Bodacious Page 5
Each species communicates among themselves using its own unique language. But with our body language we can cross-communicate between species. All humans must long ago have had the innate ability to read animal body language in order to survive, but lost that skill as they left the natural world further and further behind. I know that The Shepherd has an instinctive understanding of how to communicate with us, and she can work real magic with horses. In America, as her skills with animals grew, she became accomplished at schooling difficult horses. She would create a rapport calmly with the animal to motivate the horse to obey rather than to force it and she could sense how and when to nudge it gently to bring forth its abilities. She tells me that she would often lose herself in concentration while riding a young horse.
When I first arrived at Black Sheep Farm, there was a mare who lived on the farm named Major Beth. She was a grey mare, half Connemara pony and half thoroughbred. She was tall enough at fifteen and a half human hands, or sixty-two inches. (For those of you who may not know, a horse’s height is measured from the bottom of the front hooves to the ‘withers’, which are at the base of the neck. Each hand measure is four inches – the average size of a man’s hand.) Major Beth was the first horse The Shepherd had ever owned outright. Previously she had just borrowed horses or owned only part of a horse.
Last, but far from least, is the black pony, Marco Polo, who I also met when I first arrived at the farm. Like me, he has a fascinating rescue story that profoundly improved his life. Of course, I found many of us on our farm had had phenomenal escapes and rescues thanks to The Shepherd. Even when she was elsewhere, in the bustle of New York City during the 1980s when she was learning the ropes in the theatre, or later in London, she found herself drawn to animals. In London, she regularly exercised a beautiful bay thoroughbred gelding that lived at Kentish Town City Farm. The only drawback to this arrangement was having to ride the horse before 6.30 a.m. to avoid London’s rush-hour traffic, which would make the streets impassable for The Shepherd and her borrowed horse. The Shepherd would get up at 4 a.m. and walk from her flat in South Hill Park and then walk across Hampstead Heath to the City Farm. After unlocking the farm gate she would tack up the horse and ride along quiet London streets back up to Hampstead Heath.
One of her most memorable rides, she tells me, took place on a chilly, foggy autumnal morning. As she rode from the farm gates, the horse’s hooves clip-clopped in muffled echoes as they moved along mist-shrouded streets. The fog eddied and flowed around and over them as if they waded through streaming liquid. Traffic lights appeared as dimly coloured glows through silver mist that slowly brightened as she drew nearer. The few early cars out and about drove slowly and cautiously.
When they arrived at Hampstead Heath, horse and rider entered a fairyland, as the heath’s trees, clothed in autumn reds and golden yellows fringed with faded greens and dark browns, were veiled in shrouds of mist. They moved into the park’s obscure stillness at a brisk trot and as they did so, they heard a bagpipe faintly humming in the distance. When they came to the spot where they always began to canter up the centre of the park, The Shepherd squeezed her legs to ask the horse to gallop. They flew up the hill, hoof beats now a muted clatter on the path, mist swirling about both horse and rider. Both invigorated by their speed uphill and across open land, they penetrated a dark stand of forest. The far-off bagpipe grew louder, so they slowed to a collected canter. Suddenly they emerged from the dark wood into a small glade, mist swirling around them. They surprised the man who played his bagpipes. He had obviously chosen this woodland glade in which to practise as it was as far away as he could get from sleeping Londoners. The horse smoothly rocked the rider back and forth, very slowly prancing at the canter. He almost danced to the bagpiper’s marching tune, waited for the music to change to martial and readied himself for a cavalry charge towards enemies hidden among the wooded glade’s mist-shrouded trees. The piper played on and bowed his head to acknowledge a unique shared moment with horse and rider. He probably had not heard the galloping hooves over the musical sounds of his humming pipes. As The Shepherd rode back to the City Farm, she felt exuberant and recharged by her exceptional early morning adventure. She thrived on that day’s thrills for months afterwards.
Returning to Marco Polo, The Shepherd had put the word out that she was looking for a companion animal for Major Beth. A friend got in touch with her and said he might have the perfect companion, a nice-looking small black Welsh Mountain pony. The only problem was that he was still a stallion. Just a few weeks earlier our pony’s rescuer, a farmer who lived on a less-travelled road – let’s call him the Gentle Man, as he would be embarrassed if we drew more attention to him – had noticed him, small and hungry, wandering the roads wearily and grazing edges and hedges. One day, as he passed the place where the pony usually nibbled, he saw a group of men trying to catch him. They tried to corner him but he always escaped at a fast gallop, head low, so no thrown rope could catch him, with a buck and a swish of his tail. Our Gentle Man was amused and secretly hoped the wee pony would continue to escape, since he knew from their distinctive overalls where those men worked. The meat factory just up the road round the corner on the hillside took in horses from all over the countryside, slaughtered them and made their meat into dog food.
The next day the wee black pony, still on the loose, munched as much roadside grass as he could chew before someone tried to catch him again. But now he grazed very close to the Gentle Man’s small farm. So out on the road the farmer went, opened a gate to his fields, shook the ever-magic bucket of sweet feed and persuaded the pony to enter one of his fields. When he looked closely at the pony he discovered that the little fellow had great raw wounds around his neck. They looked as if a rope had been tied around his neck so tightly that it had rubbed deep wounds through his skin and into the muscles of his neck. To this day you can still see his scars, because white hairs grew to cover his injured skin and muscle instead of his own natural black. If you run your paw across these white strips of pony hair, you can feel a hard scarred dip where the rope rubbed deep into his neck.
This Gentle Man was not only a farmer but also an expert on horses and an excellent breeder of Connemara ponies. He thought the little black pony was a thoroughbred Welsh Mountain stallion. He felt that he might have been stolen from a Welsh pony breeder in England or Wales and then brought to Ireland to sell as a children’s pony. The pony was probably much too spirited for a child, so the people who owned him tried to starve him into submission. The Gentle Man suspected that the pony never quieted enough, so the owner sold him to the horse-meat factory to try to make a bit of money. Luckily, the clever boy escaped.
By the time The Shepherd came back to her friend’s farm to see how this little black pony was getting on, his neck wounds had nearly healed. She fell in love with him immediately, so the farmer agreed to keep the pony until he had finished healing and he had castrated him.
When Marco Polo finally came home to Black Sheep Farm his lively spirit had returned. He had a glossy black coat, a thick long flowing black tail and mane, a white blaze that was broad on his forehead and narrowed down to a snip on his soft black muzzle, a few white spots around his hooves, and white streaks on his neck over the rope scars. Right away he became a great companion for Major Beth. Even when The Shepherd rode off on Major Beth, Marco Polo never complained about being left alone.
As filaments of time wove their strands together, The Shepherd discovered more gossamer threads to weave into Marco Polo’s story. He hated young human boys, so she assumed he had been beaten by boys trying to ride him into submission. Later on, she took Marco Polo to a man who trained horses to pull carts and traps to see if she could drive him harnessed to a cart. Marco Polo took to drawing a small cart like a cat drawn to a wool blanket on a cold wet day. The man said he must have once been very well trained for driving. He moved out with only a tongue-cluck, responded to a light touch on the reins, and could turn left or right properly, crossing over
his legs easily.
The Shepherd and Marco Polo became a great team. She drove him along local roads and he competed in driving competitions at dressage venues, where he won award ribbons. They worked in movies together and modelled for students in art classes. Once the pair trotted six miles from the home farm to Thomastown, where they strolled into Carroll’s Pub. There, she unhitched him from the cart and led him inside. Marco Polo’s iron-shod hooves clip-clopped along the lovely flagstones of the long limestone corridor. Two men who were sat chatting animatedly in the pub abruptly froze silent to listen. When Marco Polo and The Shepherd appeared round the corner the men heaved sighs of relief. One of them exclaimed, ‘Thank God! I thought I’d too much drink taken and was hearing things. Thank God ’twas a real horse and not the devil playing on my mind.’ Relieved, they laughed uproariously.
Another pub visit found Marco Polo and The Shepherd in another Thomastown hostelry, The Bridge Brook Arms, after they had had a perfect wintry day driving about. The back of this tall, white-painted pub, with its black shutters, had an outdoor smoking area with a tented roof and an open fire for cold days. A group of friends had gathered round the fire to chat and enjoy each other’s company in the warm glow. One friend brought Marco Polo a bag of carrots, which he quietly munched. A second held a pint of Guinness for him. When yet another friend arrived, he approached the talkative group, joined the conversation, walked past Marco Polo, stopped at his shoulder and absent-mindedly placed his hand down on Marco Polo’s withers. He began to stroke him, chatting and laughing with everyone else. Marco Polo always behaved fine when he was touched as long as The Shepherd stood right next to him. However, as he was wont to do when standing still for a while, he adjusted his back legs and leaned down to scratch his knee. With a shout, the new visitor leapt backwards in fright. He turned white as a sheet … ‘What the f**k!’ He’d never noticed the black pony at the fireside. A friend exclaimed: ‘This black lump of a pony has been here since before you came in and you didn’t even notice him!’
As the years flew by The Shepherd bought Silver, an Irish draught mare. Both Major Beth and Silver birthed attractive foals, whom The Shepherd was able to sell to caring individuals she knew. This increased our farm’s meagre income. She loved foaling time, as did I, because it meant lots of late-night company in the stables. I helped with foal birthing, although I found it a bit more complex than birthing sheep because foals and mares are so much bigger than lambs and ewes. As with my lambing, whenever long pauses occurred during foal birthing I sniffed and prowled my way silently through nearby hay or straw to hunt and snap up a mouse or rat.
Foaling Major Beth reminds me of the time when The Shepherd used to smoke. This might seem like a bit of a leap to you, but there is a connection. The Shepherd launched on tobacco in her early twenties while she was modelling, acting and working as a backstage hand in theatres, and as a bartender in New York City. Surrounded by smokers she took to inhaling cigarettes as a way to while away time among her friends, most of whom smoked. Years later, she became a dab hand at rolling her own cigarettes with one hand while riding a horse on long treks through the forests of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. The Shepherd was quite pleased with herself for this bizarre accomplishment, even if her brown leather riding chaps had small grey and black stains all over them. She never flicked hot cigarette ash in the forest for fear of starting forest fires on hot dry summer months. To prevent any hot ash from falling onto the dry forest floor she would roll the spent grey cigarette ash along the upper inside of her chaps. When she had smoked her cigarette she would stub it out on her chaps.
For many years, she alternated between smoking and quitting smoking. Eventually she decided enough was enough when she realised how much she spent on something that just went up in smoke. The year she quit, The Shepherd had three foals about to drop: Silver, Major Beth and a new mare she had bought in foal. She recognised that she would get very little sleep and would have no cigarettes either to mitigate the foul moods due to her sleep deprivation, so, three months before foaling time, she bought a pack of smokes and opened them to make sure they became nasty and stale by the time foaling time rolled around. She then invested in little shots of fruit and vegetable juices so that whenever her tobacco addiction plagued her, she gulped a tot of healthy fruit or vegetable drink instead.
I once tried one and was disgusted. I suppose since I’m purely carnivorous that prevents me from enjoying such a cocktail. She enjoyed her vegetable and fruit treats and indeed they worked so well that Oscar and I never had the nasty smell of used tobacco smoke in our fur coats again. Our hunting became much more expedient. When we had smelly smoky coats, our dingy tobacco perfume frightened rabbits away if the wind changed direction and wafted our accumulated smoke-permeated scent towards them and they thought a human was close by.
Major Beth had her first foal in May during the time that The Shepherd quit her smoking habit. She had a bay filly, the first foal to be born on Black Sheep Farm since before The Shepherd was born.
For the first two days of their lives, foals are still very wobbly on their pins as they find out how their legs work; they sleep a lot, eat and stay close to their mare mother. By the third day they have got a handle on early life and begin to gallop, but they still have a big problem: they don’t know how to put on the brakes. Their long spidery legs carry them rapidly forward across the ground till they decide to stop, when they try their front brakes, only to fall over in a heap onto their noses. They untangle their legs, stand up slightly, nonplussed, and take off again. This time they apply their rear brakes only to land on their bottoms with a look of surprised embarrassment. Standing up once more with some energetic tail swishes, they trot off pretending that their crashes never happened.
During the third day of Major Beth’s first foal’s life, The Shepherd went out to see how the foal was getting on. When she arrived in the stonewalled paddock, all The Shepherd could see was Major Beth trotting about nickering in a very worried fashion. There was no sign of the filly foal anywhere. Where could it have gone? The walled garden paddock was very small at half an acre, the walls on three sides at least fifteen feet high and its gates over four feet tall with no space under them for a foal to roll out by mistake. The fence along the fourth side of the small paddock had no hole in it that a foal could fit through. The Shepherd started to walk along the edge of the wall, thinking the foal was lying flat on its side in a dip of the ground and somehow the mare had misplaced it. As The Shepherd walked on, she approached an old deep cement water tank that was filled from an aquifer that arose beneath the wall. As she approached she could make out a pair of ears sticking up just above the wall of the tank. She rushed forward to find an exhausted filly completely immersed in water except for her head, which she gamely managed to hold just above the water with her nostrils scrunched up to keep water out. The foal was barely alive.
With super-human strength, The Shepherd pulled the filly out of the water tank. She stripped off the sweater she had worn on that chilly May day and began to rub it vigorously over the foal’s shivering cold body. The Shepherd put her fingers into the filly’s mouth only to discover that it was very cold, a terribly bad sign that the filly was in shock and hypothermic. Major Beth was nickering, nudging, biting the filly’s ears and pawing with her hoof at her cold body, urging her to stand up. As soon as Major Beth and The Shepherd got the filly to stand between them, the mare on one side and The Shepherd on the other, The Shepherd half-carrying the shivering filly, they moved the wobbly foal down to the yard into a straw-filled stable away from the chill wind of early May.
Once The Shepherd dared to stop rubbing the filly for five minutes, she ran into the house to phone the vet on the landline. (In those days she did not own a mobile phone and few people did.) I sat vigil on the window ledge in the stable and gave the occasional bit of advice as The Shepherd worked hard to warm up the filly. Later that night, after the filly had been saved with help and advice from the vet, The Shepherd
decided to christen her with the Irish name Uisce, which means ‘water’. The Shepherd spells it phonetically, Ishka, so those not versed in the Irish language can pronounce it correctly.
Ishka recovered fully and still lives on Black Sheep Farm. She birthed her own daughter, a beautiful bay called Grasshopper, several years ago. Sadly for us all, a few years after Ishka was born, Major Beth came down with cancer and had to be put to sleep. Two years later, Silver was in such immense pain in her knees from arthritis that she also had to be put to sleep humanely. So now just three equines remain: handsome Ishka, her lovely daughter Grasshopper and the ever-resplendent Marco Polo. Oh yes, and the water tank now has a lid across most of it, with just a gap left for animals to drink from, so this kind of event shall not happen again.
Part II
SUMMER
4
Hay Heat of June
In early summer, people come to buy our lambs after they are weaned from their mother ewes. The Shepherd and I then walk the fields to assess the lambs to see how they are growing and to estimate when they will be ready to go to new homes. We bring the flock into the yard, where she sorts and loads weaned ewe lambs to go to new breeders, and the wethers to smallholders. (Wethers are castrated male lambs, grown to be harvested for meat when they nearly approach full adult size.) Zwartbles sheep are unique in that they mature slowly. It takes eight to ten months for them to gain enough weight for harvest. Standard commercial sheep bred only for meat mature much faster. Their age is similar to feline years, so in estimated comparison to human years the wethers are about eighteen years old. This ovine age comparison can vary depending on sheep breed, similar to how some large dog breeds do not live as long as some of the smaller ones. ’Tis of course universally known that the vast majority of felines live longer than the average canine. Some might quote Philip Stanhope to you: ‘A novel must be exceptionally good to live as long as the average cat.’ But I choose to think he must be referring to an exceptionally bad version of War and Peace or The Mahabharata.