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  The same sort of thing once happened to The Shepherd when she was a small child here on Black Sheep Farm. The Shepherd’s parents and grandparents told all the children that they were not to come to the porch for tea that day as they had a very important visitor. So all seven children went to play in a field well away from the house around an old pond. The pond’s edge has a cement rim and they were playing tag, running around its narrow edge, precariously balancing, when someone pushed The Shepherd into the pond. On top of the water floated a thick carpet cover of green duckweed. Under the duckweed hid a deep mushy stinky mud evolved from years of rotten leaves mixed with cow manure. Upset at becoming wet, stinky and covered head to toe in green duckweed, The Shepherd raced up to the house looking like a green wet smelly little monster. No one was happy to see her arrive at the porch, although they tried to hide their amusement.

  ‘No, you are not going in the house! Go around to the yard and hose yourself off.’

  As she walked away, she heard more amused laughter and knew it was at her expense. Only much later did she learn that the special guest was Graham Greene, a very famous writer. So The Shepherd met Mr Greene as a green smelly pond monster. I’m sure he was able to tell the tale with much more of an amusing twist than The Young Shepherd would have – of the time he visited a writer friend in rural Ireland when their intellectual conversation was interrupted by his host’s skinny blonde granddaughter covered head to toe in unpleasantly aromatic green duckweed.

  The Shepherd’s childhood summer days were spent roaming fields or being put to work in the farm garden, where she picked fruit, vegetables and flowers to sell at their local country market or to greengrocers. The Shepherd also remembers driving the farm’s donkey, named Ishbel, who was such a steady neddy. She pulled a cart whenever they made hay, spread manure in garden beds or picked pears and apples. When there was no farm work for Ishbel, The Shepherd, along with siblings and local friends, would take her on all sorts of driving adventures. If bread or milk were needed for the house, they would all climb into the donkey trap or cart and, pulled by Ishbel, walk or trot – depending on Ishbel’s mood – down to the village. There they would pick up the messages and buy chocolate ices for themselves, which they paid for with their wages from picking raspberries and currants or uprooting ragweed.

  Once in a while they drove to Simon Pearce’s glass-blowing workshop just the other side of the village. That same Simon Pearce left the village later and presently has a glass-blowing factory in White River Junction, Vermont, with an electric power house driven by the White River.

  His Irish village factory had a pool table on its interior observation deck from which tourists could watch glass blowing. The Shepherd, her sister and little brother would leave Ishbel tied up outside the factory where tourists took photographs of the donkey and cart while the children played pool.

  Once when they were headed home from the glass factory with the donkey and cart they had to stop at the village shop for bread and milk to bring back for tea. The Shepherd and her brother ran into the shop to get the messages. Their sister stood outside and held Ishbel at rest. While the two were in the shop, a car full of tourists stopped and asked her sister if they could climb into the cart while one of their party photographed them. The sister obliged and permitted them to clamber into the cart. At the last minute, one tourist said they wanted one of their group to pose holding the donkey’s bridle without The Shepherd’s sister. Again she allowed them to do this. After lots of photos had been taken and tourists had dismounted from the cart, the tourist holding Ishbel walked away without a word, leaving Ishbel free. Ishbel saw her opportunity, leapt away and galloped through the village and over the bridge. At this point The Shepherd and her brother came out of the shop to see their sister running after a donkey galloping over the bridge full tilt for home. Luckily, back then there was very little automobile traffic so there was no accident.

  Another exciting donkey event occurred when The Shepherd was training a young white donkey named Snowball to pull the small cart while a friend cycled alongside her. Snowball was suddenly spooked by something unknown. Clenching the bit between her teeth, she began to gallop uncontrollably along the road. She shied back and forth from one side of the road to the other until one of the cart’s wheels went up the roadside bank and tipped cart, donkey and driver over. The Shepherd found herself pinned under the heavy wooden cart. Snowball was stuck lying on her side, still harnessed between the cart’s shafts. The donkey panicked, kicked and struggled. The Shepherd could do nothing, so she shouted at her friend to sit on Snowball’s head until help might by chance arrive. As soon as her friend sat on Snowball’s head, she calmed down, stopped kicking about and struggling.

  Luckily, they didn’t have to wait long before a huge lorry arrived. The driver had to stop since the trapped donkey, upturned cart and pinned-down Shepherd occupied the full width of the narrow country road. He hopped down from the lorry’s cab, helped the friend unhitch Snowball from the shafts of the cart and then lifted the cart so that The Shepherd was able to crawl out. The Shepherd was very fortunate to have only suffered a bruised slightly grazed hip and thigh. Snowball was completely unscathed without a scratch upon her.

  Another favourite childhood expedition was to drive the donkey cart to Kells Priory, six miles away. Back then, Kells was an unrestored Augustinian monastery dating from early Norman times, a magnificent hidden rural archaeological Irish gem. Few except local people ever entered the large rectangular walled keep, with its lovely tall corner towers. Partly surrounded by large fields, Kells nestled in the King’s River Valley just below Kells village’s two beautiful limestone bridges. Sheep and cattle of local farmers grazed inside and outside the keep on its rich grass. The striking ruined fortification and collapsed chapels were vestiges of a time when raiders attacked and hindered the monks’ religious and productive agricultural lives. In its three acres of fortified priory, the square stone towers provided the children with steps to climb up into them. In The Shepherd’s youth, they loved to climb up all the towers to see the different vistas of the surrounding countryside. They also would scarper catlike along the high walls with that immortal fearlessness of human youth. Furthermore, its many nooks and crannies made great hiding places all through the lower ground-level monastery ruins, so it was a most wondrous location to play hide and seek or sardines. Many birthday picnics with games at Kells are stacked into the long-ago memories of family and friends.

  The Shepherd firmly believes that these exciting occasions and many other strong childhood memories drew her back, many years later, to her family’s small farm in the Nore Valley of County Kilkenny. Personally, I think that the return to the farm brought her life to a full circle after many years of work in New York, London and Southeast Asia and I strongly suspect she would agree with me.

  5

  Summer Visitors

  Summer time, June and July in particular, mark the arrival of our many visitors to Black Sheep Farm, whom I tolerate, because, as The Shepherd has explained to me, they pay the bills. She says it nicely, of course – that they are part of the growing Black Sheep Farm community that she’s built for many years on social media. She often tells me that she feels farming is like religion. There are many different kinds, each one of which people are passionate about; that passion is what keeps them going through the tough times. She is a firm believer in to each their own. She will listen and be interested but doesn’t like an agenda or belief pushed upon her. For example, here in Ireland, as a small island nation, there are a huge number of different land-types, which entail different methods of farming the same crop, be that tillage or livestock. She is very passionate about farming and utterly dedicated to it, but also understands that one of the challenges of running a modern farm is how to make money to keep the show on the road, so to speak. It’s not easy with just fourteen grazing acres and a small flock of Zwartbles sheep.

  Despite being old-fashioned in many ways, The Shepherd decided to move w
ith the times and start using social media as an inexpensive way to sell our Zwartbles sheep without paying for the traditional advertising space in papers and magazines. Our initial social media followers were sheep farmers and others with agrarian interests. After that, many non-farmers began to take an interest, curious about agricultural life, then knitters started to ask about our sheep’s wool and if they could buy some yarn spun from our sheep fleeces. Loyal Black Sheep Farm devotees, who were not knitters, were enthralled and wanted something woollen and more finished, so The Shepherd designed Zwartbles blankets for humans. Then The Shepherd was asked by her social media followers to open a page for me, because she had often written about me on the Zwartbles Ireland page and apparently people found me intriguing – which, of course, I am. So ’twas then I started my Twitter account, which The Shepherd attempts to help me update daily. Dependent on rural broadband, of course … In fact, when she was interviewed about me in an American agricultural magazine called Modern Farmer, the journalist, Jesse Hirsch, declared that, ‘In the few short months since Bodacious the cat got a Twitter account, he accumulated the same number of followers it took his owner years to acquire.’ I don’t like to boast, but I enjoy it when she grumbles about this, and you can imagine how annoyed she was when someone told her that I should be given more publicity … Since then I have been filmed for television stories and documentaries about wool and raising sheep for both wool and as food, all of which I endure, because if it helps The Shepherd to keep the farm going, I am prepared to do what I can.

  As time passed, and yarn and blankets were bought and shipped worldwide, humans found that their felines loved the real wool of the Zwartbles’ wool blankets so wanted smaller ones for their cat friends. So my cat blanket was designed and came into being. One of my Twitter followers even used one of them to seduce a feral cat into his house and it has now become a beloved member of his family, so I am quite pleased about this.

  Then there is Smudge’s story. Smudge was a weak lamb and had to use the Aga to recover from the cold, before becoming a bottle-fed lamb. At this time, a woman in Florida was enduring treatment from a second bout of breast cancer. She followed Smudge’s progress online and stated that if she recovered, she was coming to Ireland to visit Smudge. A year later, she flew from warm Florida to visit a chilly Ireland laden with gifts. She spent a wonderful half hour chatting away with Smudge.

  The Shepherd also started getting messages and emails from mothers who would write and tell her how much their child in hospital enjoyed the daily updates on farm life on Twitter, or from children who, when they visited their elderly parents in a nursing home or hospital, told her how the first questions asked were, ‘What has happened on Zwartbles farm today?’ This warmed The Shepherd’s heart, because she knew what it was like to be very sick and how welcome any distraction was from what was wrong in one’s own life.

  The next step for many of my followers was to visit Black Sheep Farm, to meet myself and some of the more personable ewes and rams like Smudge. They would book a mutually convenient date well in advance to come visit Black Sheep Farm so that they would not interrupt important farm work. Many, understandably, would love to visit during lambing time, but that’s when we have all exhausted ourselves with lack of sleep and so we have settled on summer as a popular time. Our tour groups now come from the international world of knitters, farmers, cooking students, or even tourists from as far away as Japan, Australia, New Zealand, USA and Canada. So from the gossamer web of the ether is spun the golden coin.

  However, while I put up with these seasonal hordes, whether or not I condescend to meet them is another question altogether. I’m a very busy farm cat. For those visitors who come to visit the farm, The Shepherd gives them a little talk on the importance of body language when they approach our flock. No sudden movements, no jazz hands, no direct eye contact – that kind of thing. I’ve heard her lecture many times, so I use the opportunity to snooze in the sun, occasionally tolerating a visitor’s interest. While Pepper walks among the visitors to greet everyone in a dignified way, Bear, in his unrepressed enthusiasm, tries hard not to jump up with youthful exuberance onto visitors’ legs – ‘Hello, Hello, I’m here! Hello, Hello, I’m here!’ The Big Fellow is usually locked away because he would get overexcited by all the visitors and worry that his duty as farm and flock protector was under threat.

  Bear will bounce from person to person with excitement, trying to greet everyone with equal enthusiasm. Bear’s love of life is infectious as his whole body gets involved. The Shepherd has to remind him continuously not to jump up on people, but because of his short stature he feels the need to add height to himself by leaping up on human legs with his muddy paws. For which The Shepherd profusely apologises, especially on wet days. Bear is well aware of not jumping up on The Shepherd as he knows she doesn’t like this, but he has learned other humans don’t mind. He is no fool and knows a soft touch when he sees one. This exasperates The Shepherd, but this aspect of Bear’s training is impossible to change as humans love him so much. His charm overwhelms mud on jeans.

  Before The Shepherd takes visitors to the fields she asks them an intriguing question: ‘What is your first language?’

  Most visitors reply, ‘English’, but often enough they say Spanish, French, German or even Japanese.

  The Shepherd politely corrects them: ‘Our universal first language is Body Language.’

  She then selects a visitor who seems to enjoy his/her own space and suddenly she walks right into that space, close and face-to-face. She invades their personal territory, so they retreat a step or two backwards. I have to be on guard. Once I stood behind someone who stepped back rapidly and nearly fell over me. They barely managed to stay upright as I made my rapid escape – fortunately for me their footwork was quick. I wasn’t the least bit amused.

  ‘That’s an example of body language,’ The Shepherd says, as she steps back and returns the personal space to the visitor. ‘There are a few things I trust you will understand before we enter our field with our sheep. First, we humans are predators because our eyes face fully forward.’ She looks directly into the eyes of several visitors while saying this. ‘However, sheep are prey animals because their eyes are on each side of their heads, which provides the greatest sweeping view of approaching danger.’

  She points a finger to her cheekbone and temple. Then she rotates her wrists so her fingers make a sweeping motion that shows a sheep’s ability to view much more broadly to each side. That enables them to detect predators better. Quite clever, I have to say.

  She continues, ‘Secondly, the sheep read your body language with acute instinctive ability. They fully understand predators as individual ovines (that’s the posh word for ‘sheep’) and together they form a flock of like-minded ovines. Sheep may act three ways, as individuals or as a flock, towards you humans or towards feline predators. They may first choose flight and dash away. Secondly, they may repress their fear and stand their ground. Lastly, they may remain curious and not move away. We may enhance their curiosity further, dictated by food, hence the shake of the “Magic Bucket” of sheep pellets.’

  The Shepherd shakes the Magic Bucket, the sheep pellets rattle and several sheep close by hear the nuts rattle. Right away they ‘baaa’ their Pavlovian response, which elicits smiles and laughter from visitors. And a purrrrup from me.

  ‘One hopes the rattle will stimulate the sheep’s instinctive curiosity and overcome their flight-or-fight instinct. Try to move with the slow grace of a ballet dancer,’ she says, smoothly uncurling her fingers and moving her hand gently through the air until she points her fingers like a ballerina’s hand.

  ‘You don’t want to wave or make jazz hands or any sharp sudden erratic movement,’ The Shepherd says, as she breaks the elegant curve of her arm and makes it angular, a motion and display that sheep view as harsh. ‘This will unnerve the sheep and they may flee from you. If you walk purposefully towards a sheep and stare straight at it, that sheep will imm
ediately move away from you.’ She strides with a strong eye-to-eye gaze towards another visitor. Her attitude is almost aggressive, so the visitor instinctively takes a step back and then smiles in understanding. ‘So, if you approach them with your body at an angle, sort of sideways and not looking at them directly rather than face-on, you arouse the sheep’s curiosity rather than force a fly-away response.’

  The Shepherd’s head and body assume a nearly coy angle sideways towards her audience. ‘Now, calmly put out your hand to those sheep on either side of you but not the one directly in front of you.’ Again she stretches out her hand gently. At this point Pepper, the Einstein canine that he is, will often sniff one of her hands to acknowledge and confirm this friendly gesture. ‘Sheep read your body and interpret what your body “says”. It’s a mutually understood language of body motion and posture. As humans, we often misinterpret this ancient style of communication, which we’ve lost through development of our tribal spoken tongues. So, if you appear tense, they will read how nervous your body is and they will definitely not want to interact with you. On the other hand, if you are fearful, they see, smell and read your anxiety as if you are speaking to them, and they will stand their ground.’

  The Shepherd and visitors walk from the yard towards a field. I follow them at a safe distance. ‘Try to relax so you offer yourself with graceful calm as if you are simply a friendly presence. Sheep will then accept you and come over for a head scratch or push forward for a nibble of sheep nuts that you may offer them in the palm of your hand.’

  As visitors walk towards the field, they pause to take photographs while The Shepherd moves to the gate. She halts momentarily. ‘Do you have your cameras ready?’ she asks, just before she slowly swings the gate.