The Shepherd's Life (22 page)

I don't like this snow. It is layering up into drifts very fast. I decide to take the sheep away with me, get them lower down to some shelter. I need to hurry. I push the ewes through the snow, but they want to go back to shelter. So I pull a bag out of my pocket and try and persuade them to follow me. If we can get a few hundred yards down this hillside into a new field, there is shelter. I fall on my backside, and get up again. I trudge my way through the growing drifts and am pleased to see that the ewes seem to understand. The best ewe follows me in the trodden path I am making. She has bred me great sons and daughters, helping to make my flock better. She has a sense of her own importance at all times. She was shown as a young ewe and for years afterwards would show off when I took people to the fields to see the flock, standing like a statue. In summer she leads them down the lanes from the high ground and across the beck, jumping right over it, with the whole flock following through the air. She is canny and streetwise; she knows they are being led away from danger now. I send Floss back around the rest, and they follow in single file. I am sweating, but freezing cold in my toes and fingers. I will go back for the quad bike later and fetch it down the windswept fields in another direction. We reach a gateway that is deep with snow, up to my waist, and getting worse as the wind drives more snow across the land into any slack places. Beyond this the ewes are safer; I can't leave them here in this lane, so I crunch through almost up to my chest. I wonder if this is a good idea, but the old ewe is already following in my footsteps. The others look at her, unsure whether to follow. But then one of her daughters comes, and they all bunch up at the beginning of the little white gully I have created. And then I am through the drift, the ground reaching back up towards my feet. I tumble over as I hit a stone, and the old ewe walks over my legs, followed by eighty others, all of which are now on a mission. They trek away down the fields now to where the snow is less deep, and where I go and feed them with hay. Whatever happens now the sheep can endure. They are safe now, out of the drifting winds. Floss comes and licks my face. She knows I need her today in this blizzard.

*   *   *

I eventually get the quad bike out of the snowy fields and go home. My hands are numb with cold now. I'm heading to the warm tap. The house door has a little drift against it and it falls into the kitchen as I enter. The children are excited to be off school and want to go sledding and beg me to take them. I groan.

Helen curses me for making a mess. I tell her all about what has happened, and she teases me about how much I love that old ewe. She calls her the Queen of the Flock. And then she sees how cold I am and fusses.

Winter is my swollen pig-like fingers throbbing under the hot tap, thawing out, as I howl unheard blasphemies at the stinging pain. It is my bloodshot eyes in the mirror as I finger out hayseeds. It is snowflakes or hailstones hitting my face as I drive the quad bike into the wind. Snow or rain becoming perfect lines like those scenes in
Star Wars
when ships go to warp speed and the stars transcend. Winter is my father's neck in front of me, streaming with rain, as we catch an old ewe that is unwell. Ewes grabbing desperately at hay in a storm before the wind robs them of their rations. Lambs lying dead, defeated before they have even started. Winter is hayracks and trees blown over, torn and smashed.

Winter is a bitch. But winter is also pure brilliant cloudless days when all is well in the world, when the fields dry out, the sheep are at peace, full of hay and lying in the sunshine, and we can work and also enjoy the beauty of the valley and its wildlife. Winter is beautiful too.

Skeins of geese pass high in the frosty blue. Ravens tumble over one another down the wind, like a black ribbon descending from the fell. Foxes skulk across the frosted fields at first light. Hares watch you with big dark watery eyes.

 

5

The next day I return and find the ewes. They've been buried behind a wall and are tasselled in handfuls of snow that weigh them down. But they are okay. The drifts here are smaller than higher up the mountainsides. I throw them hay and count them to know all are safe.

*   *   *

We didn't lose any sheep in the blizzard, but in the weeks that followed we lost more than we would normally. They were worn down, and they paid the price weeks later at lambing time. Some farmers we knew had hundreds of sheep buried for days and days, and lost dozens. Our neighbour spent a week clearing the road to get to his ewes with a tractor and loader. In Wales, Ireland, and the Isle of Man it was even worse.

A week or two later eighteen red deer corpses were found in a frozen tangled heap in the next valley from us. They had descended from the fells, to escape the worst of the blizzard, sheltering below Grey Crag. The drifting snow had curled over the top of the wall that they had sheltered behind, entombing them. The ground beneath their feet was grazed bare and deep in their shit. They died hungry, cold, and dehydrated. The melting snow revealed them to a shepherd friend of ours.

 

6

I am looking through the glass at a carving from a reindeer antler from at least thirteen thousand years ago of some swimming reindeer in the British Museum. I am spellbound. It reminds me of the animals that the shepherds here carve into their crook handles. The carving was found when railway was built past a rocky cliff in the Pyrenees in the 1860s. It throws me, because it makes clear to me that the north has always been moving. It was once hundreds of miles to the south. When this was carved, our landscape was still under the ice. That beautiful little carving from a reindeer antler gives me a glimpse of the people who travelled north in the summers to graze across landscapes like ours. A people with a sense of grace and beauty, a people who probably stopped and looked, and saw things they found beautiful. These were a people who imbued animals with great meaning.

As the ice retreated, nomadic hunter-gatherers crossed our land, following herds of wild animals. These first people after the ice crossed a tundralike landscape. If you could have looked down on northwest Europe from something like the International Space Station say sixteen thousand years ago and fast-forwarded the history of earth below you like a movie, you would have seen the ice retreat, a white tide going in and out but slowly backing northwards from places it had long stubbornly subdued, but slowly losing ground over the generations. The north retreating slowly back towards the North Pole. You would also have seen that with so much of the oceans trapped in vast ice sheets, sea levels were much lower than today. This little corner of northwest Europe was just a tiny part of a bigger landmass. The landscape shifted as you moved southwards from deep glacial ice, through tundra, to steppe, and then forests, furthest from the ice. As the ice retreated, a new kind of land was emerging, things growing that couldn't survive in the ice and snow. Trees marched north slowly, gradually, imperceptibly until this was a landscape of trees at least up to around two thousand feet on the mountains. And behind the retreating ice came the animals of the tundra, and later of the forest. Reindeer herds. Wolves. Bears. For several thousand years after the ice the small number of people here weren't farmers but hunter-gatherers. Then there is a period when they were partly settled farmers and still partly hunter-gatherers (four or five thousand years ago). Then finally by about three thousand years ago they look to me like they have become settled farmers, people that I feel an affinity with even if their lives were different from mine. There are successive waves of invaders in the centuries that followed, but none that break it. By a thousand years ago the farming looks very familiar indeed. After that, the scale changes, but the structure is essentially the same. The landscape now is the same landscape Wordsworth wandered through.

No one can be sure, but there is a suspicion that the fell people just go on, beneath the waves of “history” that fill the history of England. It sometimes feels to me like, as the tide of the north receded with the melting ice, it left us in place in the hills, little islands sticking up from an encroaching sea of southern civilization.

 

7

I could tell from three hundred yards away as I approached the field that the old ewe was ill. She looked different. It is weeks since the snowdrifts melted, and she has been in good health, but now she looks hollow and has an ear down. And although I did everything to save her life, she deteriorated quite quickly and died a few days later. Pneumonia. It wasn't the snow that killed her but the wet weather that followed.

We are not sentimental people, but we share our lives with these sheep. We care about them. That ewe was born on our farm seven years ago. Since I bought the Herdwick ewes, I have built up a flock that live on our intakes. Although Herdwick sheep are predominantly fell sheep, there are a number of flocks beneath the high fells. Some of these specialize in producing tups to sell, taking advantage of their enclosed land (which lets you control the breeding more tightly than you can on a high fell farm where lots of tups have to be released together with many hundreds of ewes) to have a smaller but high-quality flock. For the past ten years we have kept some of our best male lambs from those Herdwick ewes and sold them each autumn to other farmers. I have been working up through the ranks from an amateur, making lots of mistakes, to being taken a little more seriously now as my flock have improved.

The old ewe was a big part of that journey because she was my best. I remember her being born because her mother was my show ewe as well. She was born under a fallen tree out of the wind and rain. A single lamb. She lived on our hardest ground all of her first summer, somewhere she was always happiest to return to. The first autumn she was chosen to be one of the best females of her age, and kept when some of her peers went to the sales because they were surplus. She went away the first winter to the lowlands to graze on a dairy farm with lots of grass, and grew into a fine young sheep. The next spring she returned to her heaf, the place on the mountain her mother taught her was home. She won her class at our local show, and so did her first tup lamb. He was sold the next year for £2,000 to Joe Weir at Chapel Farm, Borrowdale. There are sheep that are descendants of hers in the other valleys now. Her last daughter to be born has taken after her. She too is a show-off, and likes to lead the flock wherever it goes when we are moving them. She stands like a statue too when anyone is watching. I dream that she will breed well, that the family will go on in my flock. These little dreams sustain this way of life.

 

8

Life and death are part of the work on a farm. It used to be that all farms had a dead heap or a dead hole where the bodies were thrown. We were supposed to dispose of the carcasses by calling a knackerman. He'd turn up, fag in mouth, on an old wagon, trailing the smell of death through the countryside. I used to wonder who in their right mind would choose that job. But someone had to do it.

One day we took a dead ewe to the knacker's yard. We were in my dad's battered old Land Rover. Blondie's “Atomic” was on the radio. I was used to dead things, but I'd never seen anything like this. Piles of bloated cows and sheep. Tongues thrust out. Eyes poking out of their heads. Fat black flies everywhere. Puddles of drying blood. Bile. Pools of piss. The smell made you retch and was so bad it followed you home. It was like some vast panorama of animal death by Damien Hirst. A man was sitting on the bloated belly of a large black-and-white cow, his bait box resting on the cow's belly under a cloud of flies. Huge bloated bluebottles were crawling on his hands, which were covered in dried blood. He was eating a sandwich, white bread, butter, and thickly sliced boiled ham. And he had a comical grin on his face.

We chucked the ewe out next to a small mountain of other corpses, our boots rimmed in a grey slime that they sank into. As we left my dad, usually unflappable, said, “Christ, did you see that daft bugger's hands … and eating a sandwich.”

 

9

When I finally returned from Oxford, my family and friends were proud that I had done well. But when they said that, I couldn't help thinking that I hadn't yet done anything at all. I was unemployed, I had a student loan to pay back, and there was no house on our farm for Helen and me to live in. I should have been worried, but I wasn't.

I was elated.

We are in a white transit van. I'm driving. My wife Helen sitting next to me. Everything we own (apart from my sheep) is crammed behind us. I've turned my back on another life. I could earn more money “down South.” I could probably get some highly paid job in London with my fancy Oxford degree. I might even have ended up a professor or something if I'd served my time in Oxford. All the good opportunities are probably behind us. It's like I am too dumb or stubborn to do this by the script. But I don't care what other people do when they are supposedly smart. I don't care how much someone might pay me in London. I am going home. We are heading back to a farm that doesn't make much money, certainly not enough to pay me a wage I can live on with a wife, or to get a mortgage to build a house. I will need to have a job alongside anything I do on the farm. I have no idea how that will work. I haven't really got a job to head to.

No one has asked me to go home.

There is no house on our farm for us to live in.

Oxford made me fearless around the kind of people that would once have scared me witless.

When I left Oxford I was bulletproof.

I'd never mention the “O” word to anyone nice or northern, but anyone remotely snooty or officious and I'd bring it in to conversation. Shameless. And it works. Just one mention of the “O” word and it was like fairy dust. They'd turn nice and respectful. It worked at dinner parties, job interviews.… I still get it now, a kind of resetting of the meter the second you mention it.