Bodacious Page 9
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Lazy Days and Family Visits
August is that month of our farm’s year when our house fills to overflowing with The Shepherd’s family, who all live far away from Black Sheep farm: her brother comes with his wife and sister with her husband and all their children. I tend to make myself scarce as the human young can be frightfully tiresome, though I have come to tolerate the old-young. Ovenmitt is such a lazy playboy that he revels in all the attention. He rolls over on his back, getting pulled and poked by many tiny juvenile fingers.
By contrast to my good self, The Shepherd is devoted to her flock of human youngsters, whom she takes around the farm to help her with small jobs. I follow along at a watchful distance, but sometimes cannot resist becoming more involved when the quad is used or if the children are catching frogs. Baby frog inspections are great fun for all of us, although I do get told off when I chase them through the grass and bat at them to make them jump again and again with my sheathed claw paws. The human young love to see these tiny frogs cling to The Shepherd’s finger by clutching with their tiny toes. Only a fraction bigger than The Shepherd’s thumbnail, they have just left the pond of their birth where they began as spawn and then became all head-and-tail little black tadpoles darting about. Their black colour hides them from predators in their dark pond.
Next, they grow into miniature versions of their parent frogs. They change colour from black tadpole to the fresh green of newly sprouted grass. They have charming dabs of earthy brown on their wee wrinkly green faces and little brown dots sprinkled across their backs. Dark brown stripes cross their powerful back legs to complete the camouflage colours that protect them when in grass.
Miss Marley stays well above the fray in our kitchen. She is so athletic that she leaps gracefully four feet above our kitchen table to land on the top shelves of our tall kitchen cupboards. Then she steps elegantly into one of the lovely big Mosse pottery bowls that The Shepherd was given for helping to sell pottery seconds before I came to Black Sheep Farm. A seconds pot has a flaw of some sort, which means it cannot be sold at full retail price. Miss Marley likes to curl up to have a quiet nap there. The humans regularly use these big bowls as collector-targets for the corks they toss up when they open a bottle of wine. This newly arrived cork in her bowl awakens the slumbering Miss Marley. She stirs sleepily, shakes herself and immediately kicks a cork back at the humans from her bowl. The cork sails high above the kitchen table and then plonks down onto it, which gives the visitors a fright that usually ends in fits of relieved laughter. Sometimes Miss Marley snores loudly when curled up in her bowl. This distinctive feline rumble resonates along the ceiling and throughout our kitchen. First-time visitors wonder where that peculiar buzzing sound is coming from. If one of the humans at the table lobs a new cork into her bowl and it plops on top of her while she is out of sight and snoring deeply, she awakens to meow in protest. The tips of her ears followed by her head make a sleepy half-open-eyed appearance over the top edge of a bowl.
While I’m curled on The Shepherd’s lap, I’ve overheard her tell visitors the tale of when she lived in a great big city as a young woman and slept on her own shelf. Yes, a shelf – over a doorway inside a Manhattan apartment. The New York bed doesn’t sound nearly as comfortable as our own ‘shelf’ here in the Black Sheep Farm kitchen with its warm Aga air wafting up on cold winter days. Miss Marley or Ovenmitt can be found most days curled up in one of the big bowls on the top shelf.
When we are young, it seems we will put up with just about anything. ’Tis only as we grow older that we find we prefurrrrr our creature comforts. When The Shepherd puts me out for my night work, which occasionally displeases me if the weather is blowing cold and wet, I slink across the yard to make my bed in a pile of aromatic summer hay in the stables.
In August the very important job of preparing for our lambing cycle begins. The Shepherd and I go out to the fields several times a day, where we repaint the ram’s ‘brisket’ or the front of his chest, covering it with a harmless kind of greasy coloured paint between his front legs so that The Shepherd can see which ewe our ram has covered by the coloured paint marks on her back. It shows that our ram has done his job and mated with her. The Shepherd can then estimate the date that ewe will lamb. The formula for when this will happen is 145 days, or five months minus five days from the first day that the coloured mark appears on the ewe’s rear end. This permits The Shepherd to calculate when we should begin the late-night inspections of our pregnant ewes in the lambing shed. Lambing usually happens in January or early February these days and depends precisely on when the ewe was covered. Luckily for the ewes and The Shepherd, I am an excellent judge of lambing dates after all my years of practice.
All of this activity means that The Shepherd’s mind often turns to what she rather grandly calls her ‘farming apprenticeship’. It began with her life in agricultural college in Vermont and then veered off-course to the theatre and to life in London, before she came back to the place that had been there for her all along. It happens to so many of us, that the path we take in life is not straightforward. It doesn’t go from A directly to B, but takes a winding, twisty route. So it was for The Shepherd and so it was for me, who only embraced my true nature as a farm cat after some years on the streets of Kilkenny city.
Farm life really began for The Shepherd when she was a toddler at her cousins’ farm in Maryland. She often recounts the story of arriving at their farm after dark one night just before the harvest of the fodder maize. The Young Shepherd had brought along a school friend who had rarely been out in the countryside. As they drove up the two mile-long dark and dusty farm lane, The Young Shepherd anticipated the glass of homemade warm drinking custard that surely awaited them on the old chipped white enamelled kitchen table. But when they reached the last fork in the road before the turn into the old stone farmhouse they saw flashlights waving about. The Shepherd’s father stopped the car and opened the window to ask what was wrong. The cousins’ farm helper reported that the Angus cattle had broken out of their pasture and had galloped into the field of maize, which Americans call corn on the cob. Everyone left the car except The Shepherd’s little brother and her mother.
After they stepped out of the car The Shepherd could see why the cattle might have escaped while summer heat lightning flashed and crackled in broad blankets across the sky. With only the lightning to illuminate their way, The Shepherd and her friend walked into the Front Field, so named because it extended from the front of the house for a square mile. The tall maize stalks rose well over their heads, as harvest time was just days away. In retrospect I’m sure The Shepherd felt sorry for her townie friend, who was terrified and holding onto The Shepherd’s shirt as she trailed behind her along the rows of corn plants as flashes of sheet lightning lit their way. Simultaneously, they heard the black Angus cattle crashing about through the corn. Suddenly there was a loud crashing very close to them just as a blanket of lightning flashed, and a big black cow emerged from the corn only feet away. The cow’s head turned towards them both. The Shepherd’s friend screamed in fright. This noise sent the cow charging away from them with her tail held high in the air.
When everyone got to the far end of the large Front Field, they then began to call out loud in a calm manner, ‘Move along, sucky sucky. Move along, sucky sucky.’ At the far end of the Front Field the farm helper called, ‘Sooooweeee, sucky sucky, sooooweee,’ in the hope that the cattle would come to him. No one could see anything except when a sheet of heat lightning flashed to reveal the field around them. They could hear the cattle just ahead of them rustling through the drying corn stalks and mooing in answer to the farm helper’s calls. Her friend still clung to The Shepherd’s shirt as they walked back across the Front Field to the cousin’s house, both still a bit frightened after their sudden encounter at such close quarters to an equally terrified Black Angus cow. After such an exciting encounter, the homemade drinking custard went down a treat. Oh, how I wish I had been there for the
ir after-adventure to partake in that elixir made from the farm’s own raw milk and fresh eggs!
After high school in her late teens The Shepherd attended an agricultural-forestry college in Vermont. There she acquired and improved her abilities in its formal curriculum so that she could earn her living in the country life she had loved ever since childhood. Often her learning from the practical physical labour she undertook felt deeper and much more pleasant than studying books, which she had always found difficult. She enjoyed dragging newly cut long tree trunks from woodlands with horses. She loved horse-sledging through snow among the sugar maple trees in Vermont’s early spring to collect sap-filled buckets to make maple syrup and sugar. In these beautiful wooded glades surrounded with leafless winter maple trees awakening to spring with sap flow, the only sounds heard were the clinks of harness chains and the creaks of leather as the horses plodded and swished through snow, pulling the sledge loaded with sap-filled barrels. Later, she helped make maple syrup and scrumptious maple sugar. This outdoor wintry work enhanced her ability to observe and comprehend animal behaviour so that she and the horses could improve their work together.
Book learning was far from dull, however. Soil and Civilization by Edward Hyams was a favourite read and strongly influenced her future agrarian career. Hyams, a twentieth-century social and political thinker, was a strong influence on the organic farm movement, with its emphasis on seasonality and on man learning to work with the environment without destroying it, to provide the food he needs. The Shepherd is still a fan of Hyams, even if, she tells me, she follows a sustainable method of farming, rather than a strictly organic one. She does not agree with genetic modification and does not use insecticides, but she will treat an ill animal with antibiotics when required.
Rachel Carson was another author who influenced The Shepherd with her seminal work, Silent Spring, which changed the way people thought about the environment with its passionate defence of the ecosystem and its warning about the use of pesticides. Carson was instrumental in the banning of the chemical DDT from agricultural use. A powerful insecticide, it had a terrible effect on wildlife – however, as The Shepherd points out to me, DDT could also have destroyed that pest, the malaria mosquito, and thus played a part in eradicating the disease. But as DDT was banned, malaria remains a threat. She wonders if humans haven’t succumbed to a ‘God complex’ of sorts with their own chemical concoctions. She believes they try to control or beat nature at her own game. The problem is nature has been playing this chemical cocktail game for millions of years, while humans have only recently joined in. I am not sure what she means by this, because I am a cat, but The Shepherd has read more than I have, so I feel that she might know of what she speaks.
The Shepherd advanced her skills further in animal behaviour during the summer after she graduated from agricultural college. She moved to upstate New York from her Vermont college for her first official agrarian job; she broke and schooled Morgan horses to ride. Morgan horses were an early American breed similar to the Irish Connemara pony and the Irish draught horse that could be used to work the land. She had become a licensed car driver at the age of fifteen, as many rural Americans do. At her new job she also had to learn to drive an ancient Model T Ford pickup truck to do many of her tasks on the horse farm. It had a button on the floor that you pressed with your foot to start the engine, a very stiff old steering wheel, a creaky clutch pedal you had to ease carefully or you would stall the engine, and such tight springs that you felt every grain of sand nearly bump you out of the driver’s seat. She found out later that her early acquaintance with antique machinery had boosted her future farming career. By contrast, when she had to support herself with farm jobs she finally realised that one cannot learn all the encyclopaedic knowledge of shepherding or farming at an agricultural college. Farming needs careful observation and meticulous practice – I know this very well, because I had to learn my jobs from Oscar. One cannot learn to be a farm cat other than by dwelling and working on a farm. Oscar was instrumental in my conversion to and acceptance of farm life. He instructed me first on how I should carefully observe The Shepherd’s practical farm work, and secondly, how to be attentive to his personal techniques of mousing and ratting. Often The Shepherd had to interrupt our hunts very much to our annoyance because she obviously needed our help with the sheep. She had become skilful at animal husbandry and land management as much by observation and practice as by formal academic education.
When The Shepherd returned to Ireland after her summer stint of breaking in Morgan horses on the farm in upstate New York, she needed to find work to support herself. In early 1980s Ireland there was very little available paying work, so most of her peers had emigrated to other countries to find paid employment. During that first autumn at her Irish home, it was not easy to find a steady paying job, so she looked for and tried a variety of odd jobs. All had to be within walking or easy hitch-hiking distance from our farm.
She began her odd-job work by picking brewing hops at a neighbour’s farm for a local Kilkenny brewery. It was not a job to undertake without strong gloves. She picked and sold apples from our farm’s orchard, which had been planted in the 1940s by The Shepherd’s grandfather. The garden vegetables, soft fruits and flowers were sold at nearby country markets and greengrocer shops. Summer over, she next became a beater at several local pheasant shoots. That autumnal and wintry job entailed beating bushes with a strong ash stick to flush forth pheasants from all sorts of undergrowth. The noise of beaten undergrowth pushed the birds to fly towards a line of men with guns so that they could shoot the birds as they took flight. This job came with a midday meal and if the day had been good, the beaters were given a brace of pheasants to take home to cook, enough for a few meals. The Shepherd’s cousin’s wife, a master chef of pheasant cookery, taught her the best home recipes.
Many years later, the Shepherd’s skills at cooking game came to the fore when she was given a haunch of venison by one of her students when she taught photography in Kilkenny. He approached her in the manner of a secret agent, tapping her on the elbow as he opened his bag to let her peek at a large slab of dark red meat, which The Shepherd accepted with delight.
The Shepherd loves to soak a diced venison haunch for twenty-four hours in an inexpensive ruby brandy or red wine with whole shallots, fennel root, carrots, a bit of diced ginger, a good shake of allspice, rosemary, thyme, pepper, salt and a goodly amount of juniper berries. Once the venison has had its long soak, she adds in a chunk of butter just before she places it into the slow Aga oven to cook all day long. The house gradually fills with a wondrous aroma, which triggers a universal Pavlovian effect in all carnivore and omnivorous inhabitants. She serves this with a rice mixture of brown and wild rice, which adds an earthy nutty flavour to the dish.
Another odd job The Shepherd took on was the schooling of a large grey Connemara pony. Its owner had no saddle and nor did The Shepherd, so she had to ride the pony bareback over the countryside. At this time The Shepherd acquired a dog she called Max, whom she had rescued (as you can see, there’s a pattern here, as she has a habit of rescuing strays). He was jet black with his ancestry a cross of Border Collie and black Labrador. Of medium size, his curly tail was like that of an Alaskan Husky. Max never left The Shepherd’s side. If The Shepherd left the farmhouse without him, he would find an open window in the house, no matter how high up, and he’d jump out to follow her. He was an incredible jumper and such a great dog that he would follow The Shepherd even when she rode the pony on asphalt roads.
However, Max was a bit of a qualified scaredy-cat in dealing with any other dogs. So whenever they rode through the village or passed a farm with ferocious-sounding barking dogs, he would use The Shepherd’s foot as a step to leap up and ride in front of The Shepherd on the pony’s withers. He felt quite secure high up there, with The Shepherd’s arms on either side balancing him in place as she held the pony’s reins for control.
Once when The Shepherd went on a long ride
with Max trailing after her, they came upon many cars parked at the roadside. People sat in the cars or stood outside and all looked off into the distance. Max had already leapt up into his riding position on the pony’s withers, so he felt safe as they heard a lot of noise coming from the direction everyone was watching intently. The sounds came from the Kilkenny Hunt, Ireland’s oldest county hunt, as horses and hounds trotted along the road. They approached fast on this crisp morning, steam rising from horses and hounds panting puffs of vapour. The pack was owned, hunted and cared for by Major Victor McCalmont of Mount Juliet. The pony became very excited and Max began to feel unnerved despite being held securely in his spot on the pony’s withers. The road filled with trotting horses, their riders and the large pack of Kilkenny hounds. As this equine and canine mob came along the road towards them, The Shepherd tried to find a place to stand aside and found herself and pony wedged in the crowd next to a woman she knew well. ‘Why don’t you go on and join the hunt?’ said her friend.
‘I’m sure the Major would never allow me to hunt bareback,’ The Shepherd replied. Just then the Major himself trotted up on a very large horse and surrounded by his large pack of hounds. The Shepherd’s friend, who knew the Major well, shouted out, ‘Good morning, Major, would you mind if this young woman joined the hunt for the day?’
With a quick glance at The Shepherd, who was mounted on a scruffy grey pony and no saddle with a big black mutt sitting on her pony’s withers, he curtly asked, ‘Can she stay on?’
‘Yes, she can,’ replied the friend.