The Shepherd's Life (21 page)

 

47

I stayed home all that summer. We hired a bunch of my mates and cousins to undertake the massive job of pressure washing the entire farm until it was spotlessly clean to the government inspector's satisfaction. Without livestock on the farms, everyone and everything was different. People you knew who had never relaxed in their whole lives suddenly were thrown out of their old ways. And the farms were clean and that was disconcerting and made them feel strangely clinical and dead.

The pubs and restaurants suffered as well because people assumed that everywhere was closed so the visitors didn't come that summer like previously. There were tensions too, because different farmers had gotten different auctioneers to value their stock for compensation purposes and some had valued higher than others. Some people felt cheated. Perhaps the worst off financially were those farmers that hadn't got the disease, so were not compensated, but were unable to sell their livestock so for months effectively frozen as businesses. Costs mounting. Income nil.

But it was not all bad. There is a certain community spirit that throve in those circumstances. Our farm had probably not had so many people working on it for decades and once we got past the grimness of what had happened, we had quite a lot of fun working together. Soccer matches after work. Nights out at the pub.

 

48

In the months that followed my mother and father quite sensibly gave notice to leave the rented farm (because it sometimes lost money by the time you had paid the rent), and did so a year later. They would buy a house on the edge of the local town and farm my grandfather's land remotely. We would keep the farm in the fells and see what happened. I worked with my dad for months.

Leaving the farm is supposed to make you have another life, but my leaving just made me realize that the farm was the beginning and end of everything for me. When I was young, my grandfather had stood with me in a barn that was isolated up in some of his fields; he said someday I should make it into a house and live there. And now that idea was in my head. It was my goal. It was the first thought in my head in the morning and my last thought at night. As the joke goes, it isn't a matter of life and death; it is far more important than that.

 

49

Because all of the farms later restocked at the same time, prices were inflated. We were cautious. We were not sure what to restock our farm with, so we bought some Herdwick draft ewes from Jean Wilson. They transformed from old tired-looking creatures when they got on our grass and left us thrilled with how well they had done. One day as we were working amongst them in the sheep pens, Jean came to talk to us. She told us that some of the ewes were good enough to breed pure (instead of crossing them to produce lambs just for meat). So she brought us a distinguished old Herdwick tup to use. Jean is formidable, so we did as we were told. The next spring we had our first Herdwick lambs. Those old ladies were the start of our current flock. Two of them turned out to be very fine breeding ewes. One of their first lambs grew up to win our local sheep show and gave me the bug for breeding them. One day I said to my dad, “I think I'll breed the Herdwicks.” He smiled and said that was fine. Since then we specialize in different breeds. Today, I have the granddaughters and great-granddaughters of those old ewes in my flock. My current farming life was reborn during those sad months when it seemed like everything was broken.

One empty sunlit Sunday morning in my third year as a student (some weekends I couldn't go home), Helen and I wander through the Oxfordshire landscape, in a rusty VW Golf. We pass through little villages with duck ponds and gastropubs. Through farmland with leafy narrow lanes, thatched cottages, and past huge tractors leading grain. A foreign landscape peopled with strangers.

We stop by a plain little concrete house, a farmworkers cottage, where an old man sits in the sunshine on a step. There is a muddy puddle on the other side of the road, where house martins are gathering mud for their nests. I say “Hello” and we make small talk about the birds.

Then I notice the plastic bowl by his feet. The puddle is his doing, a kindness to the birds. And they repay him by building nests in his eaves from the delicate little parcels of mud.

He watches them and smiles.

I turn to Helen. “I have to go home now, love.”

She smiles and says, “I know.”

 

 

WINTER

About living in the country?

I yawn; that step, for instance—

No need to look up—Evans

On his way to the fields, where he hoes

Up one row of mangolds and down

The next one. You needn't wonder

What goes on his mind, there is nothing

Going on there; the unemployment

Of the lobes is established. His small dole

Is kindness of the passers-by

Who mister him, who read an answer

To problems in the way his speech

Comes haltingly, and in his eyes reflect

Stillness. I would say to them

About living in the country, peace

Can deafen one, beauty surprise

No longer. There is only the thud

Of the slow foot up the long lane

At morning and back at night.

R. S. THOMAS, “THE COUNTRY”

 

1

He sees me before I see him—a young bull-necked raven. Coal black. Scared of nothing, and with a belly full of the dead.

Ravens live on our failures. Brutal. Arrogant. Cruel. And sometimes stunningly beautiful.

I am reading an ear tag for my records, and write it down on a soggy and dirty notebook: “15,547. Dead. Pneumonia.”

Had I turned the corner with a shotgun, the raven would have risen over the wall and skulked off to a tree just out of range with a laughing and throaty
“kraark,”
but he is knowingly disinterested in a man armed only with a ballpoint pen. His thick black hoary neck ruffles as the wind catches his feathers. Greedy. Delirious. He rises like he has a stone in his belly, punch-drunk on carrion.

Our casualties are not often pretty, because life and death often isn't. Winter is attritional on the flock. Two old ewes, too old for this winter, bellies bloated, and eyes stolen, lie in the yard. They lie next to a young vixen with a hole blown through her belly, insides almost outside, a resentful fang bared on her gnarled wild face.

Atop the corrugated roof of the bullock shed the raven steps from one claw to the other. Every movement of his thick dark body says he is gorged. On laboured wings he departs into the darkness.

There are moments like this, when you are half-beat and dark news shadows menacingly over you.

*   *   *

One of these ewes lying dead meant a lot to me. She was the best I had. She was like the matriarch of the flock. She led the flock out of the snowdrifts last winter when they were in danger.

 

2

Snow. Shepherds fear and loathe deep snow and drifting winds. Snow kills. It buries sheep. It buries the grass and makes the sheep even more dependent on us for survival. So we suffer everyone else's excitement. Snowballs. Snowmen. Sledging. We fear. A little snow is harmless; we can hay the sheep and they can endure the cold easily enough. But the combination of wind and deep snow is a killer. It kills sheep, and can easily kill men and women. If you've ever seen ewes lying dead behind walls after the snow has cleared, or seen lambs lying dead where they were born, you will never love snow so innocently again. Still, as much as I fear and loathe its worst effects, it does make the valley beautiful. White. Silent. Cruel. It muffles all the usual noises. Only the wind-like cry of the beck, a little quieter than usual. I can tell it is deep snow before I open my eyes just by the missing noise. But a clock is ticking in my head, telling me that until I have seen and fed all the sheep my work will not be done.

 

3

I step out into that Brueghel painting of the snow and the crows. Oak trees and thorn dykes standing out in the white like black coral. I feel alive, necessary, needed. I have to be my best self today, fight what has happened, or the sheep will go hungry. The snow is heavy now, and layering up fast on the land. Leading the hay to the ewes on the quad bike in heavy snow, I become white. Thick white snowflakes carpet me as I head up the road. You see them falling by the millions like duck down. Some land on my face, crumple into my warm eye sockets, and blind me with a soft wetness. I feel the lightness of a snowflake land on my tongue. Soft. Fat. Delicate. Like the snow god had placed it on my tongue for Holy Communion. The quad bike tires make a crunching sound, packing down the snow on the road. The field gate I open has a three-inch layer of soft snow across its top bar. The first flock I go to feed are away in a gill where their mothers and grandmothers taught them to shelter when the gales come in. Mountain sheep have a sixth sense for the weather on their own territory. I find them under Scots pine trees, forty feet beneath the danger of wind and drifts.

The oldest ewes will have led them here, and will stand stubbornly if the younger ewes try to lead them out to danger. The flock takes their cue from the elders. They know they are safe here, with tussock grass to chew on to keep them alive if the snow lasts for days. This place is almost as good as a barn. Windless. Watered by the beck that still carves the ghyll out of the mountainside. I throw emergency rations of hay down the sides and they gather to it. The ewes tug a gob full away from the slices that make up each bale of hay, and start to chew. With every mouthful I see them eat I loosen up. Ewes that are sheltered and fed with some dry hay can survive here for days and days. I count them and learn there are two missing. But then suddenly they too are tumbling down for the hay. Relief. These two young ewes have been to scratch through the snow for sweeter grass. They will be okay now. They will hold to the hay through the snowfall.

But there is no time to dwell here, admiring the scenery. I have other flocks to feed. The snow still falls heavily, and the valley is changing about me.

 

4

Whiteout. The road in the distance is silent now. Empty. The valley is being cut off from the world. I hear my father shouting to sheep on the lower ground, where he is working. Snow ploughs will be working soon, but it might be a week before they get here. They will focus on the motorways and towns. I am already fretting about the flock of ewes furthest away on some high ground. I'm not sure I will get to them if the snow keeps deepening this fast (and getting there is just half the problem).

I take them some hay so they can endure the snow with something good in their bellies. I need to get there quick. The quad bike labours. Skidding and sliding, occasionally lurching sideways. I pass my neighbour doing similar work. A little nod says he's seen me and knows where I'm going. That little nod might keep me alive later. No one else knows where I'm going. So I wave. I drive through the village past cars being pushed into drives by folk who've just returned from trying to get to work in the local town, beaten by the snow. I wind up a little lane that leads to the higher ground. But the snow is packed down like ice and I can't get up the hill. I turn around, determined on another way to get there across a field or two.

The snow is getting deep now and I have to concentrate or I could hit things hidden beneath it. Troughs. Branches. Stones. Soon I am at the field where my flock should be, but I cannot see them. They must be sheltering behind a wall across the field, but the gateway is drifting and I can't get the bike through it. I have to find them. The distance is small, but trudging through the snow with a heavy load makes it feel epic. Floss leaps through the deep snow beside me as if she is jumping waves. She knows what we are doing, and gets to the wall before me. She runs up the drifting snow against the wall to see what's over the other side. She looks back, impatient for me to catch up. We find some of the ewes quickly. Coated in snow. Faces white. Their black friendly eyes pleased to see me, their wool insulating the snow that lands on them from the heat of their bodies. They rush to my legs and start on the hay. I count them, but it is hard because other ewes are emerging out of the blizzard from all directions. I struggle to get a decent count, but some are missing, maybe a dozen. I have a decision to make: if I stay here much longer, the quad bike will get stuck in the lane; I may get into all sorts of trouble and not get back for the other flocks.

Then they appear from out of the whiteness.