Bodacious Page 4

  As spring awakens, it brings with its floral bounty parasites that love to prey on lambs. Ewes have to be brought in to queue up in our sheep yard, along with their lambs, who get their first worm dose, which will be particularly needed if spring has been mild and wet. Some years lambs are fine and need no worm dose. Other years they’ll need several doses if the ground is very moist. There are a large variety of worms, ranging from those who are productive builders of soil to the few that prey on the internal organs and digestive systems of animals. An infestation of parasitic worms among sheep can spread very quickly; if not dealt with, lambs can die or never fully recover their zest for life. Essentially a parasitic worm’s survival is down to its ability to leech out all the vitamin, mineral and protein goodness in a ewe’s milk. The fresh new grass meant to give a lamb healthy growth also becomes a hazard. A parasitic worm’s life cycle is ruthlessly efficient: sheep consume mature eggs from grass they graze. These worm eggs incubate, hatch, ingest parasitically from the sheep’s insides, then lay thousands of eggs, which are pooped out into grass for the next sheep to eat.

  To prevent this happening, The Shepherd and I walk the fields every day, weaving our way through our flock of ewes and lambs. While canines lack interest – all rush off to chase a squirrel, rabbit or hare – I walk among the sheep. Lambs snooze like cats in what The Shepherd sees as a most uncomfortable position with their little heads at strange, almost impossible angles. We walk around making sure that we have seen every single lamb stand up and move around. We try to wake them as gently as possible whenever we examine them. The best way for us to tell if lambs look well in themselves is to see if they have a good long stretch. Their fine necks and backs arch like a cat after a good nap and they stretch their tail straight up in the air with a little wiggle at the end.

  I always love these spring walks through our fields with The Shepherd, old meadows coming to life with early flowers in bloom feeding hungry early pollinating insects, which hum all around, birds singing and flitting about collecting food for young chicks. One hopes the worst of the winter has been left behind as days grow longer and nights shorter. Throughout April The Shepherd keeps an eye out for our annual migrants, the birds who return to repair, rebuild or build new nests in the barns and sheds. We like how the swallows feed on pests and insects, which will have started to annoy sheep in the evenings or early mornings.

  When our swallows arrive home to Ireland it usually bodes well as they glide in on a bow wave of a front of warm weather. When they first arrive they’re often exhausted and swoop in to land on overhanging cables, their excited chitter-chatter filling the air. This is also when The Shepherd shakes her finger at myself, Ovenmitt and Miss Marley, giving us all a stern lecture about not catching, killing or tormenting our visiting long-distance travellers. One of us usually fails at this when a tired swallow glides in too slow and too low. With an athletic twisting leap from one of us, the demise is quick. Later, when swallow chicks are close to fledging out, and readying themselves for their first flights across the yard, we find our way across hazardous as swallows dive-bomb, peck and torment us.

  At night, birds still hungry from winter sit on their recently built nests to incubate their first batch of eggs. Luckily, they cannot see their hermaphrodite neighbours, the worms, come out to dance a sensual reproductive ballet among themselves. When soil softens after rain I can hear worms disconnect from each other to slip back into their holes to avoid being trodden on as I pad over their kingdom of rich soil. Sometimes when The Shepherd walks across a field by torchlight to check on a lamb or sheep, her beam of light illuminates the worms vulnerable above ground. It’s not the light that disturbs them, but her footsteps vibrating through the ground a ripple that disturbs the cavorting worms, who rapidly withdraw back into their holes in the ground.

  At this time of year, if we haven’t done so in autumn, we spread granulated lime over fields that need their acid pH brought up to a neutral level (more about this later) to grow grass well. This farm job is one in which our preparation and clean-up take the most time, as our equipment must be cleaned after use to keep lime and condensation from corroding the metal bits of our spreader and seizing up the working parts. When The Shepherd races around the fields on the quad towing the spreader to scatter the lime granules, Pepper loves to ride behind her on the quad’s rear end, watching out for a rabbit or squirrel to chase. I, however, usually hop on board for a spin up to the yard when The Shepherd has stopped the quad and dismounted at a gate to open it. Pepper and I then share the ride, me up front on the warm engine cover, while he stands behind The Shepherd.

  In May, what we call ‘fairies’ dance in the long, low evening light above the sheep’s heads, beneath the branches of the larch trees. These insects, with their long transparent wings, are called lacewings, The Shepherd tells me. They are my favourite May event, apart from the newly risen cow parsley, the king of wild flowers, which blossoms in our woods and shady hedgerows in May. It towers above me as I stroll behind The Shepherd and wend my way through their forest of green stems. A sea of white lacy blossom floats above me as dappled sunlight seeps through the thickening tree canopy above us. Our sheep love to munch on cow parsley leaves and savour their flowery heads. They rub their heads and bodies against the stems to break them apart and cover themselves with parsley juice. Wise sheep do this because they’ve learned that cow parsley juice naturally repels annoying flies. So, when the sheep are let into fresh pasture, they race to wherever cow parsley grows. They munch it and rub themselves thoroughly until only a few stubby stems remain. Despite this annual abuse by my sheep, cow parsley has a deep vigorous root which enables its return every year as long as a percentage of its leafy greens get to feed and store its needs with enough sunlight.

  When I first came to Black Sheep Farm all those years ago, I apprenticed myself to the worldly old feline Oscar. Oscar taught me everything I know. In those days, well before I came to take over, there were no sheep on The Shepherd’s farm. Wildlife, Terrier Tassie, and cats Tabitha and Tina occupied the territory. A farmer rented our fields to graze cattle eleven months of the year. Then, when Oscar was a teenager, The Shepherd was given a few orphaned lambs from whom we’ll call the curly-haired sheep farmer, a friendly neighbour whom she had known since they were children. Back then she could not afford to buy sheep to breed. She made a pen from wooden pallets. At lambing time she found straw and borrowed a heat lamp. She collected small plastic drink bottles, bought a rubber nipple to fit them, and bought artificial sheep milk. Oscar then and there decided that it was his first duty to help keep the lambs warm under the heat lamp and secondly to clean their faces after they had finished each milky bottle-feed. He carefully attended orphan lambs, especially when the heat lamp was on. I’m told the humans sometimes couldn’t tell what was cat and what was lamb in the pile of small bodies asleep under the lamp. Oscar loved to walk with the lambs. While they were his cat size or smaller, his tail often curled over their backs to reassure them as they followed The Shepherd outside the pen for the first time. During feeding time he sometimes flopped on his side and played with a lamb’s tail. Their tails have a lively life as they suckle their mother ewes or lamb formula bottles. Tails spin and wriggle as the lambs’ bellies fill with warm milk. At other times Oscar sat near the lambs’ heads and leaned over to lick dribbles of milk that seeped between bottles and lamb lips as they suckled. Oscar was also a dedicated assistant gardener. He enjoyed nothing more than freshly dug rich earth for a good back roll. He diligently kept our Gardening Boss robin away from any worms that turned up in a recently dug flower bed.

  Unlike me, Oscar’s past is no mystery. He was born on a small farm in Curraheenavoher, near Ballymacarbry in the Nire Valley, County Waterford, in the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains. He came to Black Sheep Farm as a weaned kitten as there was a need for new blood to reduce an expanding rat and mouse population. The farm cats at that time were siblings Tabitha and Bettina, who was called Tina. They were The O
ld Guard felines from The Shepherd’s grandparents’ days. Both were aged happy cats. Tabitha was a plump tabby and loved a human lap, I am told. Tina was shy, lean and black. They arrived at our farm as kittens, having been thrown in a brown paper bag onto the road by some despicable human. The Shepherd’s grandmother spoilt them rotten with saucers of milky tea and cuts of well-buttered toast. Neither cat had any interest in hunting unless an animal of prey variety literally fell into their laps – which is indeed what happened one day, The Shepherd tells me, in one of the stories she finds so amusing.

  One day, as she sat at the kitchen window, fat Tabitha, in her elderly manner, lounged and dozed under a horse chestnut tree. While Tassie the Terrier snuffled in nearby grass, she unearthed a pheasant who had been crouched and thought itself hidden. It jumped up, raced around the tree, straight into sleeping Tabitha. Tabitha leapt up in shocked surprise, extended her claws and killed the bird in the blink of an eye. The Shepherd ran outside for a closer look. She saw Tabitha proudly drag her prey by its neck between her front legs to a secret location in order to privately partake of her surprise feast just as her wild panther cousin would.

  Cat Oscar, on the other hand, had been raised as a kitten by his mother on fresh farmyard mouse meat and was therefore an excellent candidate for the role of rat-and-mouse-killer-cat. Oscar’s calm easy-going demeanour belied a strong hunting instinct. He was not a chatty cat, but the strong silent type, who always purred steadily but quietly whenever he popped into a human’s lap. What I most liked to do companionably with Oscar, other than to curl up with him on a cold winter’s night in the stable hay for more warmth, was to hunt for rabbits. This was one of his favourite occupations, so I was very glad to be taught by such a keen expert.

  However, I have to confess that from my beginnings at Black Sheep Farm I was a clumsy oaf. I constantly fouled up hunts with my naïve impatient enthusiasm. Often I leapt too soon. I foiled my catch because my hoped-for rabbit had ample time to escape with a powerful jump and twist in the air. Those rabbits avoided my premature leap of long forelegs and extended claws.

  Our other hunting problem arose from my much-beloved Shepherd, who had given me such a lovely new life and home. She occasionally appeared out of the blue and made her way across our hunting field as we silently prowled towards our intended prey, rustling the grass and alerting the rabbit, which hopped quickly away to safety. Our hunts only became efficient after Oscar and I carefully demonstrated our techniques. To give her great credit The Shepherd stood statue still after that and carefully watched how we hunted. The excellent result was that she and we learned to understand each other much better.

  A hunt would often start when we found ourselves of the same mind. We would move out to our favourite place, a long hedgerow in the uppermost hilltop field with lots of rabbit burrows along its western edge. Oscar had found this a perfect location, because the morning sun first lights the frosted grass in front of the rabbits’ burrows, thawing the grass earliest in the cold of winter, so they like to graze there.

  The field is named the Wind-Charger Field because long ago it had a windmill that spun to charge big batteries that provided electricity for Black Sheep farmhouse. When The Shepherd was small, her grandparents and mother told her about The Olden Days before and during the Second Big Human War, known as the Second World War, when the farmhouse was lit with candles and paraffin lamps. After the war ended, they built a windmill to generate electricity. This erratic form of electric current was totally wind dependent: as the wind varied, the lights flickered. The wind-charger’s electricity lit the Black Sheep farmhouse until electric power mains were introduced into rural County Kilkenny in 1946. (These were our earliest days of making what is now considered alternative energy. Back then, fossil fuels were too expensive to use for making rural electricity. That’s why candles, paraffin lamps and this early wind power were the most important sources of our indoor light in The Olden Days.) The wind-charger had been taken down before The Shepherd was born. Recently, she cleared out an old shed and found the long wooden propeller, covered in dust and generations of cobwebs, which had spun in winds to provide electricity so many years before.

  But back to the hunting. Oscar and I would meet up in the small cobbled outer yard. I would follow him through what I called our ‘gate squeeze’, between the gatepost and pillar of the gate, which is fitted with a tight mesh. We’d slide through into the egg-maker’s Plum Orchard paddock: in spring, after plum blossoms have faded, they fall and litter the ground with a dusting of pinky-white petals. We would saunter into the Wind-Charger paddock, a small fenced-off part of the great big field that we often use for sheep that need close observation. As we’d pass close to the lean-to shed where ewes birth lambs in winter and spring and are shorn during summer months, a swallow or two might dive-bomb us until we moved far enough away from their nests.

  We’d wander slowly up the Wind-Charger Field, weave through a few beds of nettles, grass cool underfoot, clover soft on our pads, and we’d step around spiky thistles. Thistle thorns in our paws are incredibly painful, crippling even, so we always tried to avoid them. Having left the swallows behind us, we’d hope no corvids – magpie, raven, rook, jackdaw, carrion crow or even the grey crow, with its grey skull cap feathering – would spot us heading out to hunt and spoil our fun with their warning racket of cackle, caw and crow. We’d have to stop and pretend to clean our toes until they left to look for another distraction to scream about. As we headed up the hill, wagtails would bob about, snatching insects among the grasses, flit up to the tops of fence posts, or perch atop wire fences with tails wagging and heads bobbing as if to say: ‘We see you and we are quite aware of your presence. Move along, move along. We need to get back to our business of hunting insects to feed our young. Move along, move along.’

  Once we’d travelled far enough away from the sheltered nesting sites of the swallows, they would resume darting, diving, gliding after insects disturbed from the grass by our passing through. Out in the field they never flew low or close enough to enable us to leap and catch one of them for a tasty morsel. When and if we ever caught a swallow, it was usually in spring when they had just returned, exhausted from their marathon migration north to us from South Africa.

  Oscar and I were lucky if we got past all the natural early-warning systems of other species and made it up to just below the brow of the Wind-Charger hill. There we’d pause to lower our bodies and flatten our ears sideways so their tips didn’t break the horizon line and give our silent crouched-low position away. We’d cautiously peer over the field as it sloped down away from us. We remained stone-still, with only a telltale twitch of a tail to betray our presence. We’d watch a few rabbits grazing along the hedgerow – luckily, no russet-red hare could be seen. Hares are far more wary and attentive to our intentions than their cousin rabbits.

  Early in our hunting relationship, I found it tedious and boring to wait for the correct moment to begin – sometimes I just sat bolt upright and scared rabbits away when my ears and head broke their visible horizon line of clean grassy hill. Oscar was very displeased with my impatient hunting behaviour and would give me a stern look.

  As we crouched and watched rabbits move about, dining on our sheep’s grass, we hoped no hungry hunting buzzard would coast overhead and spot our rabbit prey before we could try to catch it ourselves. Whenever we chose a rabbit to catch, we separated so that we could come at the creature in a pincer movement. Oscar usually swung out at a trot low to the ground in a big circle away from me and to the other side of our selected rabbit. Once in position, he aimed at the selected rabbit, flicked his tail as a signal to me and started his cautious prowl, ears flat, one calculated light step at a time. The tiny tip of his tail came to life under his concentrated pressure and flicked back and forth. I started my approach towards the rabbit from the other side, with the same concentrated vigilance, cautious with each step I took. Gingerly I placed each paw to advance by increments. At such a slow pace it seemed
to me that time stretched out, slower and slower and longer and longer. If the wind wafted just the right way and no bird squawked a warning cry, we could draw closer to the end game.

  In the beginning, before I learned properly, I would be the one to break first. Like the release from an over-wound spring, I would leap out from my low-crouched prowling stance to pounce. I’d bound through the gap that separated me from the rabbit. The rabbit would leap and twist in the air to evade me, most often fleeing directly towards Oscar, who had remained hidden in the long grass. He would leap into the air, claws full out, and bring down the rabbit, just like our lion cousins who dwell on the great plains of Africa. We would feast on scrumptious fresh rabbit and feel fat and lazy for days afterwards.

  I miss Oscar terribly now he is gone as, although I have finally got the hang of it, I can only do my rabbit hunting in spring, when the rabbits are young and foolish. I haven’t yet been able to train Miss Marley or Ovenmitt to hunt with such intelligent skill and cooperation as good old Oscar, although I hunt alone too, which, I have to admit, sometimes has its benefits.

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  Horses, Horses and More Horses

  I cannot begin to tell you how much The Shepherd loves horses, from her earliest days as a child on Black Sheep Farm to her cousins’ Maryland pony farm and to her schooldays, when she sought refuge from bullying by working at a local stable. There, she mucked out and cleaned the owners’ stables and gave riding lessons to beginners. In exchange for her work she was allowed to ride horses. Later, while at agricultural college in America, she would work with draught horses – sometimes known as cart horses – in Vermont; she would break and train Morgan horses, a popular American breed, in upstate New York, and later still, she would ride in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, which are so like our own Irish Blackstairs Mountains that we can see from our farm’s upper fields. Caring for and riding horses enabled her to develop and hone her skills at reading the unspoken language of the body that communicates across species, within herds and between prey and predator animals.