The Shepherd's Life (24 page)

 

16

The little becks that fall off the fells through our land can mostly be covered by a man's stride. They fall, wriggling through the rocks, down the rocky hillsides, little more than a trickle at first but soon becoming frothing white ribbons in a few hundred metres, but they connect us to the North Sea and the Atlantic.

My grandfather always waited for the spates of late November or December because he knew what it would bring. A harvest. Salmon. Sea trout. My granddad used to walk the becks each day whilst shepherding and would come home some day in the early winter excited that he'd seen a flash of silver, a muscled bow wave riving upstream. The fish were back. They say that local lads used to poach these fish. Working in gangs at night with torches to illuminate the riverbed, metal gaffs to snag the fish on, up to their waists in cold beck water. They say that it was exciting, that the shiver of a strong salmon on your fork prongs was a thing to make you feel alive, that the fun was in being abroad in the small hours, fearing having to fight, or outrun, the river bailiffs, sometimes, all under the noses of the incomers who at any moment might glance out their windows and see strange torches flashing in the valley bottom and call the police. They say it was fun shouting out to mates that you'd gaffed one and flung it into the rushes. They say all this, but I know nothing. Poaching is illegal. The seas have been emptied of fish by industrial-scale fishing. But we still find gaffed fish lying forgotten, lost, on the gravel sometimes and see a flash of silver in the shallows.

 

17

One brilliant blue frosty morning we heard hounds to the west singing of a fox. I was standing with my grandfather as he fed the sheep. The hunt was hidden from our sight by the brackened contours of the fell, a couple of miles away.

We often watch the hounds working around us, or passing over our land. The fell packs aren't the red coat affairs of the Home Counties. This is simply workingmen on foot, following a pack of wily fell hounds after foxes that often get the better of them in the rugged terrain. Some keen-eyed old men with binoculars follow from their cars on the nearest roads. Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, it was a spectacle in winter. My granddad was no animal rights activist, but like many of the local men he had a begrudging respect for the fox, or Reynard as they called him rather grandly. To us, foxes are not things to be pitied here, but tough and wily creatures quite capable of looking after themselves.

We often used to watch the foxes giving the hunt the slip. Granddad would have a wicked smile on his face as he watched. He seemed to support the underdog, the fox, except at lambing time when he'd lost lambs, and then he was fine with the fox getting his comeuppance. A fox catches our eye back away to the east at the far end of our land, a little bright-red dot in the sunshine, where the noise of the hounds had led our eyes. He is sloping across the ground with that effortless gait that carries foxes across miles of land seemingly without much great effort. The sun catches his coat so that he seems to glow a fiery orange. He purposefully cuts through every hole in the hedges, under every gate bottom, making his way across the fell side he knew so well towards us. Away back, a mile or so behind, the lead hounds are on his scent. They too catch the sunshine and glow white like pieces of fine china tumbling down a hill.

The fox crosses the road and enters our field. He lopes directly towards us. I step closer to my granddad, and his fingers clutch my shoulder excitedly. His grip says, “Hold tight, watch this.” The fox had seen the sheep we were feeding and wants to lose his scent in their smell. He darts through them, less than fifteen feet from where we stand. The sheep don't seem bothered, but part to let him through. He pauses for a step and casts us a look. Then he circles the ewes, and glances back across the fields to the hounds, three fields away. Just as if he is judging time. Then he shoots down the bank behind us and across into the rushes of the boggy valley bottom. We see him making his way through the sieves.

Now the hounds are just a field away from us. Their blood up, hot on the scent. But they don't know the land like the fox. They miss the holes in the fences and the gaps under gates and are bunching up, or jumping. They lose ground all the time finding the scent again. My heart is pumping out of my chest. The lead hound gallops up the field towards us and the ewes scatter away to the quiet end of the field. Other hounds jump the wall and follow. The rest of the pack can be seen making their way to us from fields back. The lead hound casts us a pleading look, and we sort of shrug, amused. He raises his nose to the air, trying to separate sheep and fox smells. The following hounds join in to circle us, confused. Then one of them catches the smell of the fox at the dyke where he'd exited the field. The hound song starts again, and they tumble through and over the fence, heading down into the bottoms.

They never did catch the fox. We stood and watched them try to navigate the confusing scents in the bog. We saw five foxes that morning heading in different directions from the valley bottom. The hounds seemed baffled. My granddad smiled, and said, “Them clever bloody foxes are running circles round them hounds.”

 

18

Two ewes have gone off their feet. Slavering at their mouths. Shaking. Unable to stand up, so hunched pathetically in a heap. I saw they were poorly when they were unable to run up to the feed when I fed their flock. One has its head on its side and looks to me like a case of listeria, a disease that affects the brain, strikes suddenly, and usually ends in death despite our treating them with antibiotics. I lost a good sheep a week ago to listeria and this looks like more of the same. I catch them and take them into the barn. I fill them with drugs and go for a coffee in a sulk. I leave my father standing silently watching them. I am in a foul mood, because these are three of my most well-bred females. Something doesn't add up, but I can't work out what. Listeria doesn't usually drop sheep off their feet in quite the same way as this. Something about these feels related to the weather suddenly going colder. But I am too fed up to think straight. Half an hour later my father passes judgement.

“That's not listeria. Them sheep has staggers. I've given them a shot of calcium and they're a bit better already.”

He was right. There is always someone who knows more than you about sheep, usually someone older. Staggers is a condition caused by calcium deficiency. Sudden changes in the weather or growth of the grass can bring it on. It is more common in older sheep when the first flush of grass comes. But these young ewes have it. The cure is simple. You inject a large amount of diluted calcium fluid into them, under their skin, and then stand back. The prognosis is much better than for listeria. Sometimes they get up and go straight away. An hour later these two are still in a bad way, but you can tell that whatever was troubling them has eased. Good stockmen spend a lot of time looking, watching, and thinking. That's what they are doing when they seem to be standing doing nothing looking over a gate as you pass them on the road.

 

19

My dad has been very cool about my double life. In fact he encourages it. We will be working in the sheep pens, as two equals, busy grafting away, and then he will suddenly stop, look at me, and say, “Isn't there something you should be doing on your computer?… I can do this on my own.”

Don't get me wrong, my dad and I are still all about the sheep. He knows sheep are my obsession, and that given half a chance I would do nothing else, but he also knows that you need to do other things here to make a living, and that this has always been true.

 

20

Though we have the chance to keep our farm and way of life going only because of the other things we do, it takes my father, my mother, my wife, my kids, and the wider family to make this farm what it is. The sensible thing is to use each of us to best effect. So if there is the faintest hint that I should be doing something else that would bring more money in, then I am banished as quickly as possible back to do it.

I used to hate these tensions, this being pulled in two ways at once. It went against the feeling I was brought up with that the farm should always come first. But I've grown used to it. Part of that is that I see many families like ours all finding ways to have one foot in the modern world and one in their living past. Many of my farming friends run campsites or B and Bs, their wives working off the farm to support it, or working off the farm themselves seasonally. This is how crofting families work in Scotland, or how families survive on their farms in places like Norway.

I have been to many places where the past traditions have disappeared and the people regret it. In the valleys of Norway they are trying to encourage people to farm again in some places because the character of those places alters without it. Farming is more than the effect on the landscape: it sustains the local food industry, supports tourism, and gives people an income in places that might otherwise be abandoned. In some remote areas of Norway it is difficult to manage forest fires without the remote farmsteads being there to watch and raise the alarm. But above all, when local traditional farming systems disappear, communities become more and more reliant upon industrial commodity food products being transported long distances to them, with all the environmental cost (and cultural disconnection from the land) that entails. They begin to lose the traditional skills that made those places habitable in the first place, making them vulnerable in a future that may not be the same as the present. No one who works in this landscape romanticizes wilderness.

 

21

Like much of the rest of my life, my marriage to Helen has followed a curiously old-fashioned pattern. She is from exactly the same background as me, a family farm in the Eden Valley. Her father kept a herd of dairy cattle and a flock of sheep. Long before I knew Helen, I sold sheep to her father and was on first-name terms with him. When I first appeared at his house in my best clothes to collect Helen for a date, we spent ten minutes discussing the price of sheep (much to Helen's acute embarrassment and annoyance).

Her father is a friend of my father. My dad had been round there and got drunk after a sheep sale some years earlier, been sick in the bathroom when he was worse for wear, blotting our copybook with my future mother-in-law. She took a little convincing, apparently, that I was a suitable catch. Helen's grandfather had bred some of the best Clydesdale horses in the country. Her grandfather had been a friend of my grandfather. For generations back it goes on like that. The same characters appear in their family stories as appear in mine. Our grandmothers were lifelong friends, so much so we speculated whether we had been set up. When I first met her grandmother Annie as Helen's boyfriend, she told me she had ridden to a dance on the back of my (great) uncle Jack's motorbike. She smiled at the memory, and I couldn't resist asking if he was fast.… She giggled, recognizing my innuendo, and said, “Aye, in more ways than one.”

 

22

Uncle Jack, or “Peo” as he was universally known, was a famous character in our area. He'd been a farmer, racehorse trainer, egg dealer, and God only knows what else in his lifetime. When my father was young and fresh from passing his driving test, he would be sent to drive Jack somewhere. It would inevitably turn into a boozy session in some pub or farmhouse miles from home with my dad delivering them home to farmhouses round the county in the early hours. He always had rolls of egg money in his pockets, dealing in cash with local hotels (so the taxman never caught up with him). The thick wads of notes would flop out of his pockets like he was some Sicilian mobster, with him seeming to think it was the most natural thing in the world.

Once he was walking cattle to the auction with my father. An impatient young man, probably heading to work in the local town, was behind the bullocks on the road in his new Mini car. The man drove right behind the bullocks, stressing them, revving the engine, and providing a running commentary about how late he was being made. Jack told him to settle down, but he kept fretting and commenting on how slow things were going, while pushing too close to the cattle. Then one of the bullocks turned suddenly and belly flopped over his bonnet, leaving a cow-sized dint in the bodywork. The young man jumped out, whining and complaining, and throwing his hands up in horror at what had happened to his beloved car. The men driving the cattle thought he had got what his pushing deserved, and kept walking. But Jack turned back, prodded the man to stop him talking, and asked him how much his car was worth to buy. The young man said the price. Then without so much as a haggle Jack peeled off the price in fresh £50 notes from his wad of egg money, stuffed it into the young man's top pocket, told him to park what was now “his car” in the lay-by, and to “fuck off and stop pestering folk.”

When I knew him, he was an old man, and would sit at my grandmother's table and suck on boiled sweets that she placed there for his weekly visits. He was famous, amongst other things, for arranging and being guest of honour at his own wake. They say he had invited hundreds of friends to the mother of all parties at a local hotel, long before he had any form of illness, let alone a sense of impending death, just because he reckoned his wake would be a lot of fun, and he didn't want to miss it. A few years later, and still in rude health, he organized another and invited everyone again. On one occasion they say he was stopped by the police travelling home drunk the wrong way up the highway. You can say his name to just about anyone over fifty in Cumbria and they have their own Jack Pearson story.

 

23

It is the week before Christmas and my elder daughter is holding a sheepdog puppy. These two things should not be connected, but I fear they are about to be. If there were a prize for the world's cutest puppy this one would walk it. It is a black-and-white bitch. We are standing in an old barn belonging to a good family friend called Paul. He breeds fine working sheepdogs and from time to time sells one or two that he can spare. A good sheepdog that has been trained is worth thousands of pounds, so the good families are held on to and getting a pup from one difficult. It has taken us a few years to get the chance of a puppy from him. He loves his dogs and clearly hates seeing them go to an owner that might waste them. That he's letting us choose one is a bit of a privilege.