muffled thrumps on the ground all around me. I was stunned into immobility. Next, the huge dogs rushed all about me and gathered up the fallen pheasants, holding the birds softly in their jaws. I skedaddled so fast, I think I left half my coat behind on the brambles through which I dived to dodge a snuffling waggling canine, who looked happier than a pig on a hot day in cool mud. I left half my claws on the paving outside the scullery door when I raced around the corner into the kitchen, propelled into flight up the kitchen cupboard onto the safety of the top shelf.

  The humans sitting at the kitchen table burst out laughing. ‘Scaredy-cat baby Bodacious,’ teased The Shepherd. ‘Poor fellow, he must have met some of the Gundogs from the local shoot.’

  They were half right, but what really got to me was the bang bang of the shotgun sticks and the pheasants, so like the egg-makers on the farm, falling to the ground with deadly thrumps all around me. I felt like Chicken Licken with the sky falling down on my head.

  Ever since, I have had issues with guns. As soon as I hear them bang, I shoot up to that top shelf, which is otherwise much too hot for me with the heat rising from the Aga. Guns are my only phobia.

  9

  The Swallows Leave

  The stillness of the moon belies the wind-singing branches and clouds flashing by. ’Tis nearly 3 a.m., but there’s little sleep to be had as the wind dances through trees still heavy with leaf while their branches rattle across rooftops and rain thunders down, lashing at the window. The first of the autumn storms breaks the season into a rapid departure from summer.

  My tail twitches as I contemplate distractions like my walk-across-the-yard adversaries, the swallows, who dip and dive at me to distract and drive me from where their young reside. But they will soon depart our farm with the end of their summer season. Before their departure they all gather to perch in rows chitter-chattering together on rooftops and electric and telephone cables. Why they don’t just fly off, no one knows. It’s almost as if they have to gather to share a leap of faith and to encourage each other to start their marathon journey of a migration. After they’ve gone south there will be no more lofty ethereal aerial acrobatics in pursuit of insects which live in our fields’ grasses. During our long wintry months insect life nearly disappears, so swallows will have little or nothing to eat. My avian opponents will migrate to spend winter in sunny South Africa. We’ll see our swallows again next year as soon as our Irish spring begins to glow.

  About every two years, when September rolls around, The Shepherd and I take a very strange walk all over our grazing land. We walk through each of our fields in huge zigzag paths that look like lots of WWWs stuck together. It’s time to sample our soil for its health. Is it too acid or too alkaline or is it just right? Will it continue to grow the finest qualities of grass and wild herbs to keep our Zwartbles sheep flock, alpaca guardians, horses and pony well nourished?

  To determine the health of our fields’ soil we have to begin to collect samples of earth with a most bizarre tool. It is a metal funnel but there is a crossbar welded across the wide end on which to step and push a boot onto. The Shepherd can press with her foot on the bar so the sharp narrow end of the funnel digs into the soil. To position the funnel and to carry it, she uses a long handle topped with a T-bar and she presses it three inches deep into the soil. As The Shepherd strides along she regularly interrupts her walk, plants the tool, steps on its crossbar and pushes the pointed tubular nose of the funnel into the earth. Her strong push makes a narrow three-inch sausage of sod pop up into the funnel’s bowl.

  As we walk in our crazy back-and-forth and up-and-down patterns across every field, the funnel bowl regularly fills with three-inch samples of our shallow rich topsoil. The top six inches of soil is vital to all life on earth. It is where everything grows, of course, which is first eaten by animals and then by humans along the food chain. If the sun shines brightly, I sometimes lounge in one spot and watch The Shepherd. Once she or we (that is if I’m not resting to contemplate higher thoughts in a nice warm place) have moved meticulously over a field, we empty all our samples into a plastic bag and label it with the field’s name and that day’s date. We do this in every field to ascertain the pH of the soil. The level of pH is a critically important measurement of the concentration of acidity, alkalinity or neutrality of soil. A balanced pH of the soil is needed so it stays neutral, halfway between acidic and alkaline, to grow the best grasses and herbs for our flock. If we find a field is acidic we might have to add lime to lessen its acidity. We can do that by pulling our spinning sprinkler behind the quad to spread granulated lime over each field. When we keep the soil at its peak neutrality, all the most essential vitamins and minerals enter the grasses and wild herbs through their roots, which makes them delicious for all our flock.

  When the pH is in purrrrfect neutrality it also helps the soil to eat and digest the food we feed it, such as our well-rotted farmyard manure mixed with straw and wood chips from the sheep’s winter bedding. These sheep-yard leavings enrich our soil by adding and keeping its micro-organisms, bacteria and fungi thriving so they contribute to the growth of lush, easily digestible rich herbs and grasses. The combined essential vitamins and minerals make palatable natural food. Our sheep stay healthier, their milk more ambrosial; it strengthens their wool and their manure becomes richer, which in turn helps continue to improve the soil to grow luscious ovine grass and wild herbs. The lambs grow faster and stronger because they enjoy what they eat. What’s more, our happy sheep produce delicious meat. We tend the soil because Mother Earth needs feeding like any living being.

  In early spring The Shepherd would have spread year-old, well-rotted wooden chips, straw and manure across those fields with the greatest need. In autumn I watch over these manure heaps, as they are so lovely to curl up on for a cosy snooze while warm steam rises around me into the increasingly cold air, a harbinger of soon-to-come wintry winds.

  The Shepherd entertains me from time to time with tales of her student days in the agricultural and forestry college in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. Some of her most memorable adventures happened when icy air blew down from Arctic Canada and ambient temperatures of the Green Mountain State dropped as low as 30 degrees below zero. Added to the Vermont deep freeze was immeasurable wind chill. In this Arctic cold The Shepherd liked to clump through snow and ice to call upon one of the nearest neighbours of the college, an elderly woman with whom The Shepherd enjoyed chatting as she sat in her rocking chair on the front porch of her old weather-beaten wooden clapboard house. Despite the subzero winter weather, the ancient lady always offered her visitors a freshly frozen solid orange treat. The Shepherd always thanked her kindly but tactfully turned this generous offer down. Not bothered by refusals, this hardy Vermont woman just sat back and rocked in her chair while she bit with pleasure into a frozen orange, skin and all, which she savoured like a ripe apple. This wonderful rural peeress was a hardier dame than The Shepherd would ever claim to be or become. She lived beside a country road not far from Craftsbury Common, the village that was home to the agricultural-forestry/wildlife college. A friendly farmer delivered fresh milk in a tin bucket to her every other day, which soon froze on her porch. Whenever she needed milk for her coffee or for her porridge, she came out on her porch clasping a heavy metal spoon, thumped the iced milk to crack its top and scraped the milk chips off.

  Luckily our weather in Ireland never settles to that low temperature range for any length of time despite our geography that puts Ireland in the same latitude as Labrador, a country renowned for its permanent frost. The Shepherd and
I are grateful that Ireland is protected from such an icy climate by the Gulf Stream’s rise from Mexico and the Caribbean Sea.

  The Shepherd has many other fond memories of frigid Vermont winters advancing gradually into early spring. Snow still remained deep but the manure heap on the school’s farm had enlarged thanks to winter’s muck and straw bedding from the stables and barn. This high, very warm pile naturally brewed into fertiliser for the college fields. The students had to walk up a long narrow wooden ramp that stretched out over the pile, wobbling along as they pushed their heavy straw and manure-laden wheelbarrows. It tested one’s strength and balance to dump them into the pile that steamed in the late-winter air. She fondly remembers social breaks after a hard day’s work: late-night gatherings of chat, strummed banjos and guitars and folk songs sung before a blazing log fire on a giant stone hearth inside the students’ log cabin. Sometimes they tired of indoor recreation and stepped outside for fresh air in the small hours of the morning. Then the group would walk down to the school farm just before dawn with the remnants of a bottle or two of wine and musical instruments. They continued to sing as they sat above the manure heap on its wooden ramp with their legs dangling down over the compost heap, its steam rising into the cold air. They would watch the sun rise over the snow-cloaked White Mountains to the east.

  In another wintry adventure on a crisp clear evening, The Shepherd and a group of her classmates put on their homemade snowshoes and hiked through deep snow far into the woods till they came to a glade with a wonderful northwest view. They had brought a gallon of cheap wine and a box of matches and set about building a fire. They gathered the superficial paper-like dry birch bark from nearby paper birch trees, collected dry twigs and long dead branches from the woods surrounding the glade. As daylight faded their fire began to crackle and warm them. They removed their snowshoes and stuck them by their long tail ends deep into the snow. Everyone sat on the extra collected log branches and quietly passed around a bottle of wine, chatting quietly as night fell while the fire strengthened and crackled. They all looked northwest and saw the spectacular aurora borealis ripple across the sky. I’m told that year the Northern Lights were spectacular all over the world due to Mount Saint Helen’s volcanic eruption in southwest Washington State. The glossy, gritty volcanic dust had shot so high into the atmosphere that it amplified any colours of atmospheric relevance, rainbows, sunsets and the aurora borealis.