Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Harry made it quite clear that he thought me to blame for this debacle. He deliberately ignored me when I caught up with him with the few sheep I had managed to keep hold of. I trudged on, downcast, feeling ashamed. We crossed the wide saddle of Coledale Hause, tussocky with old anthills and coarse sedges, and went on over long beds of loose, flat stones where the Skiddaw Slate had breached the surface and been broken up into barren scree over innumerable winters by rain and frost. We funnelled the flock across the path that winds between Sand Hill and Eel Crag and down into Gascale Gill.

  Then he turned towards the flock, whistled to make his dogs bark and pushed them on, shoosh shoosh, shooshing, and tapping the rocks with the metal ferrule on the end of his stick. As we picked our way down the path amongst the boulders in Gascale Gill I looked back over my left shoulder and there, high above us, I could see the escaped sheep slowly winding their way back across Coledale Hause towards the pyramidal peak of Grisedale Pike. We snaked down the loose stony track which followed the edge of the Liza Beck to Lanthwaite Green. Ice-cold water broiled over blue boulders and swirled into dark foamy, bubbling pools. Jack and his tireless dogs were silhouetted against the sky, high above us in the crags where he had been scouting for stragglers. I could just make out his slight figure hundreds of feet above and hear him whistling his dogs on. Harry shouted and waved, gesturing for him to keep going and join us at the far end, and his shouts echoed round the ravine. Jack stood motionless, peering down, cupping his ear, trying to catch what Harry was saying, like an ibex on a rock ledge, silhouetted against the limitless blue afternoon summer sky.

  Gascale Gill broadened out and descended steeply towards Lanthwaite Green where it joins the valley and where the path turned right behind the fell wall towards the farm. Our sheep were now too exhausted to do more than plod on disconsolately. We had to take it slowly to avoid any of them collapsing in the heat. All the farms adjoining the common had wicket gates in the fell wall through which their owners could gain access onto the fell. Whenever we were near one of these gates we would slip through any sheep that had flopped down and refused to go any further, to wait until we could get back to collect them with the van. It was after two when we finally reached the intake behind the farm with a flock of very weary sheep and exhausted dogs. My legs and knees ached and I would have found it hard to walk much further, but Harry seemed remarkably fresh for a man in his mid-fifties who had climbed up and down 2,500 feet in the heat of June, covered at least fifteen miles and been on the go for more than ten hours with nothing to sustain him but spring water and a packet of Embassy Regal.

  After we had put the flock safely through the fell gate, Harry stopped in the path and waited for me to draw level with him; it was clear he wanted to say something. He considered me sideways from under the cap he always wore at an angle, and declared with a sigh, ‘I told you that creeping bitch would let you down.’

  The dogs were remarkable for their stamina. Fell shepherds rarely allowed their dogs meat. I remember hearing some theory that giving them meat would turn them into sheep ‘worriers’ because they’d get a taste for it. They were usually fed on euveka (a dialect word for cooked flaked maize) and cow’s milk. I don’t know what nutritional value it has, but I was surprised it was enough to sustain a dog doing the work these were expected to do. But that was the way their fathers had fed their dogs and it was good enough for them. I’m the first to see virtue in tradition, but not uncritically following a bad one. Many fell shepherds treated (and for all I know still do treat) their dogs quite harshly. They depended on them so fully that it was as if they had to treat them cruelly so as to even things up in some way. Perhaps I was being sentimental, but I always felt sorry for their dogs which gave their all and got so little in return.

  After I’d been farming for about a year I saw an advert for Bearded Collie pups for sale in the Scottish Farmer. I phoned the seller, who lived in Lanarkshire. I told him I wasn’t keen to travel all that way on a wild goose chase; he assured me that they were working dogs and even offered to send me a bitch and if I wasn’t happy I could just send it back. He wanted £75 including carriage. Two days later a carrier dropped off a cardboard box about the size of a case of wine. It was hard to recognise the pathetic scrap inside as an eight-week-old Bearded Collie pup. It was about the size of a Yorkshire terrier. We got the terrified creature out of the box and set her on the kitchen floor next to a bucket of that day’s eggs. She immediately took possession of them, bared her teeth, growled and snapped to keep us away and then gently picked out an egg, without breaking it, and cradled it between her paws, by turns licking it and uttering menacing growls if she thought any of us was going to approach. She was clearly starving but too frightened that we would take it from her to allow herself to eat the egg. We left her alone for a few minutes and when I peeped round the door she was wolfing down the last of three eggs, shell and all, which she almost immediately sicked up.

  Our vet said she had the worst infestation of intestinal worms he had ever seen – and lice – and mange. It was the only time I have ever considered reporting anyone to the RSPCA; instead I rang the man and told him he had cheated me and I wanted my money back because it had cost more in vet’s bills to put the dog right than it was worth. He was defiant. He didn’t accept there was anything wrong with the dog and he said I had got what I paid for. I told him he ought to be ashamed of himself, neglecting a dog like this. ‘Well send the bitch back!’ he said and put the phone down.

  Eventually we pulled her round, but she never fully recovered. Apart from being about half the size she should have been, she always had small, half-grown weak teeth which weren’t improved by her obsession with picking up pebbles in the yard and dropping them at visitors’ feet for them to throw for her. Her early neglect had induced such paranoia that she would not eat with other dogs or people, or even cats, nearby. She was so terrified that her food was going to be stolen from her that she would stand over it uttering bloodcurdling snarls and baring her teeth. By the time the other dogs had finished Nan had eaten nothing, so busy was she defending her dinner. Even when she was fed well away from rivals, the slightest hint of competition caused her to gulp it down, growling and chewing at the same time.

  She took me by surprise by coming into season at an absurdly young age and being impregnated, or ‘lined’ as Harry indecorously described it, by a dog belonging to a neighbouring farmer – I can’t remember whose. She gave birth to a litter of five puppies and was a marvellous mother. Her offspring astonished us. They grew to be big hairy clever Bearded Collies, twice the size of their smooth-coated mother. It would have been so easy to have had her put down, because she was a useless dog, and untrainable because she was so psychologically disturbed. But she bred a litter of the best dogs I ever had. She never had any more pups and never grew any bigger than a medium-sized spaniel.

  I kept a dog from the litter and we called him Spot. I sold the rest to neighbouring farmers. Spot grew to be a powerful hairy black, tan and white dog. I could rely on him to gather a whole hillside of sheep while I walked along the bottom, encouraging him by shouting and whistling. But every dog has its faults. Perhaps because Spot was the cleverest dog I ever owned, he was also the most temperamental. If I shouted at him too harshly he would immediately stop what he was doing and go straight home. He was just too touchy to be a reliable working dog. I could almost hear him saying I’m not being spoken to like that; you can gather your own bloody sheep if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head.

  He was the best dog I ever had at holding up a flock of sheep in the road. Nothing ever got past him. He could even do the same thing with cows if I told him in a particular tone of voice to ‘Watch them!’ With bullocks, or cows with calves, which can be difficult to stop once they’ve got their tails up and start to run, he developed the technique of going straight for the leading animal’s nose and biting it hard. It seldom failed to stop them in their tracks.

  Another of his tricks, if you wan
ted to hurry on a herd of cattle, was to leap up and nip the tail of the last cow. He knew how to avoid getting kicked by being off the ground before he bit. Sometimes he would hang on near the top of the cow’s tail and brace himself with his front paws against its rump. Once he’d got them moving he would run back to me delighted with himself, wagging his tail and panting with pleasure.

  But he was an all-or-nothing kind of dog which could only gather every sheep in a field or none at all. He would set off close to the boundary, aiming to go right round the perimeter, and often be out of sight for many minutes, working on his own initiative. I knew he would either come back with the entire flock or, if he didn’t reappear, he had come across something he couldn’t deal with on his own. But if I raised my voice he would stop in his tracks, lift his head, look at me just to be certain and, having satisfied himself that his ears were not deceiving him, set off for home at a determined trot. Occasionally – and it was only occasionally – I could coax him into staying and carrying on with his work. But only if I made an extra-special effort to persuade him I hadn’t meant what I’d just said. With the right soothing tones he would sometimes grudgingly accept my craven retraction. Sometimes it meant starting again from scratch because the sheep had taken the opportunity to get away while Spot and I resolved our differences. But even after I had apologised, he was usually still on his dignity. I had to speak quietly and show him the utmost solicitude, or he would respond to the slightest further raising of the voice by trotting off home without even pausing to check whether or not his ears had deceived him.

  Once he had decided to leave it didn’t matter how far from home we were (I had some land about three miles away, across the River Cocker), he would usually make it back before me and I would find him lying in the yard as if nothing had happened. ‘That dog’s the boss of you,’ said Harry after he’d witnessed one of his walking-off-the-job episodes. I suppose he was, but I loved him for his charm and his intelligence and, I suppose, because he was impossible.

  One morning he seemed particularly recalcitrant. I coaxed him out of his bed and he dragged himself across the yard into the field behind the farm. Usually when he saw some sheep he would work. But this morning I had never seen him so unwilling to run. I couldn’t think what I’d done to upset him. I set him off round the sheep to fetch them into the yard. He moved off slowly and seemed to be ambling round them, taking his time. I thought he was being lazy, so I whistled my ‘get a bloody move on’ whistle. This seemed to encourage him to move a bit faster up the slope, but after less than a hundred yards he flopped down, panting, on the grass. By the time I reached him he was lying on his side, apparently exhausted, and refused to get up. He licked my hand as I lifted him up and then I noticed that his gums and tongue were yellow. As I was carrying him back to the house I saw the whites of his eyes were yellow too.

  ‘Leptospirosis’ was our vet’s telephone diagnosis, which he confirmed when he saw the dog twenty minutes later. ‘Weil’s disease! They catch it from rats’ urine; either a bite or an open wound. It destroys the liver. Like hepatitis. There’s nothing much I can do.’

  ’Will he survive?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. If I’d caught it early on I might have been able to save him, but it’s too far gone.’

  Then I remembered that the dogs had been chasing rats in the buildings a few days earlier – which they often did for fun. I heard Spot yelp and come running out trying to shake off a squealing rat which was hanging by its teeth from his upper lip. I thought nothing of it at the time because I’d never heard of Weil’s disease.

  The vet gave him an injection. Spot had always hated injections and tried to bite anyone who went near him with a hypodermic needle, but apart from a whimper when the needle went into the scruff of his neck, he made no protest and I knew then he must have been very ill. I took him home. He never moved from his basket by the Aga, apart from the odd flick of his tail when I spoke his name. He died quietly after lunch the next day.

  I spent the afternoon digging a deep grave in a quiet place at the bottom of the garden. Carefully cutting the sod into squares and setting them aside, I dug off the topsoil and put it into one heap, before digging into the sub-soil, taking care to keep the sides straight and neat. It was a proper grave, fit for the best dog any man could have wished for. Afterwards, when I was able to think a bit straighter, it seemed appropriate that he should have died at that time because it turned out to be the last summer we lived at the farm and Spot couldn’t have settled anywhere else. He belonged to the place, no less than the Herdwicks to the fells and the sessile oaks and carpets of bluebells in the spring belong to the thin gravelly soils. He came to me from that land and it was right that I should have had to give him back to it. It is proper that his bones should lie there.

  After I’d buried him I climbed to the top of the high land behind the farm called Brackenthwaite Hows. It was early April, the time of year when the land starts to dry out after the mud of winter; when the hawthorns green before the pungent blossom comes cream with magenta anthers. My mind was numb, overwhelmed with the poignancy of spring and grief for the loss of my dog. Brackenthwaite Hows is a lump of slightly harder rock than the surrounding Skiddaw Slate. It has resisted being scoured out by the glacier that formed the valley during the last ice, and sits about 250 feet above the surrounding land at the intersection of the Buttermere, Lorton and Loweswater valleys. On the top the bare grey rock is scored by deep striations caused by the scraping of boulders trapped in the glacial ice, as it moved inexorably down the valley to the sea.

  To the west the ground falls steeply away through Scale Hill Woods to Crummock Water and the River Cocker. To the east the slope gently declines to Lanthwaite Green, on the gravel delta that has been washed down by the Liza Beck from the surrounding fells over centuries. From the top is the best panorama for the least effort anywhere in the northern Lake District. Up Loweswater valley to the west, past Crummock Water to the high central fells in the south, and into the Vale of Lorton and on to the Solway Firth to the north. To the east the looming slopes of Whiteside and Grasmoor rise 2,000 feet steeply from the valley floor. This is the country I come from. And if I belong anywhere on this earth, it is here. I am comforted to know that the best dog I ever had lies in this soil.

  13

  THE SACRIFICIAL LAMB

  The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart, O God, shalt thou not despise.

  Psalms, 59.16

  THE DETAIL OF THE FOOT-AND-MOUTH EPIDEMIC OF 2001 is now hazy in my memory. But I do retain a series of vivid images that come to me whenever I think about that sinister time when almost half the livestock of northern England and southern Scotland was slaughtered and cremated on huge open funeral pyres. Three of these pyres were built within fi ve miles of where I live. One was only a mile and a half away to the west, across the fields, and I can still see and smell the smoke drifting for days on end. There was hardly a place in the English countryside not overblown by smoke from the pyres like warning beacons, whose flames lit up the dark night. The smell of roasting flesh, burning diesel and creosote blew everywhere, even into our cities.

  I remember the stream of lorries laden with dead cattle coming past the house, and the charred cloven hooves pointing to the sky from the flames. ‘Bio-security’ checkpoints were set up at strategic places on remote country roads where you had to drive over mats impregnated with disinfectant or where, even in the middle of the night, men in boilersuits would emerge from a Portakabin and spray the underside of your car with pungent disinfectant before you could pass on.

  People accepted all this with goodwill and co-operated because we were told it was a national emergency and they wanted to do their best to help to bring the killing to an end. But the public officials soon lost control of the slaughter programme and had to bring in the army to get them out of the mess. Soldiers did their duty on their usual pay, while all the private contractors involved were making a fortune. The slaughtermen
had never seen so much money. One farmer said they were ‘having the time of their lives. They seemed to get a kick out of killing on a grand scale.’ Hauliers had never been so busy. There weren’t enough slaughtermen or vets in the country and they had to import them from abroad. Many had never seen foot-and-mouth before and erred on the side of caution, diagnosing the disease in animals, particularly sheep, that only had a skin infection. One farmer told me that his sheep were slaughtered before they even knew the result of the test, but by the time it came back negative it was too late to save them.

  In fact much of the livestock did not have the disease, but were slaughtered anyway, in a ‘contiguous cull’, the idea being to create a buffer zone between the disease and the supposedly healthy stock. If a farm was chosen for culling, every clovenhoofed thing on it was slaughtered, down to the children’s pet lamb or goat. The killing was ruthless and shocking and lasted for weeks. Most farmers were well compensated; some never went back into stock farming – took the money and retired, or changed direction. Quite a few bought property, or built new barns; more than one bought a holiday villa abroad. Not a few wives took the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to divorce while there was money in the bank.

  At the time I found it hard to understand why some farmers did everything they could to resist the slaughter and were devastated when they were forced to surrender their stock. I could understand that pedigree breeders, and those with heafed hill flocks, whose animals could not be replaced, would find money a poor substitute, but for commercial farmers getting all that money at once didn’t seem a proper cause for dejection.