A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  Since the price of wool had been dropping since the 1960s, and shearing a very small flock was always going to cost more than the fleece was worth, we rejected the heavy-woolled Merinos and Suffolks, as well as the super-tough North Country breeds, such as the impermeably-coated, independent-minded Herdwick, leggy Cheviot, and weather-resistant Blackface. Even the silky-ringletted Cotswold sheep, which might have seemed the obvious choice given where we lived, I passed over as too high-maintenance, and the same went for Jacob’s Sheep, with their quirky horns and oddly patched fleeces, the endangered Manx Loghtan, nervous and high-strung despite his immense curving horns and heraldic mien, and the tiny Ouessant, the Breton Dwarf, black all over and more like a toy than a sheep.

  Gradually whittling down the choice, we settled at last on two possibles. One was a foreigner: the handsome, chunky polled Dutchman called the Zwartbles, blackish-brown with a wide white blaze down the face, plus very striking white stockings and tipped tail, and the other the only breed that never needs to be shorn, because it sheds what fleece it has when the weather warms up in June: the noble, Roman-nosed Wiltshire Horn. For several weeks I hovered between the two, but eventually the Wilt won out. For the apprentice shepherd there is much to be said for a sheep whose condition is easy to assess because it is not obscured by wool, and besides, they appealed to my eye – a point that sounds superficial but is actually quite important when you consider how much you are going to see of your chosen breed, both in sickness and in health.

  With its small head, long neck and curving horns, blocky body and long slim legs, a Wiltshire Horn ewe may be mistaken at a distance for a particularly sturdy goat. In May and June the peeling fleeces look ragged and unkempt, and there is a strong temptation for the shepherd to speed the shedding process by pulling off loose sections by hand. But the animals know to a T just how much they need to keep warm until summer has fully arrived, and it is often July before their sleek, snowy coats have shaken off the last vestiges of winter’s coarse, crinkly kemp. I have often been asked who has shorn them so beautifully, without leaving any ridgemarks from the clippers.

  The Wilt’s horns are less of a plus – in fact they are a perfect nuisance. A mature ram has a pronounced Roman nose and great sweeping double-curled horns which end in a saucy little sideways flick with a very sharp point. Over the long months of growing these formidable weapons, he learns exactly how much clearance to give them, and how to use them to maximum effect. They can, in fact, be dangerous to himself as well as his rivals, because sometimes they bend inward so close to his jaw that they restrict his grazing and cudding. When this happens, the horns must be sawn and rasped on the inner edge until they are clear of his jaw, a difficult job requiring a blacksmith’s strength and accuracy. With a mask of metal moulded round his face to protect his eye, the ram will accept the steady rasping with surprising equanimity, though it is advisable to confine him in a race between sheeted hurdles to prevent any sudden movements.

  Once I heard a terrible banging noise in the paddock, accompanied by strangled grunts, and found our ram had managed to hook his left horn through the bar dividing a metal trough in half, and in trying to free himself had manoeuvred the whole trough up and round the curl of the horn. He was galloping about, half blinded by his burden, falling over from time to time, and in a real panic. I could not catch up with him until he was nearly exhausted, but when he fell over, gasping and foaming at the mouth, I was just strong enough to pin him down with my knees and twist the trough round until the metal bar came free, vowing meanwhile that never again would I leave a divided trough in his field.

  All this was far in the future, though, when my mother and I drove into the Midlands to buy my first ewe lambs. We had contacted a breeder whose sheep were regular prizewinners, and she led us to a small stable in which were three suitable candidates – well grown ewe lambs about five months old. As the door opened, they dashed into the farthest corner and stared at us defiantly, stamping their forefeet.

  ‘Right, let’s have a look at them,’ said my mother, seeing I had no idea which to choose.

  Getting close enough to examine them was no easy matter, even in that confined space, for they were both strong and wild. Though horns look easy grab-handles, taking hold of them is a mistake, for not only does it trigger a fighting reflex, but it may result in the horn breaking off, leaving a horrible mess of bloody jelly in its place. Sheep are best controlled by hands either side of the head, cupping the jaw and, if necessary, extending over the eyes. This restriction of vision has a wonderfully calming effect, but this I was yet to learn.

  After a short struggle, however, we managed to establish that two of the little ewes were correctly equipped with teeth, teats, and four sound hoofs apiece, but when it came to the third, distinguished by a noticeably pink nose, my mother shook her head.

  ‘We’ll just take the two,’ she said.

  Strong men were summoned, and my purchases lifted bodily into the dog-carrying compartment of her Subaru.

  ‘Why didn’t you want the third one?’ I asked as we drove home.

  ‘I thought it looked a bit off colour.’

  She was right. Within a week both my new ewes had developed swollen pink noses and looked far from well. In some alarm, I rang their breeder to ask what was wrong.

  ‘Don’t worry, they’ll be all right,’ she said dismissively. ‘Put some purple spray on their muzzles. That’ll fix it.’

  But what would it fix?’

  ‘Orf,’ said our neighbouring farmer, who numbered his flock in hundreds. ‘Contagious Pustular Dermatitis, if you want the proper name, and a proper bloody nuisance it is. Oh, your little ewes are weaned. They’ll get over it in a week. Trouble is, once you’ve got it in the flock, it’s the devil’s own job to get rid of it. The ewes carry it on their udders, see, and when the lambs suck they catch it, and later on they’ll pass it to their own lambs.’

  This was most unwelcome news. ‘Can’t I vaccinate against it?’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘Well, you can, but even so you’ll still get the odd case. For myself, I doubt it’s worth it. Better let it take its course, but don’t breed from lambs that get it.’

  A bad start to establishing a pedigree flock. Gloomily I foresaw a long succession of ewe lambs condemned as useless for breeding. Should I complain and ask the vendor to swap them for others? I could see several objections to this. Who could say that the swaps wouldn’t exhibit the same symptoms in due course? Besides, she might justifiably say that a deal was a deal and caveat emptor. She had sold them in good faith, and they had been healthy enough when they left her premises.

  The immediate problem was to catch the pink-nosed pair and anoint them with purple spray. Again, easier said than done. Though they looked hunched and listless from a distance, lying down with heads nodding in a six-acre field, they came to alarmed life the moment we approached, and sped off to the far fence. They had no intention of being cornered in the farm buildings, and without a sheepdog it was hard to guide them in the right direction. Because they were stuffed with grass and uninterested in bribery by bucket it took me and Duff and several passing ramblers nearly an hour to secure them in a shed.

  During that hot and bothered hour, I composed an urgent shopping list. Sheep hurdles with which to make pens. Interlinking sheeted hurdles of varying lengths. Sliding gates. A guillotine gate which you could raise and drop while standing behind the sheep. A drafting gate that swung from side to side, directing sheep into different streams. As when you buy a hamster, the cage costs far more than the animal, so the little ewes looked like costing us a pretty penny in assorted handling equipment.

  While we waited for this cornucopia of metal to be delivered, I kept the young ladies in a confined space and anointed them daily, learning in the process rather more than I wanted to know about Contagious Pustular Dermatitis, aka Orf.

  As the name suggests, it is a messy, disfiguring illness, caused by a virus related to shingles in humans, and readily tra
nsmissible to humans, too. Stress, as at lambing or weaning, provokes the eruption of small red pustules, mostly around the mouth and nose, and these can trigger a secondary infection as the pustules turn into crusty sores. Young lambs so afflicted find it difficult to feed, and their dams’ teats develop raw splits and scabs, so painful that they kick their lambs away when they try to suckle. So the lambs starve, the ewes get mastitis, and the distressing cycle may end with the death of the whole family.

  Nor is that the end of it, because as our neighbour had warned, the virus can hang about for years. Some sheep seem to have a natural immunity, while others succumb for no discernible reason, which is why – after a decade of vaccinating and selective culling – I decided to ‘Close’ our flock, and maintain the clean status we had achieved by keeping and breeding only from home-reared ewes, and this we have done ever since.

  It was all a hassle which, as a novice shepherd, I could have done without, but there was a silver lining. In the course of their treatment, being fed and ministered to while confined in a pen, the two little ewes became very tame. Good old greed conquered their fear of humans, and thereafter a call and the shake of a few sheep-cubes in a scoop would bring them across the field at a gallop, shaking their heads naughtily, and ‘pronking’ in stiff-legged leaps like gazelles as they raced to be first at the grub – a charming if ridiculous sight.

  I also took the opportunity to teach them to pick up their feet like a pony for trimming. This was more for my benefit than theirs, since I found the backwards heave-and-twist with which a proper shepherd manoeuvres his sheep into a sitting position quite beyond me. Regular hoof-trimming is an unavoidable chore, particularly when the ground is soft and wet. Like fingernails, the horn keeps growing, and if nothing wears it down, the sides of the hoof curl inwards, trapping dirt between horn and quick. This may easily lead to infection. When the sole no longer presses against the ground, it can start to rot, and suddenly the sheep will go dead lame, needing urgent treatment.

  There is a certain satisfaction, though, in the immediacy of the cure once you locate the infected spot. First a wash, then careful cutting-back all round the sole will finally reveal the source of the trouble, though sometimes it takes so much prodding and trimming that you fear to cut any more. In these cases, the trick is to let the animal rejoin its fellows, then watch the way it distributes its weight when grazing or walking about the field. The stress of being treated is often enough to mask any lameness temporarily, sometimes to the degree that you can’t tell which foot is the culprit.

  In the field, however, a sheep will quickly resume the gait which hurts least, favouring heel or toe as the case may be and, once you have identified its location, and penned up the patient once more, a single snip of the foot-shears will reveal a pus-filled cavity and – usually – bring immediate relief. After that a wash, a blast of foot-rot spray, and after a few tentative steps as if wondering why the hoof no longer hurts, the sheep will trot away as if it had never been lame in the first place.

  There are so many occasions when a single-handed shepherd has to get close up and personal with his charges that a degree of tameness is a blessing. You can’t blame sheep for being wary of humans. They have a low threshold of pain, and a short check-list of all the nasty experiences they routinely suffer at our hands from birth onward – tailing, tagging, castrating, worming, vaccinating – reinforces their natural desire to keep as far from us as they can. Add to that their inborn knowledge that they taste delicious, and not only humans but every carnivore they encounter would like to eat them, and you can see why they resist being singled out from their fellows and subjected to close inspection.

  Having a companion near at hand reduces the panic level in any sick sheep, and makes it easier to treat, but there is a fine line between tameness and over-familiarity, particularly in the case of ram lambs. A bottle-reared ‘tiddler,’ or orphan, inevitably becomes very attached to the human holding the bottle, and even after he is weaned will come racing for attention the moment he sees him or her set foot in his field.

  At first this seems rather sweet. Aaah! he remembers me, you think soppily, and feel that it would be brutal, even treacherous, to chase him away. But at this point it is well worth being tough, because what a human might mistake for affection is nothing of the kind. To the lamb, you are merely a remembered source of food, and if you encourage his attentions without giving him what he really wants, he will feel entitled to take it from you by force. A determined butt from a ten-week-old lamb is surprisingly painful – one sympathises with the ewes, who are practically lifted off the ground when their twins feel the need for a quick suckle – and once your one-time tiddler realises he can push you about, he can quickly become a pest.

  We learned this the hard way, though our first lamb, the bold Agamemnon, was no tiddler but a big single, born in a snowstorm on April 2nd, and from the start he showed unusual strength and vigour. I was very proud of him, and when he was weaned I spent a good deal of time grooming him and teaching him to lead for the local agricultural show. Come the day, he won his class and then the championship, and I was walking on air as we circled the showground in the grand parade, with rosettes on his noseband and a cup in my hand.

  Since he revelled in attention and seemed well suited to life in the limelight, I entered him for other, bigger shows, but soon had to recognise that he was not top-class in any way except ring-craft. There he excelled. As other rams slouched resentfully at the end of a rope and had to be hauled into position before the judge, Ags marched at my side with as much confidence as a well-trained dog, and stood like a rock even when subjected to intimate inspection.

  Before he was full-grown, his big curling horns were so well developed that I found it prudent to substitute a head-collar and lead-stick for the rope halter, in order to keep the nearer horn a safe distance from my thigh as we paraded, and his tendency to give me a sly biff accidentally-on-purpose became gradually more pronounced. The way he treated trees and fence-posts illustrated his insensitivity to pain. At a show, nothing scared him – bands, lorries, dancing diggers – he wove his way calmly through them, and strolled up and down the ramp of his trailer with complete unconcern. The downside was that he wasn’t in the least scared of humans, either.

  Experienced shepherds warned me to beware of him. One old stager went so far as to growl, ‘Best way to handle a ram is to clout him over the head with a stick every time you see him,’ but I wasn’t going to do that to Ags. Anyway, by then it was far too late to change his attitude.

  It became noticeable that although he was complaisance itself while being brushed and shampooed and led about, he grew restive the moment he was no longer the centre of attention. If I made a move towards climbing out of his pen after a grooming session, he would lower his great head threateningly, so I was careful not to stand directly in front of him, and reversed out of his royal presence without turning my back.

  At three years old he was in his prime, and it was on the day when he had been invited to appear as an exhibit in the Rare Breed Survival Trust stand at a show that I realised he had become dangerous. Throughout the afternoon he had dozed or nibbled hay in his pen while passers-by leaned over to admire and pet him, and I was about to lead him away to the trailer when an interested couple began asking questions, while their small daughter stroked the back of Ags’s head.

  ‘Likes that, doesn’t he?’ said the mother, smiling fondly. ‘Come on, darling, time we went home.’

  Ags’s eyes were half closed. There was nothing he liked more than being stroked, but the moment the little girl took her hand away – before she could even step back from the pen – he put in a ferocious charge.

  BAM! His frontal bone struck the metal hard enough to bend it, and had the child’s arm still been hanging over the bars, it would have been shattered.

  The parents were indignant. ‘That was vicious!’ they exclaimed, and I could not deny it. Clearly it was time the High King retired from public duties.
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  Do sheep suffer from boredom? As the old troop horse snorts at the sound of trumpets, and the hunter cocks his ears for the horn, did Agamemnon dream of loudspeakers blaring and the bustle of crowds?

  Silly question. Nevertheless, it was tempting to suppose that the close interest he took in whatever we did in garden or fields stemmed from nostalgia for his glory days. As he entered his fifth year, however, it became increasingly plain that his intentions towards us were no longer benign. It was disturbing to find ourselves under constant surveillance from those yellow, unblinking eyes as Ags moved from one vantage point to another to make sure we couldn’t slip past him unobserved.

  If I went near his paddock to hang washing on the line, he would canter across and solicit petting, which would have been endearing had I not known that as soon as I moved away he would lower his head, take two quick steps backwards and one to the side, like a place-kicker, and charge at the fence where I had been standing. When Duff was mowing, Ags would pace along the fence parallel with the lawnmower, just as fighting stags march side by side before swivelling inward to lock antlers. When the machine was switched off, he would batter the gatepost until there was blood on his horns.

  It wasn’t that he lacked company. Three vastly fat, superannuated wethers, who had started life chez my niece as bottle-reared tiddlers and were now far beyond the butcher’s knife, shared his paddock and took as little notice of us as we did of them, but Ags was always on the qui vive.

  One dark, wet, February afternoon, when I was at my desk, gazing vacantly up the hill, I saw a white blur move swiftly on the footpath that crosses our top field. Seconds later, a dark shape flew through the air, struggled briefly, then crashed over the wire fence into the lower paddock.