by Amanda Owen
I used to work for one old farmer who lived alone on his farm near Salkeld, where he kept a herd of suckler cows. Mike was a bachelor who had lived in the same house all his life with his sister who had recently died. He was a man of few words who lived frugally but contentedly amongst his cattle. He rarely ventured from his farm, didn’t possess a driving licence and relied on a weekly visit from a housekeeper who would bring him basic supplies. Every Monday she would cook a stew, and this would last him all week. The flavour of stew is said to improve with keeping, but by the time it had been reheated for the fourth or fifth time I’d be beginning to worry about food poisoning. He must have had the constitution of an ox: he never seemed to ail or indeed tire of the same meal day in day out.
His farm was a ramshackle place. Everything was held together by baler twine, bedsteads were used for gates, and his cattle sheds were so full of muck that the cattle would escape over the doors: every single five-bar gate had a squashed top bar where cows had crushed them making their escape. Once a year he had a big sale of stirks (year-old cows), and I would help him get the paperwork and ear tags in order and load them onto a lorry. This was no mean feat, as the cows were so used to Mike doing their day-to-day care that they tended to misbehave when the routine varied. Mike would always make himself scarce at the crucial moment of loading up the cows. He couldn’t bear to see them go.
Although the buildings and fences were a mess, he looked after his stock properly, almost too well. He loved them. He would hand-rear many of the calves by bottle-feeding them. Their mothers were so old that they often didn’t have enough milk to rear a calf, but he was loathe to get rid of them and consequently had some pretty geriatric cows in his herd. The calves would be overly friendly, because they were very used to human beings. This could create problems, as anybody who ventured into the field would be greeted by the unnerving sight of a half-grown bovine coming towards them at full pelt.
Trying to round up his cows and get them into a wagon for the sale was a nightmare. Their ear tags had invariably fallen out, and legally every cow needs a legible ear tag before it can be sold. The old cows needed to have their numbers read in order to record the calves’ details, but their tags were illegible and so old they had probably been written in hieroglyphics. Mike just didn’t ‘get’ the paperwork side of things at all: although he could read and write he flatly refused to fill in any forms or deal with any kind of officialdom. He had an agent who would call regularly and pick up all correspondence. He just couldn’t understand why everything had to be so complicated, and I can sympathize, as I tackle the mountain of paperwork that Ravenseat generates.
One of my other regular jobs was working for a lady called Pat Bentley, who lived at Newby. She’s a strikingly beautiful, glamorous woman who has travelled the world and was one of the first people to breed alpacas in Britain. She started quite a trend for them, and was a founder member of the British Alpaca Society. So it’s not only sheep that I can clip: I learned to clip alpacas too. And not a lot of people can say that . . .
She employed me to look after her small farm when she went away on business or, on one occasion, to South America to buy more stock. Most of the time I did a few hours a day for her, but when she was abroad I would stay on her farm looking after the alpacas, her hunter, Scattercash, and her dogs.
I loved working for her; she was a perfectionist and everything on her farm had to be just so. It made a refreshing change from some of the places where I had worked. The alpacas were naturally inquisitive and gentle animals. They seemed to cope with the British weather admirably and, although every paddock had a shelter, they spent most of their time quietly grazing or nibbling at the hay nets. Their general day-to-day care was quite simple. They did not suffer from foot rot as they had padded feet, they only calved during the day, only ever had one cria (baby alpaca), and they did all their poops in one big, communal pile. Brilliant!
Pat sold the alpacas to people all over the country and formed a cooperative so the fibre that was produced could be sold at a premium to buyers in the textile industry. They are difficult to clip, and different to sheep, because they don’t have a single fleece, they have a fibre coat which comes off more like cutting hair. There is very little natural grease in it, unlike sheep wool, so you have to keep oiling the clippers as they have a tendency to overheat. The fibre does not need scouring and can be spun directly. It’s graded as it’s shorn and must be carefully sorted, as there are many different shades.
Now, an alpaca is quite tall, about the same height as me, and getting them clipped required them to be restrained by the legs and stretched over a clipping table, then clipped down one side, turned over and then clipped down the other. They looked very comical when done, with a small furry head that looked a bit like a crash helmet on top of such a long thin neck. It goes without saying that they didn’t like it, but with an assistant to hold their head still they were pretty much incapacitated and, other than them spitting an occasional smattering of semi-digested grass and giving some ear-splitting squeals, it would go without a hitch. Well, I say without a hitch, but this is not accounting for a certain alpaca who went by the name of ‘The Black Bastard’. Once again the curse of the hand-reared pet animal raises its ugly head. He had been bought from a zoo after being reared on a bottle and, I daresay, petted and cosseted by many children. This meant that he had developed a serious attitude problem. He had his own private paddock which he patrolled methodically, keeping his beady eye out for any person or other alpaca who dared venture near. He would lunge at any unfortunate in the vicinity, rearing up onto his back legs in an attempt to get his front legs over your shoulders so he could down you and . . . well, I’m not sure what his aim was, and nobody ever volunteered to find out.
One Sunday afternoon after a relaxed pub lunch, Pat’s husband, Bill, returned home and, hearing the shrieks of the Black Bastard as he attacked yet another innocent alpaca which had strayed too near, had a sudden rush of bravado.
‘That’s it, I am going to sort out the Black Bastard once and for all!’ he announced.
He nipped to the tack room and returned brandishing a lunge whip and, after much encouragement from Pat and other onlookers, set off to teach the Black Bastard a lesson he would never forget. It took all of ten minutes. Bill returned a broken man: the Black Bastard had claimed another victim. Bill’s sadly inadequate attempt to tame him only exacerbated the problem and the embittered alpaca became Bill’s nemesis thereafter.
Early one morning I arrived at Syke House to find Pat distraught. One of her best young alpacas had died in the night. This one was particularly special, recently imported from Peru, and Pat had hoped to breed from her, so her death was a big blow.
‘Let’s turn it into a positive,’ I said.
‘How can we? She’s dead.’
‘Let’s get her stuffed.’
At the time, Pat was setting up an Alpaca Visitor Centre, a place where people could learn about the animals, buy some yarn and other products made using the fibre.
‘I’ll find someone to stuff her for you, and she can go on display. The visitors will love to be able to see an alpaca up close and to touch her coat.’
‘Really? Can we find someone to do it?’
I knew that we didn’t have long to decide what to do with the corpse, and having the vet out to look was not going to make any difference, so we made a few calls. By chance I had picked up a card from a taxidermist at a country show. I rang him, but he only did small birds and squirrels. However, he had a friend in the Scottish borders who, he said, loved a challenge.
‘Bring me the body right away,’ said the friend when I rang him.
Pat and I used a horse rug to make an improvised stretcher to get her into the back of the open pickup. We hastily wrapped her in a shroud fashioned from a bed sheet and I set off on the long journey with my very precious, very dead cargo. The address I had was a house on an ordinary suburban street in Hawick. I guess the neighbours were either comp
letely oblivious, or entirely used to seeing two people carrying what looked suspiciously like a stiff, outstretched body wrapped in a shroud up the garden path and into the living room.
‘Not a problem,’ the man said, ‘I’ll get started now.’
This was a cue for me to leave.
‘All I need is some photographs of a living alpaca so I can get the stance right.’
Pat found photographs to send to him, but it was a while before he needed them: he had a lot to do before raising the alpaca to a vertical position.
It cost Pat £3,000 to get her alpaca stuffed but she was mightily pleased with the end result. The stuffed alpaca took pride of place at the Alpaca Visitor Centre, so something good came out of her sad, inexplicable demise.
After I met Clive I introduced him and his friend Alec to Pat, because what she really needed at certain times of the year was a couple of good strong stockmen, as her alpaca herd had increased considerably due to a new breeding programme. Clive and Alec enjoyed alpaca wrestling, it made a refreshing change from sheep, and they became dab hands in the art of camelid restraint and proficient in the use of an improvised angle grinder to keep their teeth right. Clive at one point went down to a quarantine centre in the south of England to check on a batch of newly imported animals, and I even went to Twycross Zoo, in the Midlands, to clip a couple of the zoo’s alpacas. It was all quite funny really, especially when you consider that I didn’t even know what an alpaca was until I met Pat.
My first contact with Pat had been through another contract shepherd, Bob, who was very well established in the area and often got offered more work than he could handle. He was happy to pass it on to me, and sometimes I would go out working with him. Gradually, as time went on, my name became known, and the phone rang regularly with work.
One of my great companions entered my life while I was living in the cottage at Crosby. I was clipping at a farm at Melmerby, and we had to gather the woolled sheep down from the fell. As usual I had been taken on the outward journey on a quad bike, and then walked and ran back, zig-zagging the fell, yelling, whistling and hollering to move the sheep – and at the same time being yelled, whistled and hollered at by the other shepherds and farmers. I sometimes felt like I was a poor substitute for a sheepdog but at least it kept me fit. It was after we had finished clipping and were packing up ready for home that night that I was taken to look at a litter of pups in a stable. I had previously seen sheepdogs of many types and hues, from the traditional ubiquitous Border Collie to the lolloping great New Zealand Huntaways and smaller, finer Kelpies, but there was one type of work dog I had really admired, and that was the Bearded Collies. I had seen them gathering flocks on the steep slopes of the Lakes, moving the sheep through areas of deep bracken with their incessant barking. I liked their more relaxed attitude towards work – they didn’t seem quite as ‘hot’ as the Border Collies.
I looked over the stable door and there in a corner sat the hairiest blue Bearded Collie bitch I had ever seen. Her coat was thick and matted and a pair of dark eyes peeped from behind a fringe of blue tangles. With her were half a dozen pups of the same mould, woolly and fat; she’d milked them well. But amongst the clutter of buckets and bowls and loose straw was another pup, not at all like the others. White and wiry-coated, it seemed to have the look of a terrier about it, perhaps a throwback from previous generations, because it was definitely from the same litter.
‘They’re all spoken for,’ said the farmer.
I said nothing: decent pups off a good working strain are expensive to buy and working Beardies are especially sought after.
‘Apart fro’ that un.’
He gestured towards the mismatched pup.
‘There’s no one for that un.’
I looked at the small pup. ‘What is’t?’ I enquired.
‘A bitch an’ thoo can ’ave it if yer want.’
This was unexpected, and certainly I wasn’t going to give him time to reconsider. I put her in the footwell of the car and when I got back to the cottage I made a nest for her from a freshly shorn fleece, and she slept in front of the fire with me. She settled happily.
I called her Deefa, a stupid name, but I knew no better. D is for Dog, but also D for Different, because she was. I also figured that giving her one of the classic sheepdog names such as Fly, Nip or Floss would give her something to live up to and, frankly, I really wasn’t sure how to train a sheepdog. I had been working alongside shepherds and farmers who had their own dogs, and I’d watched them work, but how to actually run a dog or, more to the point, make one run for me, was a mystery. I was offered plenty of work and some of it was do-able sans dog, but I knew in my heart of hearts that in order to be taken seriously, I needed a dog. The pup and me, we were literally as green as the hills, and sometimes – just sometimes – that works. We both learned together. I didn’t know the correct way to train her, but I knew what I wanted her to do. I made up my own signals for her, and we persevered.
I practically begged her to work for me. If I could get her to be a good sheepdog, it would open up a whole new chapter for me. There’s a saying among farmers: ‘There’s nowt worse than a running shepherd.’ Meaning that if a shepherd is legging it after sheep, then something has likely gone very wrong.
When someone says they want a shepherd, what they mean is a shepherd and a dog. The two go together. You can get sheep in by cunning and stealth without a dog, and in many places you can use a quad bike, but the dog is still the best method. I remember being on foot coming down Little Mell Fell near Penruddock, an exposed moor between Penrith and Keswick, on a grey, misty day with Deefa. The sheep I was driving towards home kept breaking back and, to add to my problems, I was carrying a lamb, so things were not going to plan. As usual, Deefa, who was now a lanky young dog, was heeling me. She was devoted to me and was as loyal as you could ever wish a dog to be, but she had never actually graduated to helping me other than with the occasional bark here and there.
‘Please, please, Deefa. I’m so sick of running after sheep, can’t you just get back?’
I’m ashamed to say it now but I actually sat down, using the recumbent lamb as a pillow, and wept. I like to think that at this juncture there was a great moment of clear understanding between woman and dog, because Deefa set off at lightning speed in the direction of the errant flock.
I could hardly believe it. I’d had no lessons; she’d had no proper lessons. I assume that a natural inbred trait to chase sheep must have surfaced. I simply used the commands that I’d seen others use, amalgamated with my own interpretations, which involved a lot of arm waving and gesticulation, and that was it. Deefa became a sheepdog because she had to, because I needed her. We weren’t One Man and His Dog material because my commands were not exactly conventional and she ran with no style or panache, but she was my great mate – she stuck by me and I stuck by her. She had learned, somehow, to work.
With my erratic employment, I had to take the rough with the smooth, and when money was really short I lived on 29p packets of noodles, while Deefa was fed on bags of mixed cereal (an animal mix of corn, maize and peas) made into a hot mash with water and an Oxo cube to make it taste meaty. She ate it. Like me, she didn’t have much choice, but we were both as fit as fiddles.
A few months later I acquired a friend for Deefa, a handsome, red and white bearded collie dog given to me by a farmer called Geordie. Geordie and Connie farmed in a picturesque little Lakeland village, the kind of place that attracted sightseers and visitors. The dog was just too territorial: if anyone strayed into the farmyard he would go for them. He could sink his teeth into a shin and disappear so quickly the victim would not see who had inflicted the wound. He was a fine dog, and never developed that same territorial issue with me, probably because we moved from farm to farm. There was one small snag: he was called Roger . . . Roger was such a ridiculous name for a sheepdog. I found it just too embarrassing to stand in a field yelling for ‘Roger’, so I changed it, first to ‘Roger Red’,
because of his colour, and eventually just ‘Red’.
He was a funny dog, already a considerable age when I got him, and in his prime he had been a brilliant cow dog. For many years he had fetched Geordie’s small herd of milk cows in and, although capable among sheep, old age had made him slightly cantankerous and prone to moments of petulance. But with my two sheepdogs I could now get a job done, and I looked quite the part.
I started to gather my own little menagerie. I picked up a few pet lambs on my travels, all given to me by farmers who thought they were too weak to survive. I didn’t win with them all, but the majority of them made it, and I then hand-reared them. My garden was plenty big enough for them and alpaca Pat also let me graze them in some of her fields. Eventually I would sell them, taking them to market when they were ready, but I had to be encouraged. The farmers who gave them to me used to get cross: ‘We gave ’em to yer so you could mak a bit o’ money, not so that yer can keep ’em an spend all yer brass on ’em.’