The Shepherd's Life (27 page)

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We start lambing at the beginning of April. Theoretically at the point where winter here becomes spring, but sometimes winter isn't aware of our plans and the weather is still gruesome until well into lambing. Snow. Rain. Hail. Wind. Mud. We brought the ewes quietly into the lambing fields in the valley bottoms a few days ago, fields which in theory should now have some grass after being cleared of last year's lambs which were fattened and sold to butchers in February and March. But there isn't much grass, so we are praying for some warmth. Begging for spring.

It's a strange mixture of dread and excitement at the start. Dread at the work to be done and the things that can go wrong. Excitement because if sheep are your life then this is a key moment in the year, both commercially because a sheep farm without lambs is pointless, and from a breeding perspective because you see whether your flock is improving and your breeding decisions working. But mostly it is about getting lambs out alive and seeing them get a good start in life.

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My second daughter, Bea, has come to work with me in the lambing fields and has seen a ewe lying against a wall, down the field, paining on its side. It is lambing. She has come to lamb a sheep, determined to keep up with her elder sister who lambed one two days ago and is crowing about it. She appeared in her work clothes as I was leaving the house at first light, and got on the quad bike with me. I tell her that it is cold, and that she may not get a chance, but she seemed to know that she would and came anyway. As I shout the ewes up to their feed, I see three pairs of large round ears appear out of a sea of sun-bleached sieves. The roe deer know my voice, and that I offer no threat to them, so they hold tight each morning and watch, unless I approach them. Bea and I drive down the field, the roe deer bounding off in halfhearted leaps. Floss pushes behind us in excitement because she knows I may need her to hold this ewe until I have caught it. I tell her, “Steady,” because I do not want to jump off the quad bike and stress the ewe if I can help it. The ewe is fairly oblivious to us arriving, and in three steps I catch her and hold her down before she can struggle. She lies on her side. With each contraction she raises her head and throws it back against herself. I can see two legs and a nose breaching, as it should be, so my daughter can do this.

She looks nervous, like she is trying to be brave. She hates her elder sister doing anything that she hasn't, so there is a grit behind that nervous smile that says she will do this thing whether it is fun or not. She is small, just six years old, and the lamb coming (judging by its feet) is on the large side. But she grabs a lamb toe in each fist and pulls. I talk her through it. I tell her to give the ewe a moment between pulls. I can tell she is a little unsure whether it feels right, but with each contraction the legs slip out a little farther. She gets a hand round each leg at the first joint of the foot. Then the nose is breaching. She wants to stop and let me do this, but I reassure her, tell her she can do it, and if she does she will be able to go back and tell her mum and her sister she did it. Then the smile toughens and she starts to pull. My daughter is tired now. She nearly stops when it resists her pressure at its hips, but she knows enough to pull it farther and get it out now so it can breathe quickly. She slops it down in front of the mother whose tongue is already manic in its determination to lick it dry. My daughter laughs because the ewe licks her bloody hands as she sets the lamb down. She stands over the lamb, which wriggles and shakes itself free of the afterbirth slime, her face a mixture of pride and awe. The sun is shining so we will leave this lamb and its mother. Then my daughter remembers something.

“We have to go for breakfast, Dad, and tell Molly I lambed one.

“And it's bigger than the one she lambed.”

I used to follow my father (and grandfather before that) round the lambing fields. Now my children follow my father round the farm in all seasons and learn from him. He comes to the farm each day; he teaches my children his values and his knowledge like my grandfather taught me. My son worships him.

The thing comes full circle.

 

2

But this lambing time he is not here.

He is in Newcastle hospital, where they are trying to kill the cancer with chemotherapy. I don't know whether they will beat it or not, but when you love someone you have to believe they might.

Once I wanted to kill him and now I want him to live more than anything. He has lived his life by his values, a modest hardworking life that I admire. But now he is in hospital and I can do nothing to help him. So I send him commentary and pictures of his best ewes and their new lambs on my phone so he can live this time vicariously through me. I am forbidden to go and visit, because he wants the farm looked after right more than he wants visitors.

I lamb the sheep alone this spring but it is not the same. Dad couldn't care less about money and would drive twenty miles without a thought to help a friend with work if he thought he was needed. My grandfather might have bought this farm, but it is my father who has tended it. He is stoic, but we know it is killing him to be away from his sheep and from the work. Recently he became a pensioner and someone rang to ask if he would be stopping working. He just laughed at the idea, like it wasn't even a serious question.

In the weeks that follow my father recovers.

He is in remission.

He is almost back to full strength.

We dare to hope it is gone.

 

3

I feed the ewes in long lines on the hillsides. They line up behind me with their heads down like a massive scarf. I walk up either side of them and check their rear ends for signs. One ewe has blood on her woolly tail. But she isn't lambing. She has miscarried. My heart sinks. There is always a dread lurking behind our excitement each lambing time, a fear that something might go wrong. This is nature, not some cute movie. I call the vet. She tells me that there are a lot of failed pregnancies going around. It is probably a virus. Bad news: there isn't much I can do. The virus will have gone through them weeks ago, early in the pregnancy without any outward signs. They may all have it, or just a small few. Those that have it will miscarry a week before the due date. I inject all the ewes with antibiotics to help them get over the disease. The vet isn't sure whether this will work or not, and doing anything with the heavily pregnant ewes can induce stress and create new problems; but it is the only weapon I have and we always try to do our best for the flock. Half a dozen ewes' pregnancies fail in the next week. Some of the lambs breathe briefly, then die. I wake up feeling sick each morning.

It is not the loss of these half-dozen lambs that upsets me, as sickening as that is, but the pressing fear that this could escalate and spread. But thankfully it doesn't. With each passing day the fear that the whole flock will have dead lambs passes.

Thankfully, it stopped as soon as it started. We come through this thing. It starts to look like a minor setback. As the miscarriages are found, I skin the aborted lambs as people here have always done. I cut round the legs and the neck and then peel the skin off, leaving the head and legs black and the rest of the body naked. It isn't a very nice job, but it takes some skill to do it neatly. Ideally the dead lamb's skin forms a kind of jacket that can be put onto a live lamb without a mother. You soon learn to get over your squeamishness on a farm. My children watch all of this, and I let them, because it is a part of who we are.

Blood was everywhere when I was a child. Sheep lambing, bloody hands, dehorning cattle with blood spurting out of the horn stumps like something out of a zombie movie as they career off across the yard before being let out in the fields for spring. Cow caesareans, men with armfuls of guts and blood, then shoving it all back in and stitching it right. One night we calved a cow and the vet said, “There is something wrong with this blood … Christ this cow is a haemophiliac.”

It bled to death despite our best efforts to stop it, but we rescued the calf. And my father's hands were always torn, scraped, grazed, cracked, or “kinned,” with sores or dried blood. He never bothered and called skin “bark.”

“You're cut, Dad.”

“Aw its nowt, just knocked a bit of bark off.”

We accept blood as normal as long as it stops flowing, scabs over, and heals. In traditional communities, blood is part of day-to-day life, something even children are familiar with.

But I grew up with blood.

I like blood.

I would rather my children see blood and know reality than have a childish relationship with farming and food, everything in plastic packaging and everyone pretending it never lived.

Everything and everyone is at times covered in shit or snot. It is just part of a farm life. You learn to accept that you will get spattered in shit at times, or slaver, or afterbirth, or snot. That you will smell of your animals. You can always tell how alien someone is to our world by how terrified they look of the muck.

 

4

A friend over the hill from our farm lambs a fortnight sooner than us and has some lambs without mothers, so I go (six times) for a lamb from her. Orphan lambs are shared like this here so that everyone makes best use of the ewes with milk and the lambs. No one really wants to rear a pet lamb on a bottle. They don't do as well in the end. The orphan lambs are a different breed from the casualties, but it doesn't matter. The mothers judge them mostly on their smell at this age. I take the lamb in my hands when I get them home. The skin of the dead lamb forms a tight-fitting waistcoat, with the orphan lamb's legs poking through the leg holes and its head through the neck. With legs and head in, the skin cannot come off. I put the lamb in a small pen with the grieving ewe and hold my breath in the hope that she will mother it. The ewe sees the lamb with the false skin on and glares at it suspiciously. Then she sniffs at it, and is confused. It smells just like the lamb she had an hour ago. She turns around the pen a few times as it approaches her hungrily. She is not convinced this is hers. She gives it a head butt or two to knock it down while she processes the competing urge to mother something that smells right with the suspicion that I have had something to do with this situation. And perhaps she knows her lamb is dead. But these old shepherding tricks work because all six of the ewes take to their orphan lambs. Some take them within five minutes, a couple take half a day, but all are back in the fields with a lamb after two days.

They have reared them well. I see them each morning when I shepherd the different flocks and I smile. I still owe my neighbour for those orphan lambs months later, but we run a kind of unwritten ledger; we will return the favour another year. She passes my lambing fields several times a day, on the way to her own lambing ewes. If she sees anything that needs my attention, she will bawl down the fields to my house for me to go and sort it. And I do the same for her.

 

5

One of my best ewes is lambing. She has been lambing for nearly two hours, and I was unable to come back until now to help her. She is in a good place and the rain has stopped. I daren't leave her any longer, so with a flick of the hand Floss runs by her and I have her by the neck with my crook. I reach under her and pull her far leg so she gently rolls onto her side. Under her woolly tail I feel for lamb legs. A moment after catching the ewe I have a bloody arm deep inside her. You never know what you will find. Sometimes it is a wriggling, tangled mass of limbs inside. If there is just one leg, it means the other has been left behind and I will need to go in and fetch it forwards for a proper delivery. If there are no legs but a head, then the lamb can get stuck and die on exit, and I will need to push it back in, and get the legs coming in front of the head as they should be, like a diver. I have to guess whose limbs are whose by sticking my arm in and by touch alone. The ewe lies flat, lifting her head from time to time in contraction (my spare hand holding her down firm and my leg holding hers from the ground like a wrestler). When I find the right combination of legs, I get the first joint between my knuckles and start to pull. As my fist comes back into view I have two lamb legs between my fingers, followed after some steady pressure by the head. The nose, wrinkling with the pressure, shows. Then breaches. Then the head peels out. I keep the pressure on as the body slithers out, then the pressure eases as the body follows in a gush of yellow afterbirth in a crumpled heap on the grass.

The lambs are born with a cough, splutter, and a shake of the head. They don't breathe for a couple of seconds so I tickle their nostrils with a piece of straw or grass. Then they shake and cough into life. The ewe's tongue instinctively licks the lambs dry. I turn them and can see that they are two “gimmers” (ewe lambs). These are the future of the flock; they will live in the fells for most of their lives. I find myself talking to the ewe, telling her she has done well. She nuzzles them to their feet. Then, in minutes, on their matchstick legs they are stumbling towards the teats. Instinct telling them that they have one chance to live and it relies on getting hold and sucking. The line between life and death is often paper-thin. It is essential that they get enough of the yellow creamy colostrum milk that carries the antibodies and nutrition they need in the first few hours. It is magic golden stuff, and half our work is ensuring that new lambs get to their feet and get their share. You rarely have to help a healthy Herdwick lamb on the second or third day if its mother is milking it properly, but a share of the Swaledales need a little help. When you skin a Herdwick lamb you can see why they are so perfectly suited to this landscape and its tough weather. The fleece at birth is about half an inch thick, a leathery skin on the inside and a wiry weather-turning carpet on the outside. They are, literally, born dressed for a snowstorm or a rainy day.