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  I also find that I have to look after The Shepherd from time to time. As I mentioned earlier, long ago she worked for a wildlife charity in Southeast Asia. She befriended many exotic wild animals while she collected and collated animal-husbandry and veterinary information to bring home to her employer in London. This was before you could google such specialist information and find correct answers. While there, she contracted a tropical sickness which kept her bedridden for three years. Although this illness lingers, she manages capably with my help and enjoys her farm work, although I still have to play nursemaid to her whenever she succumbs to a recurrence. I lie on her to keep her stationary, so that she rests. It’s a hard life.

  On top of this, I give instructions while The Shepherd cooks and I make sure all the eggs are collected from my egg-makers. They might think their eggs are hidden, but I know where they hide them, behind bales of straw and nestled in loose hay. I also keep other animals in check and I’m not above giving one of them a clawed slap to keep them under control. When The Shepherd is working in the garden I make sure the robin doesn’t get all the worms, leaving some behind to naturally enrich the soil – it’s simple really, I just chase him away from the top of the garden fork. I ignore Miss Marley, but I must always control Ovenmitt to show him who is the main Shepherd Cat.

  My work never ends, but my day usually debuts when I feel like it. Sometimes it begins when the scullery door to the house opens and I enter to breakfast on crunchy cat biscuits. Other days start by counting sheep with The Shepherd and our canine work companions. I find the most accurate way to check sheep is to count the legs and divide by four.

  I enjoy walks through the fields to inspect ewes and lambs. Some are old friends whom I greet with a gentle welcome salutation of a headbutt. Others try to headbutt me, so I tend to avoid them. Ram lambs can be quite stroppy, so I must watch out for them in particular. Mostly all is well as we walk through fields to count ewes and lambs, check fences, stone walls and note what the wildlife is doing as each year turns. All that counting sheep can make me feel a bit sleepy though, so afterwards I sometimes catch a snooze in front of or on top of the Aga.

  After more than twenty years in charge, The Shepherd is passably competent and the benefits of supervising her outweigh the disadvantages, so I do not plan to move on at this time. But I am a singularly independent cat and I should never be taken for granted. I am NOT child-friendly and I do not suffer fools gladly. I am a busy professional, intelligent – if I say so myself – hard-working farm cat. Humans have tried to pick me up, but quickly drop me when my teeth sink into their hands or arms. When teased, my claws quickly find exposed flesh. The only human I respect is my own human, The Shepherd. As she is a female farmer, she will sometimes be patronised by male humans and asked to show someone where the ‘real boss’ is. She can’t really point to me and say, ‘There’s my boss’, or they might laugh even harder, even if we both know it to be true.

  On cold misty mornings when we walk up and down rolling green hills of the 14 acres of our part of a 50-acre farm, mist from our exhaled breath fills the air. We feel we are on our own until all of our flock of sheep troop up to us, baa-ing, out of the misty banks of air. When a cold winter sun leaks weak milky light and frost whitens the ground in dark dawn of day, black shapes linger far across fields and then draw close as they are called for breakfast. The rattle of the Magic Bucket of sheep nuts lures them towards us.

  Of course, many jobs other than winter-feeding must be done. I like to oversee the vaccination and dosing for worms of sheep and lambs in particular. I sit on a wooden worktable or on a ledge of an old stone wall that overlooks the working sheep yard. I chat with a sheep occasionally as The Shepherd vaccinates or doses each one. When farm machinery needs a grease or service I stand by to supervise. I enjoy gardening and when not directing The Shepherd as she digs, I sleep in the deep cool shade of box hedges. If someone passes and I wake up, I always shout, ‘Meow’ to say, ‘Hello’ and rise up out of my cosy bed to steer them towards another job. Farming is like that: there are always a thousand jobs to do and many of them never get done. For farmers a weekend is still a weather dependent daily job dictated by season not hours or a categorised allotment of days.

  In rain, sun, snow and wind I pad down laneways, cross winter streams, carefully walk through muddy gateways, weave my way through long summer grasses, jump on to the tops of fence posts to survey my flock of sheep, or wander along tops of walls to view them from a great height. So far my fluffy tail has never been closed in a gate, but I have sometimes been left on the wrong side and have had to crawl under or through it – most undignified. Mind you, I’m quite immune to wet muddy yards now as my city-slicker days of long ago and my distant youth are far behind me. This is my life now and I wouldn’t wish it any different.

  Part I

  SPRING

  1

  Egg-makers and Spring Flowers

  During the mucky, muddy month of March on Black Sheep Farm there is a unique sight to behold as daffodils flower. In what is called the ‘middle lawn’ field, it looks like the sun has gone splat and landed there. There are at least twenty-one different kinds of daffodil that flower and there could be more. The Shepherd’s grandparents planted all the bulbs many years before my time. This is how they earned their livelihood – by selling flowers and vegetables at local markets.

  Black Sheep farmhouse, with its lovely pale yellow and pink exterior, now covered with a thick layer of ivy, its fine porch supported by four Tuscan columns (not installed by the Tuscans, obviously, but much later), its large slate roof, and its warm stone outhouses, has been in The Shepherd’s family for generations. She occasionally pulls a dusty old book, dated 1801, off the shelf to show guests the history of our farm. I always sneeze when she opens that creaking book with its cracked leather binding. She indicates where her triple great-grandfather wrote long ago about sheep farming. In those distant, now almost foreign times, a horse or donkey powered the plough. Many flocks of sheep had their standards and qualities measured by how many cheeses their milk made per day from the milk collected. Back then, sheep gave birth, kept their lambs only six weeks before weaning and all ewes were milked (today, with modern farming, most flocks of sheep are farmed just for their meat). There are a few dairies these days that milk sheep and more coming on line in Ireland as humans become aware of how delicious sheep’s milk is, much to The Shepherd’s delight. The farmers produced delicious cheeses from sheep’s milk that were then sold weekly in nearby Kilkenny city. In those days, with no refrigeration, sheep’s milk lasted longer, never soured and kept its fine flavour better when it was made into cheese. So, sheep that could be milked and whose milk produced a lot of cheeses were considered a superior flock. Cow’s milk was a rival, but when made into butter or cheese tainted more easily in pre-refrigeration days. Sheep’s cheese was more durable.

  Nowadays, as well as using the wool to make fine woollen blankets, The Shepherd still follows many other agrarian tasks that she learned from her grandparents when she was a little girl, visiting Black Sheep Farm from her home, which was then thousands of miles away in America.

  Unlike myself, an Irish-born Kilkenny city feline, The Shepherd was born in New York City, where her father (now a tall, still-handsome man with a stoop and a diligent, calm manner) worked in city hospitals. When The Shepherd was born, she was not a completely well child. It was soon discovered she was allergic to cow’s milk. In fact, soon after I arrived on the farm, The Shepherd and her mother were cleaning out a tall press in the kitchen when they discovered on the top shelf hidden at the back a big blue-grey tin of Gerber’s baby soy milk. It still had the price tag and label from a Belfast shop. The Shepherd wanted to save it as a souvenir but her ma did not, saying, ‘When you were a baby, you were so thin, people thought I was starving you.’

  The Shepherd is lucky to have known all her grandparents and some elderly cousins to whom she could ask questions about her family history. Her bloodlines are abou
t as pure as our mixed mutt, Bear. Her hodgepodge American-Irish ancestry reflects input from Ireland, Scotland, England, colonial Maryland and Ukraine. Farming runs deep in her blood, though. On her paternal side her many times great grandfather was born in 1735, in Maryland, where he farmed in Pleasant Valley, Washington County, a mile or so west of Crampton’s Gap in South Mountain, a north extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  The Shepherd’s paternal grandfather was a very handsome Don Juan, who pursued many beautiful well-known women between and during his first three marriages. He abandoned his first wife (The Shepherd’s grandmother), who was a successful journalist and fashion writer in the 1920s, when The Shepherd’s father was very young and his sister just a baby. His mother, Louise, survived the Great Depression as a single parent and supported her children through her careers in Benton & Bowles advertising firm in New York and editing the Connecticut state guide book. When finances were difficult, kind farmers let her glean leftover potatoes and carrots from harvested fields. The Shepherd’s father remembers how his mother would create a sense of picnic and adventure as she roasted their meagre dinner in the fireplace of their small farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Now, vegetables and fresh, tasty lamb are plentiful on Black Sheep Farm, but the thrift and care that The Shepherd learned from her parents and grandparents has never left her.

  When The Shepherd and I are gone, my beautiful Zwartbles flock will disperse and the farmstead will pass on to its next inhabitant. The Shepherd’s only wish is that her philosophy of steady improvement of farmland will continue with whomever comes after her. She fell in love with country life and sundry farming tasks as a child. Her mother’s family has farmed this land hereabouts in Ireland for many generations and from her maternal Irish grandfather, whose family had owned Black Sheep Farm, she learned how to look after and harvest vegetables, red- and blackcurrants and raspberries in his market garden. He also taught her how to pick and box apples, pears and plums from his orchard. Her Irish grandmother taught her how to bed and grow flowers and cut and arrange bunches to sell. Her maternal grandfather called himself a market gardener, but he was also a gifted writer of five books of acclaimed essays. Her grandmother was a painter and poet, and she also fostered many children during the Second World War and other troubled times.

  In the USA at her Maryland cousins’ farm, The Shepherd learned how to milk cows by hand, befriended the sheep and began to understand the rudiments of tending their flock. The cousins also bred championship ponies, which is how she first learned to ride, and only bareback at that. She later learned how to gentle the wild young ponies to the human touch. She often surprised people when she took a saddle off a horse before riding it, saying that she was uncomfortable in a saddle because she couldn’t feel a horse’s intention with the saddle between them. Now, as a much older woman, she enjoys the luxury of riding in a saddle.

  Here on Black Sheep Farm, when orphaned lambs are brought outside from their shed – where they’re normally housed, warmed by heat lamps – for daily walks of fresh air and grass-shoot nibbles, The Shepherd is like a pied piper. Weaving her way through our field of yellow and white daffodils with a menagerie of lambs, the canine crew and my apprentice Ovenmitt cavort behind her. Lambs race about among the flowers while Ovenmitt plays a bouncing game of hide and seek. He will pounce out, prancing on his hind legs, front paws in the air like a dancing bear, at any passing canine or lamb. Sometimes he mistakenly does this to me as I saunter past following the fun, but I rarely take part as I feel it is only for the young and easily pleased canines. He will get an embarrassingly quick smack down from me and soon enough will be off once again, galloping sideways with his back arched, ears flat against his head and tail all a squiggle, pretending he had intended to give me a fright and not in the least embarrassed by our brief fight. On sunny March days everyone enjoys these wanderings among the daffodil-flowered field.

  There are many superstitions and old wives’ tails (if you’ll excuse the pun) that travel companionably through time and the history of farming. One of these is to see how the first ewe lambs down (one of many rural terms for a ewe giving birth to a lamb) at the beginning of the season. If it goes badly, there could be problems ahead, but if it goes well then the season might run its course relatively smoothly.

  Not long ago we used to lamb in March. I remember the first ewes to lamb were from The Shepherd’s old flock of mixed breeds. However, now, with lambing happening earlier in the year, I concentrate instead on making my morning rounds because egg-makers resume laying their eggs after a few months of winter rest. After hunting there is nothing that grabs me more than tracking down fresh raw warm eggs. Some crafty egg-makers hide their eggs, so I hunt for them in the clean loose piles of golden straw or aromatic hay in the sheep shed and stables. I descend behind and creep between large straw and hay bales. Once in a while I surprise a mouse or a rat to add to the fun when searching for my second breakfast of the day. I’m always ready to inform The Shepherd when I next see her and tell her all about my discovery while I march her to where I think egg nests are hidden. She collects and retrieves them, even if they’ve fallen behind bales of straw or hay. My scrumptious reward is a fresh raw egg. There’s nothing I like better than an egg yolk. Eggs, eggs, glorious eggs … raw, scrambled, fried, but none better than farm-fresh raw eggs still warm from the nest.

  I follow The Shepherd as she enters the stables to collect feed. I make sure to point out the bin containing our egg-makers’ rolled barley. One scattered barley scoop is thrown every morning and they happily peck and scratch. After their barley breakfast, egg-makers head out to hunt for delectable insects, worms, grubs and seeds. They also graze on tasty grasses and delicious wild herbs that grow abundantly in our surrounding fields and which give their egg yokes a healthy, lovely deep rich orange colour and a unique gourmet flavour. Their yokes resemble the bright early-morning sun, which projects the arrival of a great day. In my feline mind, my gustatory opinion is that their diet makes eggs an obvious food to eat. A good healthy egg yolk is my favourite part of my favourite food, with the added benefit that it’s great for my glossy fur coat. I can hear an eggshell crack from way across fields even when I am fast asleep in the sheep shed or stables. I arrive at a romping gallop, ears pricked forward, to wherever the cracked-egg noise came from. I’ve heard The Shepherd say that if you feed egg-makers food with a strong distinctive flavour like roast garlic or leftover Indian curry, that flavour will permeate the taste of eggs laid over the next few days. I must say this is very true indeed, but I personally prefer my eggs seasoned by our farm’s insects, field grasses and wild herbs.

  Every morning the four canines and I trot across the cobbled yard to a mesh-covered gate which has a vintage sign bolted to the stone pier right above where you open the gate. It states:

  The gate must always be closed. If left open, the fine is forty shillings.

  This sign is most important because it gives visiting strangers a laugh, so they pay attention to what it says despite its out-of-date numismatic fine. Shillings, pence and farthings have long gone but countryside golden rules prevail. A most important golden rule is that every gate you open to walk through must be closed behind you. Over the years members of my lovely flock of egg-makers have been killed by foxes, or once in a while by neighbours’ dogs that strayed through an open gate. Both times the dogs were caught in the act and the neighbours paid for new egg-makers, BUT when foxes come calling, they usually slaughter all my egg-makers.

  Late in March is when the ‘kits’ (the rural name for fox cubs) of our local mother fox (known as a vixen in our agrarian world) are old enough to start to need solid food. The mother will explore the countryside to find the most abundant food source to feed her hungry offspring. She will choose the easiest to take home. If the egg-makers are let out too early in the morning or the door to their house not tightly closed at night, the vixen will come and kill the whole flock, given half a chance. She will then bring one bird home to her kits and p
ull it apart to make it easy for them to eat bite-sized pieces. After she has fed her litter, she sneaks back as often as possible to retrieve as many of our egg-maker bodies as she can. The vixen trots off to a variety of locations in hedgerows or fields to bury egg-maker bodies. She uses the still-cool March earth as a storeroom, similar to a human’s refrigerator, as a place to keep her extra food. She tries to do this in a timely way before The Shepherd or my canines discover the dead egg-makers.

  Whenever we arrive and see what looks like wanton carnage, bloody bodies strewn across the egg-maker’s paddock, The Shepherd becomes very upset. I sniff each body, make sure that it is dead and move on to examine the next. The canine work crew comes in, takes a quick note of the murdered egg-makers and then tactfully avoids even a passing glance at any egg-maker, dead or alive.

  Their collective body language screams at The Shepherd: ‘No, we did not do this, no, we did not do this, but we can smell a musky scent in the air.’

  To each other: ‘Can you smell that pungency?’

  ‘Yes, quick, I got a whiff of that foxy musk. It seems to have gone this way.’

  Turning to each other, the canines rush off, some with noses in the air and others with noses close to the ground, to follow the strong tang of fox scent. They collectively dash to a fresh hole dug recently under the egg-makers’ fence to enter the kill zone. A few stray feathers would lie near the entrance dig or snagged in the fence wire, fluffed and wafting in the breeze. A trail of feathers is seen among the blades of grass and leaves or caught between sticks, all showing the vixen’s passage across the field with her prized corpses.