The Shepherd's Life (30 page)

My daughter has gone for another ewe down the field. She lifts the lambs to their feet because they were sunbathing and sleepy. The ewe is a proud mother and stands over them, giving mouth. She is so defiant a mother that she nudges at my daughter with her head, pushing her away from her lambs. Molly is having none of it and waves her away determinedly. She then walks the ewe with lambs in train, up the field to me, and I let them through the gate. My daughter laughs at the bossy ewe that was not remotely scared of her. As lambs are born and straighten out, in the first few days, we see the future of our flock, and little clues in their appearance tell us whether these will be good sheep.

 

16

Lambing time often feels like it starts in the depths of winter and ends in summer. About halfway through, the spring comes, and everything becomes easier. The seasonal transition is dramatic. The days are lengthening. The sun grows in warmth, hanging higher in the sky each day. The sheep have started to thrive again and put on flesh. The land is drying out. I can hear water seeping imperceptibly away. As the fields warm in the sunlight each morning, the valley is bottomed with mist and the fields are rimed wet with dew. The fell sides catch the warmth sometimes as it rises from the colder valley floor. This sun-warmed air catches my face as I rise up the fell sides to feed the ewes.

This morning I noticed something missing. The winter-vagrant fieldfares are gone from the hedgerows, back to the far north, and in their place are the summer visitors. I don't always notice straightaway, and then I know I haven't seen them for a while. And you feel a little sadness, like the valley is emptier, quieter, less colourful and chatty. The fieldfares have headed away over the seas and other lands to breed. The fields are littered with fresh mole heaps, a rich black loamy soil of fields not ploughed for decades, if ever. The few moles we catch, we hang on the barbed wire fences, making but a small dent in their number. Then as we work we see the summer migrants return. Stonechats suddenly reappear from Africa, bobbing eagerly up and down on our walls, and on the bare ground where the ewes have been fed through the winter. Oystercatchers strut around the pastures and stand atop the gate stoops. Curlews rise and fall on their own song. Geese circle past the fell side before falling slowly on muscular wings to the freshening pastures below. The trees host a little orchestra of whistle and chatter from the starlings. But the snow still clings on the high fells. Dodd Scar holds the snow sometimes right into May. The snow-speckled fell looks more and more like the side of a piebald pony. The buzzards start to find thermals and get back their majesty after a winter of sulking in the ash trees and scratching worms out of the molehills. Everything in the natural world around me changes, and I am outside to feel and see it. Our spirits rise again.

I take off my waterproof leggings and Wellington boots, throw them in a corner. I lace up my walking boots. I am back on top of the ground instead of wading through it. New grass means we stop feeding hay or buying supplementary feed. Grass means our workload eases, or changes at least, to less life-critical tasks. Longer days mean we can start to do other jobs outside that have been on hold through the dark months. There is a time each spring when I know it can't go back, we are through it. I notice the oak buds fattening slightly. The catkins appear on the willow by the edge of the becks. And as we are lambing, the rooks begin their courtships and build their nests, journeying here and there with sticks, or tugging wool from the backs of our ewes to line their nests, leaving little circles where the robberies took place. They glide down from the wooded fell sides to where we feed without a single beat of their fingered wings, wheeling above us, seemingly motionless and within touching distance.

There is a kind of light-headedness that comes with spring.

The whole valley echoes to the sound of ewes calling their lambs, and the older lambs start racing each other across the hillsides. Our work shifts from supervising lambing to looking after hundreds of young lambs and keeping them alive and out of trouble. Some days it all goes like a dream. Ewes give birth themselves, get their lambs suckled, and then tuck them sheltered behind some rushes. Older lambs follow their mothers obediently and safely. Sometimes a lamb makes me laugh by chasing or trying to head butt one of the crows that struts about amongst them, shining purple, bronze, and jet-black in the sunshine. I see frog spawn in the wet bits of land where I pass each morning. The heron folds down the wind, heading downstream.

 

17

When I was a child, towards the end of lambing time, the men circled the woods and shot crows. Shouting, excited like boys, sociable again, after the testing weeks. The whole valley echoed with cawing and the thuds of cartridges, twelve-bore retribution for one-eyed lambs and maimed corpses. Shattered twigs blown skywards, as nest floors crackled back down through the branches. Ravens, rooks, dopes (carrion crows), magpies, and jackdaws … all wanted for murder. Anything with black feathers was a dope—a robber, a killer, and a cheat. In a valley where men lived for their sheep, these shadows of the lambing field were guilty. The morning after there were black specks in the rushes by the wood's edge. Crumpled wings, perforated flight feathers, specks of blood, porcelain legs twisted and broken like cocktail sticks. The angry caws of the survivors reprimanded the valley and its shepherds.

A dope rose and twisted like a broken kite, before crumpling to earth like a biplane with torn canvas wings. “Look at that murdering bugger, hoppin' about,” Granddad said. A length of hazel, skin shining and soft to the touch, was sitting idle by the Land Rover gear stick. My staff. My chance. We exchanged smiles that we both understood. “You'll be wet to the skin,” he warned. But it was said as encouragement. I tore off across the pasture through a scattered lake of puddles, racing with the clouds reflecting beneath my feet. The crow rising and falling in desperate leaps to the sky. Wailing, thrashing wings, only one of which now held the air, the other failing, a deep black shimmering force like the wrath of God, and with one wing it still had me beat. But, legs pumping like pistons, I got almost within stick reach. I caught the crow with the staff somewhere above its failing wings. It dropped like a toy into the standing water, suddenly small, and ended. I held it up in my hand, a trophy, and turned back to the gate, stick aloft. The old man didn't mind at all that I was soaked to the skin.

 

18

As lambing time peters away, and with plenty of grass and warmer weather, our focus changes to working on the ewes and lambs and getting them to the higher ground so that the meadows can be cleared for growing our hay. Last year's ewe lambs return from their wintering grounds and are driven to their home on the fells, holding there because their mothers taught them this as young lambs. In the valley bottom, we have hundreds of sheep on the farm, each of the breeding ewes having either a single lamb or twins, and we need to begin the work of sorting them.

The crossbred lambs that will be grown and fattened for meat are castrated and have their tails docked (tails or testicles were cut off with a knife, or twisted off, with a spray of blood, when I was a kid but now it's done with an orange rubber ring that slowly stops the circulation and lets them fall off). Lowland sheep need their tails docked to stop them getting fly strike (maggots) on the damp and dirt that accumulates on their tails. The castrated lambs lie down for a few minutes, wincing, and then go off to find their mothers and seem fast to forget about it. The fell lambs keep their tails because mountain sheep need them in bad weather and because they don't scour on the fell grazing and thus have mucky backsides that attract flies.

The lambs all have to be doctored: injected with vaccines for preventable illnesses, wormed with an oral drench (as the parasites come to life again with the warmth), marked, and tagged with their two fourteen-digit microchipped tags (a legal requirement), and notched in their ears to show they belong to our farm. We use a spray to stop blowflies laying eggs on our sheep, as in June and July some would be struck without this and would eventually die a horrible death.

So in early May we gather the sheep into the pens or the barns. It is work we have always done as a family, because many hands make light work, although there is a clear pecking order among us.

The oldest members of the family always claim a kind of authority based on their experience, as I will when it is my turn. So my father reckons he is the boss, even though he is weaker after months of chemotherapy. Those of us in our prime do the catching and rougher work, and working our dogs to get the sheep in and out of the pens. My mother gets the job of writing in the messy old textbook the individual tag numbers of each of the lambs so we can always trace their ancestry. The children hold orange rubber castration rings, or the ear tags, and enjoy passing them to us. It is a day of trying not to forget what each ewe and lamb needs with everyone given a task. But it is also a chance to identify the breeding decisions that have worked, and which haven't—so we give each other hell about the decisions we each made that didn't work, or begrudgingly admit perhaps he, or I, got something right. We can now see the quality of our lamb crop and which ewes have bred well and which have not. We spend the day forming judgements. Everyone has an opinion. Tups bought the autumn before are now cheerfully damned.

“That one's far too white out of that old ewe.”

“No, it'll be all right.… You wait and see.”

My grandfather would tell you where each lamb was born, or how it was bred. “This one was born under that Scotch pine at top of the horse pasture.… I thought it was dead … but look at it now.”

These days of stories and chatting often threaten to take attention away from the confusing number of jobs each sheep needs done. My father will periodically shout, “Oh fucking hell.… We better stop talking—I've let that bugger off without marking it.”

The error will be corrected, the lamb caught and marked. Then this is followed by ten minutes of focused work, before the chattering cycle will be repeated. We have some tremendous family rows on such days, but we get over it. When all is said and done we are working as a family, and that is a special thing. My children now have opinions, and want to tell everyone how their sheep have bred, and how they are going to beat their dad with a tup lamb when it grows up. My son is two years old and hangs over the rails, waving a crook, shouting instructions, and offering unwanted opinions to add to the others floating around. My dad smiles as if to say, Here we go again. Nothing changes.

Grandfathers.

Fathers.

Sons.

Once the ewes and lambs are doctored, they can be moved to the higher ground. As we push them out, the valley echoes with ewes and lambs calling for one another, all of them carrying our blue and red smit mark on their shoulders, as dictated since time immemorial in the Lake District
Flock Book
.

 

19

When the fell flock I bought from Jean were walked back to their fell from our farm after their first winter, they remembered where they were going and streamed away at a trot to their summer home. The whole fell side seemed to sigh with relief at their being home again. The next winter, they were fine on our farm too, as though they had adjusted to the change.

 

20

Wordsworth may have “wandered lonely as a cloud,” but shepherds are social animals once winter is through. We come back together at the spring sheep shows in May, where we show the best of our tups (or ewes as well in the Swaledale events).

Hundreds of Swaledale shepherds congregate on a windy bit of moorland next to Tan Hill Inn. The tiny road that winds over the moor is shadowed with parked cars for half a mile or so on either side of the show field, an area of the moor shaped out of wooden hurdles that springs up overnight and vanishes as fast afterwards. It is one of the great achievements of that breed to “win Tan Hill.” But truth be known it's also an old-fashioned coming together. I understand that in ancient times places like ours were governed at gatherings like this. Big fairs where people came together, showed or traded livestock, raced horses, got drunk, and made friends or found wives or husbands. At Tan Hill shepherds chat with their friends from across the Swaledale lands that they have not seen since the autumn sales. Comparing notes about their lambing and how well the tups have done. There are other smaller spring fairs like this across the fell country. Without these gatherings we would drift into being strangers divided up into the different valleys, and our breed communities would drift apart.

The Herdwick shepherds have their own spring tup fairs. Keswick Tup Fair takes place on “the Thursday after the third Wednesday in May” (go figure) on Keswick Town Field. (The other tup fair takes place a week earlier in Eskdale in the field by the Woolpack Inn.) Folk gather each spring from right across the Lake District, coming to return their hired tups and to show their best ones against each other, as they have for centuries. The field is divided by wooden or metal hurdles into a big circle of bale-string-tied pens, a makeshift ring in the centre. Sheep are unloaded from aluminum sheep trailers towed behind Land Rovers, and walked to pens set aside for each farmer. The tups blink as they come out into the daylight, and strut as they realize they are amongst strangers, and give an occasional thump of heads and horns.