Bodacious Page 14

  Pre-winter tasks include clearing drains, stacking firewood and preparing feed for our sheep. To do this, we have to collect our gigantic round hay bales that we store in The Shepherd’s cousin’s barn. His farm is next to Black Sheep Farm but we must still drive our bales one at a time along two miles of rough lanes from his barn to our sheep shed and stables. Come rain or shine, wind or snow, The Shepherd must cleverly wedge each single heavy bale to fit into her specially designed round bale trailer. Then she pulls the trailer home with our quad that is like our tractor, with Pepper, as usual, riding behind to keep her company. We deliver each bale to our hungry sheep directly into the grazing fields when there is little grass in good weather and undercover into the sheep feeding shed in rough winter weather.

  One of her least favourite jobs at this time of year is mucking out. But the hard physical work reminds The Shepherd of just how far she’s come since the illness that struck her down over twenty years ago. Whenever she mucks out a shed in spring that is full of sheep manure or lies on the wet ground in pouring rain or stretches flat upon the damp stable floor to reach in up to her elbow to unclog a blocked drain, she can recall how long she spent in bed with a fevered foggy brain and body racked with pain. Whenever she mucks out a stable she still feels her physical movement in every muscle. She can’t help but remember how much she suffered and she has to wonder if her illness might return unexpectedly. She senses how each muscle carries its share of work to keep her legs upright, to move with fluid strength, to sift a sprong (a three tined fork) through straw, to pick up manure and to toss sprongfuls into the wheelbarrow. She wheels the heavy barrow that tests her combined muscle and mind power to reach the muck heap. The weighty load has to be pushed by its handles to the top of the pile, tipped to empty and wheeled back for the next load.

  Every morning she wakes up in hope that her body will carry her through another day. Some days prove better than others, but even if truly bad days are now further apart, she is always haunted by the feeling that her body might suddenly surrender to her illness again.

  With Pepper’s assistance I also oversee The Shepherd continuously as caretaker and sometimes have to nurse her full-time. You see, Pepper ingeniously senses whenever The Shepherd’s tropical fever is about to recur well before she does. Even though The Shepherd has learned over the years the kind of warning signals her body may give and what symptoms to keep an eye out for, it’s Pepper who will lean firmly against her leg, sensing all is not well. He pushes so ridiculously close that he almost trips her if she stands or steps forward. He presses her leg to warn her to become aware that it is time for her to stop whatever she is doing and go straight to bed to rest. The sooner she goes to bed, the quicker she will recover to resume her duties on our farm. While she is in bed, I mind all our house and farm activities.

  How and where does one begin to explain The Shepherd’s sporadically debilitating illness, which I alluded to at the beginning of this book? After she returned to London from what became her last work project in Southeast Asia, she was suddenly overwhelmed by fever. She had loved her job and found it a perfect fit from which to make up her lack of postgraduate education. She helped care for extraordinary varieties of tropical animal species. She met fascinating people with interests similar to hers and had new entertaining adventures daily. She had deeply loved this work with wild exotic animals and the warm lovely people she met and worked with.

  Exhausted by months of long hours in humid tropical heat, wildlife parks, zoos and rainforests, and many hours of travel, often by primitive means, she suddenly sensed something was profoundly amiss. She had walked into the Oxford Street Tube station to the top of the escalators that plunge down to the Underground. As the top moving step slowly brought her into the subterranean underworld, she felt herself spin. Her world became a revolving technicolor kaleidoscope. Fortunately, another human was standing a step below her, so she knew she could not fall down the flight of moving stairs. She hurried home to bed for what she thought was only exhaustion from jet lag and frenetic, difficult work. She thought that a good night’s sleep would banish her malaise. Sadly, that was not to be, as a visit to the Royal Hospital for Tropical Diseases confirmed what she had initially thought might have been a simple flu or dose of toxoplasmosis was probably something more serious and difficult to treat.

  As soon as The Shepherd lay down upon her hospital bed, she felt her body let itself go, as it had found a safe place to collapse. She had enormous muscular pain. She suffered pounding headaches that she described as feeling as if she had a watermelon-sized brain confined within a pea-sized skull. During her first week in hospital, she underwent a plethora of tests for tropical diseases. Some tests were revolting, like one called the string test, in which she had to swallow a pill the size of her pinky finger attached to a long length of coarse string. One end of the string hung out of her mouth. The nurse held one end of loose string while The Shepherd swallowed the huge pill and the long string. Once the pill and string had been swallowed, its loose end of string was taped to The Shepherd’s cheek. Many hours passed with no food permitted to protect the string from stomach acid and digestive enzymes. The string and pill capsule passed almost all the way down through The Shepherd’s small and large intestine. The nurse then pulled the string slowly back through The Shepherd’s throat and she gagged with nausea as it slid from her throat and mouth. This kind of string test was one of the few ways to look for particular kinds of tropical parasites. However, one blood test confirmed that The Shepherd had, in fact, had toxoplasmosis at one point eighteen months before.

  Toxoplasmosis is an illness well known in cats, sheep and humans and can cause abortions. ’Tis well known to spread by us felines as well as rodents and some even say by birds. Cats have traditionally been accused of being the terrible spreaders of toxoplasmosis. We allegedly hinder shepherds by infecting their flocks and ruining their health, so many sheep farmers intensely dislike us. With modern husbandry, however, the parasitic disease can be prevented by a vaccine or treated in humans with an antibiotic, if necessary. I help The Shepherd administer this vaccine every year, a month before our flock of ewes is visited by a ram. We use several vaccines, which keep our flock healthy. I feel that prevention is far better than cure, especially with sheep. Ask any shepherd and they will say that sheep seem to love to die in any way they can, even invent new ways to die. With farming livestock, one always has some dead stock and we mourn our losses of animal friends. By contrast there exists so much reward for us in all the wonderful real-world beauty that surrounds us and in life between birth and death: it keeps us going, ever hopeful and happy.

  The Shepherd often tells me that her only companion during the years of bed rest that followed was her mind, filled with memories of her adventurous life. She couldn’t watch TV or listen to music to distract herself as the noise and flickering light hurt her eyes and her head. So instead, she played out her recollections on the ceiling of her bedroom. She used the white cracked plaster as an imagined canvas where she painted her remembrances. At other times she closed her eyes and remembered in her mind’s eye how she rode a horse galloping bareback by a sandy seashore. She sensed the inhalation of the smell and taste of wet salty sea air and the intimate feel of every one of her muscle movements staying with the motion of the horse. She felt the power, the wet and smell of horsey sweat and the lash of its mane whipping across her face as the horse rose and fell in its smooth soothing rocking rhythmic gallop. She recalled the sound and splash of hooves as they impacted the wave-washed sand and then pushed off to continue forward momentum.

  The first year she mostly rested in bed to survive, but she planted an avocado seed, which she watched sprout and grow until it became so tall that it had to live outside her basement room’s door in its second year. Then she was saddened when an early first frost killed it. Death was unintended, but these things happen.

  As The Shepherd tells it, one of her most vivid memories of her years of bedridden stillness in Vi
rginia, was lying on a sofa in her parents’ sheltered glass sun porch, where she viewed a big Siberian Elm. This tree stood slightly downhill from the porch on the property line shared with the neighbours. What she remembers best is the many hours she lay each day watching the tree through all its seasons. So she can now see in retrospect a short film in her mind’s eye of this great elm tree as it spun through its seasons of light spring green, summer’s dark green, brown autumnal colours, the fall of leaves, then naked in winter, occasionally trimmed in snow or dripping icicles that glittered in winter sun.

  When November rolls around, the coming of winter is in the air as frosts crunch underfoot. Final preparations must be made to house our ewes close to their lambing time so that their newborns will be sheltered from the worst weather. First, the shed must be cleared out and the floor cleaned of all manure. Then a layer of dried woodchips that The Shepherd received earlier in the year from a local tree surgeon is spread across the shed floor. Woodchips will insulate as well as absorb. Once they are spread, golden straw is rolled out on top of them. I LOVE this part as sometimes there are mice to chase when they come scuttling out of the straw. The straw is warm and insulates against the coming cutting winter winds. I am often found curled up in the straw bedding, as is Ovenmitt.

  Once the lambing shed is prepared for winter, we are ready to bring in our expectant ewes. Having been introduced to the ram in October, they are now scanned with an ultrasound instrument to see how many lambs each ewe carries: one, two, three or none at all.

  Lambing must be a carefully planned procedure and The Shepherd practises the modern husbandry technique of ‘sponging’ to ensure that all our ewes produce their lambs at more or less the same time. Such a tight breeding schedule enables The Shepherd to do all the lambing herself because she will have two precise sets of lambing dates with a ten-day break between each in the middle of the lambing season to recover from lack of sleep. Very sensible, I think.

  Next, winter feeding begins and depends on such variables as when our ewes are due to lamb, how much grass is in our fields, how wet or dry our land is and the type of weather. Now I closely watch the condition of our rams’ and ewes’ feet – they are occasionally prone to scald. This condition is a bit like very severe athlete’s foot in humans – except more painful than itchy, and can cause lameness. Ovenmitt often likes to sit and chat to The Shepherd when she has flipped over a sheep to tend to this bacterial problem. With a coarse cloth that she draws in between the sheep’s cloven hoof, she cleans and dries each foot where the bacteria has rubbed and made the flesh raw. Then she sprays on a blue liquid spray that contains the antibiotic chlortetracycline, which kills and dries out the fungus. Within twenty-four hours the sheep is usually sound again.

  Now is also the time that The Shepherd removes the ram after the six-week period he has had to be present during the two seventeen-day breeding cycles. When his work is done, he is placed in a confined space with all our other rams who have been taken away from their chosen flocks of ewes. They must be kept in this tightly confined space for a week to ten days so that they don’t kill each other fighting over who is top boss.

  As Black Sheep Farm is so hilly, a ram that charges downhill can easily hit and kill another ram. We all saw this happen once when The Shepherd turned our rams out together too early. I was, as usual, sitting on one of my fence posts, where I watched as the rams were turned out. One ram ran uphill, then turned and charged down, gathering speed as he went. Another ram, whom we call The Welshman, had faced uphill and stood his ground to challenge this act of aggression. The charging ram smashed right into him with such great force that The Welshman flipped over and flew backwards, knocked out cold. The Shepherd leapt into the field to chase off the aggressive ram, which was continuing to pummel the downed ram. She and her friends who had witnessed this thought he was surely dead as blood streamed from his nose. It took The Shepherd weeks of careful nursing to get The Welshman right again. She spent time and effort keeping him alive because she was fond of him and admired his hardy Zwartbles breeding from the Welsh Mountains. Happily, The Welshman survived, and The Shepherd had learned not to let rams out too early.

  After rams get over their aggression towards each other, they and Smudge have a ten-month holiday to eat, sleep and enjoy a life of leisure till the next breeding season arrives.

  With nights drawing in, there is more time to spend by the Aga to warm ourselves after our routine twice-daily feeding of hay and checking of stock. As daylight hours become so short and expectant ewes need eight hours between meals, our rounds are done after dark by torchlight or in light from the quad’s headlights. In the mornings, as the darkness fades, the gloaming dawn light can be breathtakingly beautiful. The Shepherd stands to watch it unfold across the river valley as mists rise in cream greys, silvers, pinks and purples against the stark black-silhouetted winter trees. During these moments I must sometimes reach up and sink my claws into The Shepherd’s leg to spur her into action as she stands transfixed. Our sheep must be fed, and our dogs are hungry, I want my second breakfast and she probably needs her pot of black tea and hot porridge.

  On rainy mornings, I make my way across the yard as I hear The Shepherd perform her morning ablutions, brush her teeth, flush her litterbox, then thump downstairs to open the scullery door. As on every other morning, we felines are outside, waiting. We’ve hunted mice and rats all night while those canines had cushy beds in the farmhouse. I stretch my front paws as far up as I can reach on the red wooden scullery door to scratch my prime hunting talons with impatience. I hear a key click slowly in its lock. The Big Fellow finds the click unbearable, and lets out one of his rich, deep ear-splitting barks. Then the door opens and the dogs all rush past me as they leap over the threshold into the rain. I swish my tail that glitters with rain droplets, my wet coat sleeked down. Sauntering in, I leave wet paw prints on the scullery flagstones. I demand my first breakfast at once as I have worked hard all night. Ovenmitt bounds through the door after me, shaking rain off his short tabby coat, and tries to rub himself dry on The Shepherd’s trousers. He plaintively mews complaints about all and sundry, as is his wont, and demands breakfast. A lidded bucket that holds our cat biscuits pops open and a scoop cut from a plastic milk carton digs out our breakfast biscuits.

  As Ovenmitt and I settle into breakfast, all canines return with a bounce back inside. The Big Fellow whines impatiently as The Shepherd begins to pull on her boots, which Bear tries to grab at and run out the door into the rain with. Finally, her boots are on and with a rustle the waterproof trousers are pulled up. Raincoat and hat are donned. With a pat on my back and a loving tug at Ovenmitt’s tail, The Shepherd strides into wet and wind to do the morning rounds. With a bouncy meow, I trot behind her and try to keep up, my feline short-legged stride no match for her brisk walk, particularly when the yard is wet and muddy. I try to keep her abreast of the night’s developments as she walks and as we begin another day.

  The Shepherd often tells me stories by the Aga during the long winter nights – wild and colourful yarns about her former life as an actress, or learning to become a farmer. She has a couple of favourites, one involving someone she calls Ichabod Crane, a strange name, perhaps Dutch, I think, like the origins of my Zwartbles sheep. She often takes this story out for a spin at Hallowe’en. She tells me that the house where she lived, while breaking and training Morgan houses, in upstate New York, was once the home to a schoolteacher named Jesse Merwin, who would became known in the tale of the headless horseman as Ichabod Crane in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving, an American writer.

  The house was typically Dutch colonial, a wooden clapboard structure with big stone steps leading up to a small front porch. Large old trees surrounded the house and its small windows kept the interior cool during the height of summer. Offset and to the left was a more modern structure that housed a kitchen and another entrance, which was favoured over the traditional farmhouse front door. In farmhouses, you rarely, if ever,
come in the front door anyway. Upon entering the kitchen extension, you could see three doors: one directly in front, which led out to the back of the house, a second on the far wall at an angle, which led down into the original house’s root cellar and which would have been an exterior door before this kitchen had been built. As you turned right, you would reach a third door, which led to the old part of the house and the dining room. This room, too, had three doors, one on the opposite wall, which led into the rest of the house, to the owner’s bedroom and to a snug living room. The second door opened into a small guest room with a bed, which was built into the original structure of the old house. The third door gave access to a steep narrow-walled stairway up to two bedrooms in the eves of the house. All doors in the old part of the house had traditional old metal hooks and latches, which made a double click and chink sound when they were opened and closed. Also, whenever a strong wind blew outside, they rattled.

  The Shepherd stayed in a room at the top of those steep narrow stairs. One evening, when she returned from a 4th of July party on another farm, she entered the kitchen through the side entrance and locked its door. She noticed the open cellar door and light on. She walked over and called down to see if her boss was down below. There was no answer. She didn’t want to turn off any lights if her boss was awake, as she was an elderly lady, so The Shepherd walked down into the cellar, but found no one. She came back upstairs and switched off the cellar light and closed the door. She stepped over the kitchen threshold into the dining room and switched off the kitchen light behind her.

  As she was about to take another step she heard a door open and a light go on behind her. She turned, ready to apologise to her boss for turning the lights off prematurely, but no one was there. Confused, she went back into the kitchen, opened the cellar door and peered down. ‘Hello?’ No answer.