by Te Radar
I had to go away to work on another project overnight, and returned to find only empty paddocks. There is some debate about how they escaped. There had been several people at the farm the day before, so whether someone hadn’t closed the gate properly, or whether someone had driven in and taken them will never be known.
It could have been worse though, as Harriet and Coco were initially missing too. Thankfully, I find them a short distance away down a side road, grazing peacefully.
Now there is just the question of how I will get them back. I am fairly sure that where Harriet goes, Coco will follow, so I decide to catch Harriet by the halter and lead her back. Only Harriet doesn’t seem to want to be caught by the halter.
Eventually I find a bucket and put some stones in it, thinking that she will be under the impression they are cow nuts. The deception is enough to lure Harriet in, and grasping her halter I lead her back up the road, with Coco reluctantly tagging along. I can only hope that a car doesn’t spook her. That would be a disaster for everyone involved, especially Coco.
With the cows safely returned, I drive up and down the road, looking into driveways, through fences, into paddocks, and in people’s sections in a vain attempt to find the sheep.
To the untrained eye, one sheep may look a lot like another, but I am in the fortunate position of having just shorn mine. They are fairly distinctive, and I am pretty sure I will recognise them in a mob, even if they are in a mob of other freshly shorn sheep.
I even go so far as to put up some flyers with their picture on them. It isn’t the most flattering picture of them, taken as it was post shearing, but now is not the time for sheep vanity.
As the days pass, the general consensus is that the sheep are gracing the barbecues of the rustlers.
While I was never emotionally attached to them, I do miss them, as they had been doing a good job of keeping the grass under control around my gardens.
I have foresworn mowing, so having the sheep and cattle was a pleasure. When the grass was quite long, I had leased out the paddock as grazing for my landlord’s stock for a few days. I sat in my thinking chair as they mowed the grass off with their long tongues. But they couldn’t be trusted to maintain the grass inside the enclosure of my field trial gardens without plundering what little produce was growing there.
While I had been making cheese with Sabine at the Otamatea Eco Village, during the hour the cheese did its cheesy thing, we strolled down to the orchard where her husband Wolfgang was mowing his meadow with a scythe.
Wolfgang is over two metres tall and is very lean. With his angular face and armed with his scythe, he is the personification of Death as depicted by medieval drawings and heavy metal album covers. It all looks so Germanically appropriate.
I have only ever seen a scythe used in old film footage, yet here he is wielding one with a fluid and graceful motion. I am flabbergasted at the ease with which it fells the foot-high grass.
‘It’s meditation in motion,’ Wolfgang says.
He offers me a go and it’s a simple task to master running the blade of the scythe parallel along the ground, with the rear of it just resting on the damp earth, so that the blade effortlessly hews the grass.
It is razor sharp, and Wolfgang keeps a whetstone in a bamboo water carrier at his waist to keep it that way. It isn’t used to sharpen the blade as such, but more to reshape the wafer-thin cutting edge so that it stays straight and true.
The scythe is a remarkable piece of technology, and using it is a wonderful, rhythmic, silent way to mow the long grass.
It also gives my disco muscles a good workout, as most of the movement seems to come from the hips.
Wolfgang explains that in Germany there is a measure of land known as a ‘morning’, which is the area a man could be expected to be able to mow with a scythe in that period of time. It’s about a quarter of an acre. I don’t know if there is an area known as an ‘afternoon’, or whether the efforts of the morning mean that an ‘afternoon’ is the designated length of time a man could spend at the tavern before he has to get home for his tea.
‘Why don’t we see people using these any more, Wolfgang?’ I ask.
‘I think the skill is lost; farms got bigger, oil was cheap. That’s about to come to an end, of course,’ he says. ‘But it’s much quieter than a lawnmower. There are no fumes, and it isn’t really that much slower.’
It is time to bring the art of scything back, I think, as I survey the grass growing inside my garden plot. It has become quite long since the disappearance of the sheep, and is causing significant dampness to my lower pants area.
In lieu of my handy sheep, I have arranged a challenge between Wolfgang and myself to see who can mow a meadow more efficiently. He has graciously accepted.
On the appointed morning, Wolfgang arrives. Regrettably for my overblown sense of drama, it isn’t sickles at dawn as such, as he arrives about nine. Gentlemen’s hours.
It is Wolfgang and his scythe versus me and my weed-whacker versus Pansy, a brown-and-white goat, and her stomach.
I have borrowed Pansy for a while to see how she fares against the two of us. She is proving to be a charming animal.
As a child we had an old billy goat who was supposed to keep the grass chewed down around the place. His name was Billy and he was ferocious. The only person who could deal with him if he came off his chain was my grandfather.
At my grandmother’s funeral, my uncle recounted the traumas that Billy had inflicted upon her. She’d had wonderful gardens, as countrywomen of her era did, and when Billy slipped his chain he would habitually make his way there to graze on her flowers.
Once, when Grandma was kneeling down weeding the garden, Billy had snuck up behind her. When she became aware of his presence she fled, pursued by the malevolent goat. She managed to get inside the house, but Billy followed her in, and she was forced to barricade herself in the bedroom while the goat sauntered around the house.
Grandma spent a terrorised few hours trapped while the goat toured her immaculate home. Eventually Grandad came home and rescued her from her horned nemesis. I imagine he didn’t dare have the courage to laugh.
Pansy couldn’t be more different to Billy.
While we often see goats kept alone, they are very much a herd animal, and Pansy hates being tied up by herself. I could let her roam around, but her intelligent and inquisitive nature invariably leads her to eat everything she isn’t supposed to, and to want to investigate everything, including the inside of my caravan.
She is particularly adept at getting through fences. Of course, having horns can make reaching through fences to graze problematic, as they go through all too easily, but get stuck on the way back out. Many will be the time during the project that I will discover Pansy, kneeling down, head trapped in a fence by her horns, looking dejected and a little shamefaced. This propensity to wander means that she requires constant supervision. Without a doubt, she is the most labour-intensive animal on the farm.
Naturally, Pansy won’t eradicate the grass as quickly as either Wolfgang or me, but she seems an apt competitor, albeit the one most likely to veer away from the target area and give my valuable gardens a thorough mastication.
I rig up some set areas of equal size and difficulty, and mark them with fencing tape and barrels, and off we go.
By the time I have mixed the fuel for the weed-whacker, Wolfgang is well under way. Obviously, I could have mixed the fuel sooner, but that seems unfair, as in my experience no weed-whacker ever has fuel in it, or its whacking string on it when one wants to use it. Therefore this must be added to the duration of the process.
By the time I wind the plastic string on, Wolfgang is almost half-finished.
Pansy appears to be transfixed by the scythe, and isn’t doing much except watching Wolfgang.
There is a cold bead of dread about my spinal area as I contemplate the fact that I have yet to start the infernal machine, and the notoriously unreliable two-stroke motor has over the yea
rs driven people to madness.
I bend down, thumb the ON switch on, set the choke to what I believe is full (I have never really been able to tell as there are no markings on the machine), pump the plastic nubbin of the petrol primer vigorously, and pull the cord.
Miraculously it fires into life, smokes, coughs, and continues to run as I reduce the choke to half, massage the throttle, and burst into that spontaneous smile one gets when a two-stroke motor starts at the first pull. I’m off.
Wolfgang refuels by taking a leisurely drink, watching as I tangle the cord in some wire.
Pansy stares at us both while nibbling at a dandelion.
The shrill shriek of the motor rises as I apply the throttle, prompting an intoxicating cloud of oily smoke to be expelled abruptly from the exhaust. The motor strains as the spinning plastic whacker string shreds the soft, yielding grass. It doesn’t cut it so much as tear it bodily apart, leaving tattered stumps of grass where the scythe leaves razor-like cuts.
The weed-whacker flings the cut grass all over the show, whereas the grass Wolfgang has cut lies in neat furrows. It takes him little time to collect the grass he has cut, whereas I still face an eternity of raking.
Wolfgang finishes, having barely broken a sweat, and is standing chatting to Jane.
I am barely halfway through.
Pansy has tangled her chain around her pole, and tired of our antics and unable to go anywhere, she has sat down for a nap.
Wolfgang sums it up best when he says, ‘We think of it as work, whereas she thinks of it as just living.’
It’s the last time I will use the weed-whacker. I don’t give it up for any reasons of sustainability. Instead, I have somehow done something that causes little shards of metal to fall out of the motor.
After having started so easily, it never goes again.
13
A sow’s ear
I have never felt so much like a wildlife filmmaker as I do standing in the middle of the forestry road, holding the tracking device that will locate the wild pig.
Well, technically it will locate the dog that has located the pig, and it will locate the dog even if the dog hasn’t located the pig, but it is nonetheless a wonderful moment in my television career.
The situation is emotionally enhanced by the knowledge that when we do locate the pig, I will then stab it to death with a knife.
We can hear the dogs, barking and crashing through the scrub, but then all goes suddenly quiet. The air is so tense I could practise my pig-stabbing technique by cutting it with a knife.
It is with a heightened sense of awareness and a grim sense of theatre that I allow the radio receiver to drift in a repetitive arc to see if I can locate the exact direction of the dog. The T-shaped receiver emits an intermittent buzzing sound, which rises to a single note when pointed in the general direction of the unseen dog.
Along the track my hunting companions stand quietly alert, gazing off into the scrub, listening attentively to see if they can hear what is happening.
I’m with Glen Osborne, former All Black and general wag, his buddy Matt the butcher, and Matt’s young sons. Having the boys present highlights the intergenerational nature of the hunt. The closest most children will ever get to a hunt is reaching into the meat chiller at the supermarket to buy a little disembodied dinner.
It never ceases to amaze me that we have vast tracts of bush where it is possible for ordinary citizens of any means to go hunting, and to do so for free. This is not the case the world over. It would have been a source of immense frustration to have lived as a 19th-century peasant in the forests of the local lord, and been forbidden from hunting any of the game you encountered, even if your family was starving.
I always experience a sense of nostalgic nationalism when, driving around the provinces, I pass a 4WD, usually with dog boxes on its deck, parked by the side of the road in a forest. Somewhere in the surrounding area there’s a primal struggle of life and death being enacted. A story being told that is as old as man—the hunt.
The feral pig is a delightfully exhilarating target species. The very fact that they are described as feral is in itself superbly evocative, conjuring up images of hairy low-slung hogs, stout of shoulder, tusks dripping with slather, turning to confront their aggressors. Today that aggressor will be me.
Even the tools that are used to chase them, namely dogs and knives, remain largely unchanged from the earliest days of hunting.
The pig dog is a composite mongrel bred to hunt, doing as nature, and a selective breeding programme, would have them do. Big dogs, small dogs, finders and holders, they bound from the back of the ute, all bright alert eyes, tightly sprung muscles, and barely contained excitement.
It is an undeniably primal experience.
While some things remain the same, there is a touch of modernity about our proceedings. Not only do we have the tracking devices, but Glen carries a short-barrelled lever-action rifle. It’s a beautiful weapon—stocky, and perfectly suited to the bush. It would have made an ideal weapon in the New Zealand wars, serving as both rifle and club.
Glen is also wearing leather chaps. They result in a round of good-natured banter as to the lifestyle choices that leather chaps represent. As much as we chastise him, I am a little envious. They appear practical, as well as stylish. I only have on a light pair of jeans, and not being a big fan of gorse, I am not looking forward to forcing my way through it in a frantic manner.
Gorse is needlessly needle sharp, and tends to impale you wherever possible. Even when dead it’s a prickly curse, easily penetrating light footwear. If the people who imported it here to serve as nicely manicured hedges aren’t being flogged with strands of it in one of the many levels of hell, then there is no justice.
My jeans are held up with a piece of baling twine, onto which a sheathed knife had been added. According to Glen and Matt, I have not yet earned the right to wear a belt, because I have not yet been blooded.
It’s a colourful term, blooded. It has a certain romantic barbarism to it. I like the symbolism of it in a society that doesn’t seem to have a lot of symbolism.
Matt’s young boys already have their belts. Compared to me, they are seasoned, albeit decidedly ungrizzled, veterans.
The occasional bark echoes around the clearing as we loiter, a tight and tense little group, waiting for a signal that there is contact. Conversation is muted, eyes scan the gorse. I wave the finder around. The camera crew film me doing it.
A dog barks, then another, then there’s the sound of brush crashing down, and more barking. Almost before we can move, the squeal of a pig joins the dogs in a chorus of savage intensity. Headlong into the manuka and gorse we plunge.
A change in the tone of the dogs’ barking is drowned out by the louder screams of the pig, as scattered shouts of ‘This way’ and ‘They’re over here’ and ‘C’mon, Radar’ sound from various directions.
I blunder through the gorse in as manly a fashion as my timidity allows, all the while knowing that the situation into which I am running is going to be one in which I will encounter one of the forest’s largest and most dangerous animals, all tusks and diseases and lice.
Actually, it’s about the forest’s only dangerous animal. It always seems as if more people are killed and hurt by the forest itself than by anything in it.
Running just behind Matt means that I catch the branches that he’s pushing past. They whip back at me, catching me on my forearms, which I am holding up to protect my beautiful face. It’s not Matt’s fault—there’s no time for niceties. Who knows what we will encounter? Will the pig have turned the tables on a dog, eviscerating it with a tusk?
The barking is louder now. I certainly don’t need the radio receiver any more. It’s fairly easy to locate them—they’ll be at the place from which an unending and unnerving squeal is issuing.
Suddenly I’m there, and there it is in the low manuka regrowth. A black, hairy mass of muscle is trying to turn and fight off each of the dogs in turn, bu
t as soon as it goes for one, the others bound back in. It’s clearly a musketeer-like world for man’s best friend. All for one and all that.
The dogs are now clamped onto various parts of the pig’s anatomy, pulling it out in several directions, effectively pinning it, while it screams a squeal of penetrating angered anguish.
The noise alone is a good incentive to kill it immediately, to spare its suffering and ours.
Squealing is the pig’s forte. Picking up baby pigs will elicit a squeal as if you are torturing them, then when put down they waddle off as if nothing ever happened. This time, though, something is happening.
‘We got it, Radar,’ says Glen in a masterful moment of understatement.
‘Great, what do we do now?’
‘Now,’ he says, ‘you’re going to kill it.’
Oh. Right.
I have the knife. The pig, one of its ears torn off, is still squealing. With the dogs still harassing it, we grab the back legs and then flip it over. It’s kicking and thrashing, but Glen and Matt work together with a precision that says they have done this a number of times.
Grasping the stout front legs, they splay them open, presenting its throat. Matt indicates where I need to create an incision in the throat that will allow me to plunge the knife into the beast’s heart.
Opening the throat is no problem. I use the sharp point of the knife and slice a short straight slit. I’m acutely aware of the combination of fearsome tusks and the snarling dogs not far from my hand.
‘The knife’s not long enough,’ Matt says. ‘It’s a bit bigger than we thought. You’ll have to stick your hand right inside to get at the heart.’
I now have the knife and my hand entirely inside the throat of a live and rightly aggrieved pig. For a split second, my brain thinks to itself that on a chilly morning such as it is, the sensation is one of pleasant warmth on my cold fingers.