The Shepherd's Life (18 page)

One of the stranger features of a fell farm is that your best females are rarely ever seen by anyone but you and your neighbouring fell shepherds.

Shepherds compete with these draft ewes at the autumn sales for the prestige of securing the highest prices because, although they are not our best ewes in their prime, they still have significant sale value and form a big chunk of our annual income, and they make a very public statement about the quality of our flock. If they have poor teeth or are old and lean, then the quality of our breeding is thrown into doubt. If they are still great ewes, with good teeth and have worn well, then our breeding looks desirable to other shepherds. So some of the old shepherds say that you can only really judge how effective a tup is when his daughters are sold as drafts maybe six or seven years after he is bought.

Men and women crowd five deep to peer through to the sheep in the sale ring. When a notable flock comes to be sold, the crowds follow them. Our friends the Lightfoot family are heading to the ring with their ten best ewes, their ewes sparkling black-and-white against their fleeces. These are highly respected shepherds with sheep that have a depth of breeding that everyone here knows about. The names of the great flocks are uttered reverentially here. Such sheep are presented and treated with great respect. Hours of preparation have been invested in getting them into prime condition. They have been dipped and coloured with peat (in line with the tradition that they should be a certain colour from the moors), their black-and-white noses and legs washed, stray white hairs or black ones “tonsed” out with tweezers. The great-looking ones with a track record might make £600 each, the run-of-the-mill ones £100. The best ewes are even spoken of affectionately: “She's special, that old lass, bred me a tup I sold last year for three thousand pounds.” These ewes can never be put to the fell again, because they are hefted to another piece of land, so they are farmed with care on the lower fenced ground.

 

33

My father is wielding a white-handled meat saw usually used by a butcher to cut through bones. I am holding a very-much-alive tup in the corner of the sheep pens, his backside in the corner. His head twisted strongly up around my body to present his horn at an angle my father can cut it at, my knee in his chest. The tup is angry and throws us forward a few inches with each thrust of his body, and I counter it to keep him as still as I can. With each wriggle my father curses.

Swaledale tups have curled, ammonite-like horns, curling once or even twice round before they are old. In the autumn when their blood is up, they back away from each other, then charge with their heads down until they meet with a vicious crack that is like two great rocks smacking together. Sometimes one will be found lying peaceful, and ended, neck broken. Most of these tups have horns that curl safely away from their eyes or from their heads, and can be left alone. But some of these horns break, twist the wrong way, or can grow into the tup's head; others grow so fast that the flies aggravate the base of the growing horns. So we train the horns of some sheep, and have to be vigilant to others. Sometimes we have to cut off a sliver of horn nearest the head to stop its boring into the flesh. Or we occasionally warm a horn to bend it to a more harmless course. We have even used a contraption that bends the horns slowly away from the head by tightening a bolt a little bit each day to apply slow pressure to a chain between the horns until they hold right naturally. Sometimes the horns are just too tight to the head, and we will take them off as the lesser of two evils. Sometimes there is some blood, but it soon stops, and the end result is safer for the sheep.

When the tups are old or dead, the horns are sawn off to make the varnished, soft, curved handles of the shepherd's crooks, attached to a staff of hazel with a seamless joint. Nothing was wasted in the old days. Some of the old shepherds or men in the villages carve ornate sheep or sheepdog heads in these horn handles to decorate their crooks, though the best of these are never used for work, but are simply for show. I will wave my crook to get the tup's attention in the sale ring, and tickle it gently under its nose to get it to raise its head to look prouder and full of character.

A crook is as essential now on our farm as it ever was. My crook is an extension of my arm, letting me catch the sheep. Sheep are faster than a man, but will let you within a distance they feel safe at. The crook is used to take advantage of that and snag them round the neck. I use a crook almost every day in winter and dozens of times a day in the spring when we are lambing and need to catch ewes at regular intervals. We also carry with us a medicine box with all the tools and potions that our trade demands—penicillin, purple foot spray, foot shears, multivitamins, hand shears, needles and syringes, wormer, and fly repellent (in summer).

 

34

My two-year-old son, Isaac, understands that a stick is part of what makes you a shepherd. He has his own made for him by a distinguished shepherd and stick maker. Each autumn at the sales the auctioneer sells a handful of this shepherd's fine crooks. They are keenly bid for. Some have the classic, horn-curled crook handle; others are wooden and in different styles. They are beautiful sticks and much admired, and the shepherd who makes them has made and sold many hundreds for charity. Last year I had to go and see the old shepherd who makes these sticks; we had some sheep business to attend to. I loaded my son in his car seat and we drove off across the mountain passes that take you to Langdale. An hour or so later we pulled into the farmyard, and my son woke up. We were ushered into the kitchen of an old-fashioned but picture-postcard-pretty farmhouse, and then the shepherd showed me his sticks, dozens of them, many carefully laid out for the day when they would be sold, others hanging upside down from the black oak beams so their varnish would dry right. He tells me that his sheepdog is so good on the fell that he thinks he could send it from the kitchen table to gather the crags above the house, and carry on his breakfast whilst it worked in the rocks above.

The old shepherd is proud of his sticks, and rightly so. I asked him if he had learned from his father; and he said, no, he was self-taught. Outside, he showed me the workshop in the barn where sticks in various stages of creation are placed. Bundles of hazel or beech rods, tied round the middle with string, rest against the workbench. In the vise is a beautiful stick that he has been working on. He tells me that he is having a job to curl the horn how he wants to; it has a little twist in it. I tell him I like it just fine; it has character. He says it is mine. And a few weeks later it is put in my hand, beautifully varnished, and less crooked that it had been, because he wanted it to look right. Then he hands me a stick for Isaac, a boy's crook, with a half-curled horn handle, the perfect height for him to stand and lean on.

 

35

My mother is sitting on a wooden chair in our barn, sunlight streaming through the doors. She is slightly hunched over a sheep's face, her glasses perched on her nose, like she is reading some tiny writing. A Swaledale sheep is held tight in the crate that holds their heads as we prepare them for the sales (sheep tend to stand still if firmly held under the chin and with a rope behind their heads, to tussle a little, and then resign themselves to enduring the work we do on them). In her hands are a pair of tweezers, the kind a lady might use to pluck stray hairs from her eyebrows. She is tonsing a tup, plucking out some of the hairs on his face to make his black-and-white colouring look even more distinct.

There is an ideal pattern, colour, feel, and style to the face markings of Swaledale sheep that is aspired to and only very rarely achieved. So everyone cheats a little and helps with the definition of the pattern by plucking. In the barns across northern England everyone who breeds Swaledales is at it. I know a shepherd who spent more than forty hours once on one sheep, plucking; when he told me I laughed and said he was crazy.… His response was, “Aye, maybe … but you should have seen her. She was beautiful by the time I'd finished. Won every show that summer.”

The sunlight is lighting my mum's hair. She is the most patient and careful of us. So she gets this strange job, my dad losing patience with it after twenty minutes. We have always done these little things, but I appreciate them much more now when I come home from university and see them with fresh eyes. I realize more than ever that these little things make us who we are.

 

36

I suddenly found, now that I was a student at Oxford, that when I am home I am for the first time interesting to middle-class English people. I am invited to book clubs in the village, and to dinner parties, and people want to talk about current affairs with me when I meet them in the lane.

Occasionally someone will ignore my friends if we are out and make a beeline to me to talk about something Oxford related, and my friends will just smile because they see it happening.

I have been reclassified as clever, and I am not entirely comfortable with it because it confirms lots of things I'd suspected.

 

37

Everything the shepherds were ever taught is tested in the shows and sales, in the full glare of scrutiny and the judgement of peers. This isn't just vanity, though there is vanity in it, and it isn't just pride, though you will never meet prouder folk. This is the coming together of everything, the ending of old stories and the beginning of new ones. The great flocks of sheep are the accumulation of countless achievements at these shows and sales over many years, each year's successes or failures layering up like chapters in an epic ancient poem. The story of these flocks is known and made in the retelling by everyone else. Men, who will tell you they are stupid and not very bright, can recall encyclopaedic amounts of information about the pedigrees of these sheep. Sheep are not just bought: they are judged, and stored away in memories, pieces of a jigsaw of breeding that will come good or go bad over time. Our standing, our status, and our worth as men and women is decided to a large extent by our ability to turn out our sheep in their prime, and as great examples of the breed.

 

38

The fields are silver wet with a late-autumn dew, and where the sheep have run the grass has been shaken back to green. There is a nip in the air. We are working in the sheep pens. My father's dog, Mac, lies with his head under the wooden gate, keen to be in where we are working. Selecting which of the ewes will go to which of the tups is arguably the most important day's work of the year for a shepherd. A complicated business of selecting animals with complementary characteristics to try and breed the best sheep you can. So we look at the ewes that fill the pen in front of us, weighing up in our minds which ewes bred best to which tups last autumn, and which ones might breed well to the new tups we have bought this autumn.

The ewes have the top of their tails sheared a week earlier to make it easier for the ram to get them pregnant (think removing woolly knickers). Then we dip them, worm them, give them a mineral supplement, and a dose to prevent liver fluke disease. A prenatal checkover if you like. Our job now is to ensure that the ewes are mated to the right tups so that they are a) in lamb, and b) in lamb to the right tup to produce the best possible offspring the following spring. We call it lowsing the tups.

At its simplest, it is just about putting a ram, or rams, with a bunch of ewes. Sex.

Then five months later, lambs.

Simple. But if you try to breed high-quality breeding stock or tups to sell to other people, and sustain the character and quality of a good flock of sheep, then it's a whole lot more complicated.

Sometimes writers mention what we do as having a kind of wisdom of the hands; they mean it respectfully and as a compliment, like we are artisans, but I don't like the phrase.

I am back from Oxford for one of my flying visits to help with this work, and it occurs to me that this is more intellectually challenging than anything I have done there for weeks. This was about making judgements, of thinking as well as doing. There is an awkward few minutes of adjustment each time I come home. I am daydreaming about something I'd studied that week, or trying to tell my dad something amazing I'd learnt, and then I realize I have botched catching a sheep and I get a look that says “You're back now. Focus on what we are doing. Or bugger off.” And then I switch off the other me and in a few minutes it is like I have never been away. Shepherds are not thick.

We are just tuned to a different channel.

 

39

The ewes that run past our legs are in peak condition. They have had eight to ten weeks of holidays after their lambs were taken off, healthy, fat, and recovered. Ready for winter. The previous year my father and I argued about this work, but now we have both changed a bit. If we disagree, I show more respect now; and the less I push, the more he's willing to listen. The Swaledale tup he has bought breeds beautifully coloured sheep but lacks size, so we are selecting ewes that have the power and quality to match him. To avoid inbreeding, ewes related to the older tups are sorted off and put to new mates. We know these ewes as individuals, their breeding and life stories, what their lambs were like this year and possibly last. Being away for a few weeks doesn't change that because I was here when they were born and when they lambed, and I was home to help clip many of them. Occasionally, one will elude our memories and we check its ear tag and Dad's scruffy old notepad; a moment later he will shout out in triumph.