by Amanda Owen
It was appalling to see his lifeless body suspended from the gate, his swollen tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, his paws scraped raw and bleeding from scratching at the concrete in desperation. It was wholly upsetting to think that all of this had been going on just yards away from the farmhouse, whilst we were eating our tea. His body was still warm, it had taken just thirty minutes for Joe to die.
‘What we gonna do?’ I said, not thinking clearly, as there was nothing that we could do.
‘Gis’ a hand to loosen him,’ said Clive.
I am ashamed to say that I couldn’t; the sight filled me with revulsion. Of course, I see death amongst the farm animals and accept that where you have livestock you will inevitably end up with deadstock. But this was just something else. I cannot, hand on heart, say that Joe had ventured into the realms of a real companion, he had not been with us for long enough to forge that bond, but I still saw it as an acutely personal loss.
‘I cannae see,’ Clive muttered as he struggled to unbuckle Joe’s collar.
Then, all of a sudden, with a dull thud Joe’s lifeless body dropped to the ground.
Clive pulled angrily at the collar that was still caught in the hinge. It came off with ridiculous ease and he flung it aside.
‘Erm, I’s thinkin’ tha’ we might need that,’ I said, picking up the collar from where it lay by the pen wall. I was sure that sheepdogs would be covered under the farm insurance, so it was important to keep evidence of what had happened. I also realized that, rather like a crime scene, I should perhaps have taken a photograph of Joe’s predicament.
Clive picked Joe up, carried him back to his kennel and laid him in his straw-filled dog bed. ‘Bloody latch,’ he said, as he shut the kennel door behind him. ‘I just can’t believe it.’
The other dogs were quiet. Usually the noise of the quad bike and the sound of footsteps would signal an outing and trigger a chorus of barking, but not on this occasion. Even Bill was silent, tail at half mast as he looked through the weld mesh towards Joe’s kennel. Clive let Kate out and talked to Bill as he passed the kennels.
‘Well, Bill, it looks like yer comin’ outta retirement, my old friend,’ he quipped.
Clive and I set off to the moor, one dog down. We didn’t say much, just the occasional comment.
‘He were doin’ all right, weren’t he?’ I said.
‘Nay I’d won with ’im,’ said Clive stoically.
We gathered the sheep up and put them to the moor. Leaving the bike at the bottom, we both walked, Clive with his hands behind his back and his head bowed. Nancy was weighing me down, and I stopped to catch my breath before casting Kate out in a wide arc, to pick up the sheep from the far side of the gutter that bisected the steep rough allotment. It was a big ask for Kate; that evening she was doing the job of two dogs, but pleasingly she worked at a distance with ease and gave me no reason to instruct her further. I stood on a rocky outcrop that gave me the best vantage point and watched her working, her black figure weaving quickly and purposefully through the seaves. Even when she was hidden from sight you could roughly tell where she was according to which way the sheep were running.
Seeing Kate round up the sheep reminded me of being a child, sitting at the kitchen table with my grandad and watching as he did the Pools and the ‘Spot the Dog’ competition in the newspaper. Every week there’d be a black-and-white photograph taken at a sheepdog trial, showing the sheep, and the handler, but no dog. All you needed to do was put a cross in exactly the place where the sheepdog was to win a prize. He never won. I wondered if I’d be any better at it now.
By the time we got back to the farmyard, the mourners had arrived. The children had been alerted to what had happened by Annas and had come to have a look for themselves.
‘Poor Joe,’ said Violet, while Edith looked sadly at his body; he was lying on his side as though sleeping in his dog bed.
‘Can I dig ’im a hole wi’ t’digger?’ asked Reuben enthusiastically.
I glared at him. ‘He’s not even cold yet, Reuben,’ I said crossly. ‘Anyways, I think that we’ll need a post mortem for t’insurance.’
‘Aye, yer mebbe right,’ Clive said. ‘I’ll talk to ’em in t’morning.’
Yes, the insurers needed a veterinary certificate, but it was a bank holiday weekend and a dead dog didn’t exactly qualify as a medical emergency.
‘What we gonna do with him?’ I said. ‘It isn’t good keepin’ weather, Clive.’
Unusually, for a bank holiday, the weather was sunny and hot. Perfect for picnics, swimming and attracting hordes of visitors for afternoon teas but not so good for a corpse. Already, I had seen Sidney – with a mischievous glint in his eye – entertaining the visitors on several occasions. They often made small talk with the children and would ask what animals we had on the farm and whether they could see them.
‘Yis, we’ve got lots of animals,’ Sidney would say. ‘Sheep, horses, cows and chickens.’
The innocent enquirer would then be informed that none of the above were actually in residence at the moment . . . but they could come and look at the sheepdogs if they wanted!
Sidney would show them Roy, who would bounce up and down, and Kate, who would come quietly to the front of the run for her nose to be scratched. Bill would have none of this friendly interaction business and would look at them aloofly from the back of the kennel. And then the highlight of this guided walk – in Sidney’s eyes at least – was when he would get to Joe’s kennel and could point out his mortal remains, shrouded in a downgraded bedsheet and laid out in his dog bed.
When I realized what he was up to, I warned Sidney that people really did not need to see that!
‘The insurers ’ave found a vet that is willing to look at Joe for us,’ Clive said, ‘on Monday afternoon. You’ve just got to take Joe to t’surgery. I know nowt about t’fella other than he’ll be there all afternoon.’
‘Well, I don’t suppose that it matters whether he’s a good vet or not really,’ I mused.
I was going to have to take a drive out towards Carlisle, but it would be worth it not only in monetary terms – working sheepdogs don’t come cheap – but also because then we could do the right thing and give Joe the burial that he rightfully deserved. Sidney decided that he would come with me, so Clive was left in charge of serving afternoon teas whilst Edith and Violet constructed a home-made grave-marker out of discarded slats from the woodshed. Reuben got busy on the digger.
I followed the directions I’d been given and eventually pulled up outside a modern building on a quiet street. Surprisingly, the car park beside the surgery was packed and it took a few circuits to find a space for the pickup. In the reception area I found a sea of people, all dressed up to the nines, having some kind of party. Feeling conspicuous in my wellies and torn leggings I pushed my way through the gathered throng.
The crowds parted as, like the opening scene from The Lion King, I carried aloft and at arm’s length (by now Joe wasn’t smelling too pleasant) a shrouded object that was clearly the corpse of a dog.
Sidney melted into the crowd, undoubtedly recounting to all who would listen the tale of woe that had led to us being there.
Sam, the veterinarian, put down his glass of Prosecco as I laid Joe carefully on the table in an anteroom and unwrapped him. Outside the room, I could hear raucous laughter and the sound of music, the mood entirely at odds with how I was feeling upon seeing our sheepdog laid out stone cold on the slab.
I went through the whole horrible incident again as Sam carefully pulled back Joe’s lips to look at his teeth and gums and then gently moved his head backwards, parting his fur and inspecting his neck.
‘I can see that strangulation has occurred,’ he said as he went to the sink to wash his hands.
‘Is that it?’ I asked. He did seem to be stating the obvious and I felt a bit disgruntled that nothing more scientific had gone on.
‘Yes, I’ll send a certificate through in t’post,’ he said. ‘An
’ a bill.’
‘I’ll see myself out,’ I said as I rewrapped Joe in the sheet, but my words fell on deaf ears as Sam had picked up his wine glass, left the room and rejoined the revellers.
It was a sad end for Joe. We duly buried him in the garden alongside some of the great dogs that had gone before him. He never had the chance to shine, didn’t get the opportunity to show us what he could do, but he will certainly be sorely missed – though perhaps not by Bill.
9
Wild Things
The children have always loved to set out on an adventure to the moors and, with a bit of planning, it is possible to combine work with pleasure and take them and a dog or two on a jaunt. Taking a packed lunch and flasks, we would aim for nowhere in particular, just somewhere new, a place where we’d imagine that no person had ever set foot. It always came as a disappointment if we found some kind of man-made mark that told us that we were not the pioneers that we envisaged but were merely following in the footsteps of others who had gone before.
It was usually Bill who would accompany us on these missions, as he did have the ability to at least partially switch off from sheep. Pippen and Chalky would also come but in a low-key manner, following a short distance away, never in a straight line, just haphazardly snuffling around in the undergrowth hoping to put up a rabbit or hare.
With the purchase of The Firs, it felt like we had broadened our horizons even further; now there were new places to explore and more stories to be uncovered. Lonin End lead mines were within close proximity, and although they sounded exciting, it could of course be a potentially dangerous place. The footpath from Keldside, where the ruins of the smelting house stood, followed the River Swale upstream, past The Firs and along a narrow jagger cum drovers’ road. Walled on both sides, this trackway was just wide enough to accommodate the horse-drawn carts that transported the lead ore on the journey of a mile and a half from the mine to the smelting house. At any one time, there were fifty men working in the Lonin End mines, some of whom would have lived in a row of cottages that formed part of the site. The rest would have lived within walking distance, passing The Firs along this route every day. If they needed to know the time, they could look up at a primitive sundial on the east wall of the house, now so weathered that only in the brightest of sunshine are the roman numerals on its surface visible. Hewn into the stone above the kitchen window that looks onto the footpath is the word ‘DAIRY’ so maybe this served as a shop window to take advantage of this passing trade.
An open mineshaft remained at Lonin, three hundred feet deep and only partially covered by a rusting pipe. The children found it fabulously interesting and terrifying, the bigger ones commando crawling to the very edge to peer down into the darkness whilst the little ones hovered at a safe distance.
It was an area that stirred emotions, the last skeletal remains of a once-great industry that dominated the area, employing men, women and children who worked both in the mines and smelting mills. I’d read numerous accounts detailing life in Swaledale two hundred years ago but, as we stood on the site, I just could not visualize it. The overriding feeling was one of serenity and peace, which seemed entirely at odds with the human toil that had shaped the view. The spoil heaps, the remains of the engine house, and the walled pens that once would have held ponies, were all still there to see but slowly crumbling as nature reclaimed what was rightfully hers.
In the past, water and the threat of flooding was a constant worry, as the miners went ever deeper below the surface in search of the lead ore galena, pushing themselves to the very limits of what was achievable with the most basic of tools.
At Lonin End, water was not just the problem but conversely it was also the solution. Birkdale Tarn, a small natural stretch of water nearly a mile away, was extended and dammed. Its location, high above the mine workings, meant that by channelling the water through a series of hand-cut races and pipes, the pressure of the water could be used to power an engine and two waterwheels to pump water out from the mine’s deepest levels. It was a marvel of innovation; the eighty-horse-power engine was bought from Ashton Green Colliery and then, for the final part of the lengthy journey, dragged by a team of seventeen horses to its final destination.
Birkdale Tarn is always a picture of loveliness, an open expanse of water that appears to almost sit on a windswept plateau like a giant puddle. Its shallow waters gently lap the shore, shingle to the north side and blackened peat haggs around the remainder. It is invisible until one has almost stumbled upon it and is little known, with few visitors. Its isolation gives it a melancholy air that does not lend itself to anything other than quiet meditation. When the wind whips up and waves sweep across its dark expanse it seems that at any given moment its banks could break, sending a torrent of water down the steep embankment that lies just out of sight.
Throughout the winter months, I’d always look at the frozen rivers and ice-encrusted waterfalls and dream of blistering sunshine, evening swims, nights spent camping out under the stars, and al fresco meals eaten around a campfire. After the damp squib that was the summer of 2017, I was determined to make the most of any good weather that came our way in 2018. The high pressure built up gradually and brought weeks of scorching sun and blue skies. This meant parched fields and rivers running dry, a phenomenon that everyone remembers from their childhood, but which has become a rarity in recent years.
Hats, gloves and scarves were consigned to the cupboard and swimming costumes and trunks retrieved. As the hot spell wore on, the swimming attire became skimpier until the little ones were to be found in the water wearing only pumps. It was the beginning of a summer of wild swimming. Every day after tea we would set out in search of new pools in which to paddle and swim – a procession of bathers laden with towels, snorkels, an inflatable unicorn and, on one occasion, a canoe that began taking on water almost as soon as we launched her. Reuben and Miles had ‘liberated’ her from her normal – albeit unusual – moorings, resting on the crossmembers of a redundant barn that had once belonged to Tot.
‘Does ta think that Tot ever canoed?’ Reuben had asked as we trudged through the fields with the orange canoe resting on our shoulders.
I couldn’t see Tot partaking in any kind of watersports. It was far more likely that it had washed up in the river and, being a collector of things, he’d stashed it away for a rainy day . . . just in case. With so many tales of lives lost in the past due to drowning whilst crossing swollen rivers, there was no wonder the older generation had an aversion to water.
For Raven, these nights were more than just evenings spent with the family playing in the water – they were therapy. Now seventeen, she was dealing with the pressure of her schoolwork and impending exams. The sensation of being immersed in the water in secluded and peaceful surroundings was food for the soul, and it washed away her daily worries and stresses. In the case of the little ones, these baths were useful for removing the daily accumulation of dirt and grime picked up around the farm. Raven had always lacked confidence in the water, her school-led swimming lessons at Richmond baths having been cut short after she had a particularly vicious flare-up of psoriasis as a child. The chlorine in the water had dried her skin and left her with weals and sores that she scratched until they bled. Wild swimming was the answer; the water contained none of the nasty irritants that caused her problems and her psoriasis cleared up. Perhaps it was the exposure of her skin to the sunshine, maybe the peaty water itself, but whatever it was the regime worked wonders.
I had wondered if she would be reluctant to go wild swimming, after a desperately sad incident the previous summer. One afternoon when the children were itching for the holidays to start, the school bus carrying the bigger ones did not appear at the usual time. Clive and I did not worry as timings did vary and due to it having been a glorious day there would undoubtedly be tourist traffic out and about on the scenic roads of Swaledale, hindering the school bus on its return journey to Ravenseat.
Time went on, I busied mysel
f making tea, and then the phone rang. It was Rachel, my friend from Bridge End, some three miles away. There’d been an accident, she said, nothing to worry about regarding the children but the road was blocked owing to the air ambulance being in attendance.
Finally, an hour later than usual, Raven, Reuben and Miles returned.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Raven told me that she’d planned to swim at Wain Wath waterfalls at Keld that evening with her friends from school but that there’d been an accident there.
‘Not another broken leg!’ I said flatly.
Every year someone would jump from the top of the falls and do themselves a mischief. It really was a leap of faith if you hadn’t taken your time to investigate the depth and the river bottom. Boulders move frequently and to dive or jump without checking would be very risky.
‘No, I think that the lad’s dead,’ said Reuben.
‘He jumped in from the top,’ said Raven, ‘but couldn’t swim, got trapped under a rock and was under for eight minutes.’
‘Oh my God!’ I exclaimed. ‘That’s terrible – tragic.’
‘They got him out, and someone went to get the defibrillator from Keld but he was blue, he wasn’t breathing,’ she said, her eyes glassed over.
I wondered whether seeing someone’s life ebb away in front of their very eyes would leave a lasting impression on Raven, Reuben and Miles, because it had obviously shaken them, but I was surprised at their resilience. I questioned Raven a few days after about how she felt about the incident as her longstanding dream was to become a doctor, and I felt sure this might have put her off. I need not have worried, for it actually did entirely the opposite and spurred her on, but it did make all the children mindful of what can happen if one does not take care.
My aim was for the children to be confident swimmers and to be able to recognize the dangers. I’d make a point of checking the depth and current; in some places where Whitsundale Beck narrowed the water could easily have swept the little ones off their feet. So, while the younger children paddled and played on the banks, the bigger ones swam or jumped and dived depending on the depth of the water.