Bodacious Page 3
Pepper usually leads my hunting pack as they follow an ambient whiff of fox musk that still hangs in the air. If The Shepherd sees our canine crew take off in a race across a field, she worries that the new tiny bat-like Puddlemaker Inca will get lost or killed in a fox or rabbit hole. I must confess I do admire the little dog’s mighty tenacious attitude. She can provoke The Shepherd into a fit of giggles when she grabs Bear’s tail and hangs on with a vice-like grip. She bounces behind, hanging on as Bear races after The Big Fellow. Both bigger dogs run shoulder to shoulder while they snap at each other in play. Bear’s tail is the only one used by the Puddlemaker in her favourite game of ‘Catch the Dragon’s Tail’. The Puddlemaker hangs on till Bear’s tail-feather hair suddenly gives way. When this happens Inca is sent flying and rolls over. She then scrambles up to race after both much bigger dogs, spitting out Bear’s tail-feather hairs as she tries to catch another bouncing ride with her teeth. These shenanigans occur daily and sometimes Pepper deigns to takes part in this silly frolic of tomfoolery, much to my embarrassment.
On good days, when the flock has not been killed or eaten, the egg-makers are usually faffing about at the gate in anticipation of breakfast. Sometimes the large cocky disruptive male, who’s only good for making more egg-makers during the spring and summer months, perches high above my head on the gate and crows as if his life depends on it. I wait as The Shepherd opens the gate to feed the egg-makers and I follow. As soon as barley grains hit the ground, I ask her to come with me into the egg-makers’ house to see how many eggs have been left for me. I really get very annoyed when there are none.
Crows and magpies often fly into the egg-makers’ house after they hear the happy clucks as one egg-maker successfully lays and then proudly struts away from her newly laid warm egg. I find this terribly foolish, advertising to the world that fresh eggs are available – it’s practically inviting their foes into the nests to steal eggs. Occasionally, The Shepherd finds a trapped crow or magpie in the egg-makers’ house when she’s looking for eggs. From time to time a small wren, a robin or a sweet-singing blackbird is attracted by leftover barley. They hop through the small ground-floor egg-maker sized entrance. When they find themselves inside, they feel trapped and panic, having forgotten how they got in and unable to find a way out. When The Shepherd rescues these small birds, she releases them outside. They fly off slightly battered but essentially unharmed.
Once I saw the most beautiful bird of prey, a sparrowhawk, who had pursued a cheeky wren into the egg-makers’ house through their small door, so promptly became trapped inside instead. A clever wren escaped through a wren-sized gap in the egg-makers’ window, but the sparrowhawk wasn’t so lucky. The Shepherd heard a clucking commotion when we came near the house, a noisy flapping and banging on windows. I knew right away that something larger than normal was caught inside, so I remained outside happily while The Shepherd dived in to try and catch the brown-and-white speckled sparrowhawk with her bare hands. The quicker she caught it, the less damage it was likely to do to itself by panicking in the confines of the enclosed space with its rack of roosting poles and nest boxes. When The Shepherd finally caught it, she brought it into the farmhouse for all of us to admire its beauty and stunning big yellow eyes. I padded behind and demanded that she reprimand it for scaring my egg-makers, who had broken their eggs and left a big eggy mess soaking into the wood shavings on the floor of their house, with not a decent egg left for me to eat.
Several egg-makers usually disappear in April or May. If they haven’t been killed by a fox, they return in late May or June, leading troops of baby egg-makers behind them. They peck and chirp behind their mothers, who cluck around the yard, proudly showing off their newly hatched balls of multi-coloured fluff. I have to admit they can be quite sweet.
Mother egg-makers are very protective. I have seen them, wings out and spread feathers all fluffed up like a feather duster, chasing Ovenmitt across the yard, squawking and screaming at him to steer clear of their clutch of young. Ovenmitt has great respect for mother egg-makers, so much so that he will wait for me, The Shepherd or a canine to walk him past a mothering egg-maker. Even then he is very wary and if the egg-maker makes the slightest move towards him, even if only half fluffed up, Ovenmitt will skedaddle across the yard with his tail straight up in the air.
The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favourite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I’d like to mention to readers that my egg-makers originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rainforests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have the world over today.) While The Shepherd was working for the wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity by foolish humans and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation centre was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for those poor primates. Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd’s companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill, whom she has described to me. He was a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck, whom some of you will know due to his or her long neck and distinctive run.
The Shepherd’s friend had a long feathery amber-coloured neck with beady eyes surrounded by pale blue skin, as if someone had smudged eyeshadow all around his eyes. His head actually looks like it was made up of an enormous beak, with a horn-like fixture on his crown that extended onto his huge bill. He waddle-walked around like a penguin and to get the measure of you, The Shepherd tells me, ‘He would turn his head from side to side to peer at you.’ But I still can’t imagine what he’d look like with the illogical hodgepodge collection of odd animal parts she described.
He would sit on the table next to her while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time by hand from her bowl until he’d had his fill. After he had taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to The Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill’s soft feathery head. Honestly, if only I received anything like this same attention …
The one time that I have The Shepherd’s undivided attention is when we take one of our working walks over Black Sheep Farm in search of the best nettle patch to harvest. Wild nettles are a spring tonic for our farm’s grazers because their deep taproots pull all sorts of essential vitamins and minerals from our rich soil. Nettles are not foolish plants by any stretch of the imagination since they always choose the best, richest soil to grow in. Even when horses have a nice mineral lick, they will dig for nettle roots in winter. All our herbivores eat nettles once they are cut and left to dry for at least three days, which takes the sting out of them. The Shepherd cooks the nettles in stock made from the bones of home-cooked roast chicken.
I am always on hand when a chicken carcass is stripped before it is boiled into soup stock. We all stand about or sit in a row: Pepper, The Big Fellow, Bear, the new Puddlemaker, Miss Marley, Ovenmitt and I. We each wait our turn to get our morsel of chicken although I sometimes sink my claws into the hand that tenders the chicken morsel as it can be very slow coming round to my turn. It really is hard being a cat sometimes.
2
Sun and Sh
owers
As March becomes April, The Shepherd keeps a close eye on the leaf buds as they swell on the oak and ash trees, since they are an age-old predictor of summer weather. This ditty surfaces every year, she tells me:
Oak before ash, we are in for a splash,
Ash before oak, we are in for a soak.
So every morning leaf buds are inspected and compared between these two species.
While daffodils still bloom in the fields, the grass, wild herbs and flowers really start to grow in the milder weather. The edges of the fields begin to prick out in many colours as the muddy month of March fades. The subtle pale greens of lords and ladies appear, celandine yellows the bottom of hedgerows with its rich egg-yoke flowers, while pale yellow primroses appear on banks and dog violets spread purple under trees, their colours deepening as the trees’ leaves unfurl and shadow them. The fields are covered in strong yellow dandelions all humming with bees and other pollinating insects as they have their first good feed on blossoms after a long winter’s hibernation. Cowslips burst up and out of their flat-lying leafy rosettes with pale yellow bells bobbing on any hint of wind. No longer are they picked to make cowslip wine, as they are a rare sight to behold in any quantity. Speedwell and vetches, blue and purple, add flashes of stippled colour through grasses as they flower. The Shepherd loves to eat vetch flowers as they taste like nutty flavoured green garden peas, and they add flavour and a beautiful colour to a fresh spring green salad. Rabbit food to me, but some humans are mad keen on their salad greens.
As flowers burst out and mild southwest winds blow in to warm the earth, young lambs frolic and cavort around trees or play a game of ‘King of the Log’ atop a fallen tree from a recent winter storm. I find the most transfixing to watch is a whole flock of lambs, who race to see who is fastest up a hilltop. They turn as if at an invisible marker, then with tails spinning like speed-inducing propellers, they race downhill in great leaps with a flourishing bouncing twist, which shows how healthy and happy they are.
Often while we watch these lambs’ skylarking romps, the canine crew follow The Shepherd in a slow procession. Pepper watches with disinterested, amused tolerance, The Big Fellow is watchful for any mishaps that might occur and ready to step in as a concerned caretaker, while silly Bear trails behind with a look of longing, wanting to join in the fun they all seem to be having without him.
The collection of nettle leaves will form part of a delicious seasonal vegetable dish for the household of humans. I have no real interest in nettles. We cats find most vegetables dull compared to a tasty morsel of chicken, or a nice fresh mouse. Intermittently I will partake of a green bean, or some spears of grass I personally pluck to alleviate and dislodge an occasional hairball. Once nettles are cooked their sting is nullified and the resulting simple dish of nettle leaves steamed like spinach is served with a knob of butter, which The Shepherd tells me is scrumptious. However, I much prefer when The Shepherd makes nettle soup, because she uses stock made from the boiled bones from the Sunday lunch of roast chicken. The carcass has been steeped overnight in the simmering oven of the Aga with extra seasoning and chunks of carrots and onions, filling the kitchen with a delicious aroma. She then drains the chicken stock and to it, adds our fresh picked nettles with diced potatoes, boiled until they are soft. Then she whizzes with a very noisy whizzy machine till it’s smooth. She adds some frozen green peas, stirs them in while reheating it only briefly so the peas still have a nice pop when crushed between the teeth. She then serves it with a good scrape of fresh nutmeg on top and if she’s feeling really fancy a spoonful of crème fraîche or a nice dollop of Velvet Cloud sheep-milk yogurt. She talks a lot about the vitamins and minerals in the soup, and I pretend to listen, but really I’m only interested because it smells of chicken.
The Shepherd has not always been an expert in the kitchen, it has to be said. Long before I came here, in The Shepherd’s distant youth she decided to dye some white trousers black. It was the most inexpensive way to get an article of seemingly new clothing. She bought the dye and asked her granny which pot she could use in the kitchen to boil water to dye the trousers. Her granny often used a big pot to cook dog food, which was made up of cheap scrap meats from the butcher. The meat was called offal or ‘lights’ and was usually mixed with lungs, tripe, sheep heads and cow stomachs. Puuurrsonally, I prefer The Shepherd’s proffered raw liver and heart chunks. Her granny would cook this mix slowly in the Aga overnight. It filled the house with a distinctly different odour from that of stew or roast meat. This canine cookery event happened at least twice a week. Once the meat mix was cooked, it was removed to the meat safe just outside the kitchen door, which got little sun and where it perfumed the air in the scullery. The meat safe was an open wooden-shelved structure covered with fine metal mesh and it had a tall latched door to lock it. They were commonly used before refrigerators were invented. In fact, The Shepherd often tells me that the farmhouse’s first refrigerator was rented and it was just a very small white box. The deep freeze proved to be a more useful purchase for her thrifty grandmother: it froze fruit for jam-making and blanched vegetables, which was how The Shepherd’s granny and grandpa extended their season of dining on homegrown produce. Whenever there was over-production of garden fruit and veg, they also saved it to sell as well as for future household use.
Back to dyeing The Shepherd’s white trousers … Granny had said that she could use the dog food pot between her stewing sessions for the canines. But this was impossible since The Shepherd planned to go out wearing the dyed black trousers the very next evening and she had found the pot of homemade dog food still quite full. There was another giant pot that was used to make jam or to boil ham and tongue for the human household to eat. The Shepherd thought this would be fine for her to use as long as she cleaned it well after use. So she worked away dyeing her white trousers black. She stirred the big boiling pot of white trousers and black dye on the Aga’s hottest burner. When she had finished, she scrubbed the pot clean, or so she thought, and pronounced herself very pleased with a job well done. A few days later, her granny placed a ham in the big pot to boil for lunch that day. The boiled ham emerged coloured a deep indigo, much to the fury of The Shepherd’s granny. Lunch that day was a very quiet meal as they all munched on indigo ham. Luckily, there were no guests on that day, or indeed on the succeeding days until they had consumed the whole ham.
I find April a great deal more annoying, because of horse chestnut trees. Just before their leaves unfurl in spring, the horse chestnut release a sticky sap, which covers its leaf-bud protectors. They fall to the ground, then seem to love to get caught up in my fine coat. I spend hours trying to rid myself of these sap-covered bud protectors, often only making it worse as I pull them off, unintentionally spreading the stickiness, so my coat becomes such a tangle that mats form. I then resign myself to the hands of The Shepherd to untangle my mats and comb out my fine hair. She has said this reminds her of times when she worked for the wildlife charity twenty-six years ago, when she watched geckos or lizards as well as big Komodo dragons. How she makes the connection I just don’t know, but it seems when lizards lick their faces and clean their eyes, the way their tongue moves across their face seems like their tongue is sticky but in reality it’s quite smooth.
The Shepherd describes once when the call of nature awoke her in the middle of the night when she was doing fieldwork in Malaysia. Not being able to find her torch, she had to feel her way along the walls to the bathroom. She takes particular delight in describing the hole in the floor that was their litter box – I have no idea why – but on this night, just as she was feeling her way down the steps to the litter box, a gecko jumped onto her face and ran across it, its cool little feet sticking to her skin like miniature suction cups, before leaping onto the opposite wall. Luckily, she didn’t jump in fright or she might have fallen down steps into a deep mucky hole. I tolerate this and other stories as they seem to give her such amusement while she grooms annoying tangles out of my
magnificent coat.
As April wears on, flowers spring up and bring in a second flush of colour to the fields around the farm. Cowslips, once a rare sight, pop out of their ground hugging leafy rosettes on slender stems with yellow clustered bells hanging, heads bobbing about in gusty spring breezes. The cuckoo flower’s delicate pink blossoms signal the return migration of the irresponsible cuckoo bird. The cuckoo lays her eggs in another bird’s nest, forcing her to raise the interloper that will result. Then the growing cuckoo chick pushes all of the natural chicks out of the nest. Cuckoos have a distinctive call and in springtime, ‘cuckoo, cuckoo’ can be heard across the fields and in the hedgerows. Sadly, the call is rarely heard any more when this flower blooms, because the modern farm practice of square-cutting hedges in winter means that the nest sites that small birds use – and that the cuckoo loves to invade – are fewer. With magpies able to find more exposed, less hidden nests and eat eggs or young hatchlings, even the cuckoo has less chance of survival.
Dandelions bloom in profusion and feed a hungry multiplicity of humming pollinators. Forget-me-nots flush blue, as does the delicate bloom of speedwell as it sprinkles its colour through the fresh spring green of growing grass. The Shepherd’s favourites are blue wood anemones, with their ground covering profusion of blue stars, each with a cluster of white stamens at the centre. A proverbial sea of purple-blue spreads out under horse chestnut trees outside the kitchen window. They were planted by The Shepherd’s grandmother, who loved flowers.