Читать книгу Bodacious: The Shepherd Cat - Suzanna Crampton, Suzanna Crampton - Страница 10

During the mucky, muddy month of March on Black Sheep Farm there is a unique sight to behold as daffodils flower. In what is called the ‘middle lawn’ field, it looks like the sun has gone splat and landed there. There are at least twenty-one different kinds of daffodil that flower and there could be more. The Shepherd’s grandparents planted all the bulbs many years before my time. This is how they earned their livelihood – by selling flowers and vegetables at local markets.

Black Sheep farmhouse, with its lovely pale yellow and pink exterior, now covered with a thick layer of ivy, its fine porch supported by four Tuscan columns (not installed by the Tuscans, obviously, but much later), its large slate roof, and its warm stone outhouses, has been in The Shepherd’s family for generations. She occasionally pulls a dusty old book, dated 1801, off the shelf to show guests the history of our farm. I always sneeze when she opens that creaking book with its cracked leather binding. She indicates where her triple great-grandfather wrote long ago about sheep farming. In those distant, now almost foreign times, a horse or donkey powered the plough. Many flocks of sheep had their standards and qualities measured by how many cheeses their milk made per day from the milk collected. Back then, sheep gave birth, kept their lambs only six weeks before weaning and all ewes were milked (today, with modern farming, most flocks of sheep are farmed just for their meat). There are a few dairies these days that milk sheep and more coming on line in Ireland as humans become aware of how delicious sheep’s milk is, much to The Shepherd’s delight. The farmers produced delicious cheeses from sheep’s milk that were then sold weekly in nearby Kilkenny city. In those days, with no refrigeration, sheep’s milk lasted longer, never soured and kept its fine flavour better when it was made into cheese. So, sheep that could be milked and whose milk produced a lot of cheeses were considered a superior flock. Cow’s milk was a rival, but when made into butter or cheese tainted more easily in pre-refrigeration days. Sheep’s cheese was more durable.

Nowadays, as well as using the wool to make fine woollen blankets, The Shepherd still follows many other agrarian tasks that she learned from her grandparents when she was a little girl, visiting Black Sheep Farm from her home, which was then thousands of miles away in America.

Unlike myself, an Irish-born Kilkenny city feline, The Shepherd was born in New York City, where her father (now a tall, still-handsome man with a stoop and a diligent, calm manner) worked in city hospitals. When The Shepherd was born, she was not a completely well child. It was soon discovered she was allergic to cow’s milk. In fact, soon after I arrived on the farm, The Shepherd and her mother were cleaning out a tall press in the kitchen when they discovered on the top shelf hidden at the back a big blue-grey tin of Gerber’s baby soy milk. It still had the price tag and label from a Belfast shop. The Shepherd wanted to save it as a souvenir but her ma did not, saying, ‘When you were a baby, you were so thin, people thought I was starving you.’

The Shepherd is lucky to have known all her grandparents and some elderly cousins to whom she could ask questions about her family history. Her bloodlines are about as pure as our mixed mutt, Bear. Her hodgepodge American-Irish ancestry reflects input from Ireland, Scotland, England, colonial Maryland and Ukraine. Farming runs deep in her blood, though. On her paternal side her many times great grandfather was born in 1735, in Maryland, where he farmed in Pleasant Valley, Washington County, a mile or so west of Crampton’s Gap in South Mountain, a north extension of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The Shepherd’s paternal grandfather was a very handsome Don Juan, who pursued many beautiful well-known women between and during his first three marriages. He abandoned his first wife (The Shepherd’s grandmother), who was a successful journalist and fashion writer in the 1920s, when The Shepherd’s father was very young and his sister just a baby. His mother, Louise, survived the Great Depression as a single parent and supported her children through her careers in Benton & Bowles advertising firm in New York and editing the Connecticut state guide book. When finances were difficult, kind farmers let her glean leftover potatoes and carrots from harvested fields. The Shepherd’s father remembers how his mother would create a sense of picnic and adventure as she roasted their meagre dinner in the fireplace of their small farmhouse in rural Connecticut. Now, vegetables and fresh, tasty lamb are plentiful on Black Sheep Farm, but the thrift and care that The Shepherd learned from her parents and grandparents has never left her.

When The Shepherd and I are gone, my beautiful Zwartbles flock will disperse and the farmstead will pass on to its next inhabitant. The Shepherd’s only wish is that her philosophy of steady improvement of farmland will continue with whomever comes after her. She fell in love with country life and sundry farming tasks as a child. Her mother’s family has farmed this land hereabouts in Ireland for many generations and from her maternal Irish grandfather, whose family had owned Black Sheep Farm, she learned how to look after and harvest vegetables, red- and blackcurrants and raspberries in his market garden. He also taught her how to pick and box apples, pears and plums from his orchard. Her Irish grandmother taught her how to bed and grow flowers and cut and arrange bunches to sell. Her maternal grandfather called himself a market gardener, but he was also a gifted writer of five books of acclaimed essays. Her grandmother was a painter and poet, and she also fostered many children during the Second World War and other troubled times.

In the USA at her Maryland cousins’ farm, The Shepherd learned how to milk cows by hand, befriended the sheep and began to understand the rudiments of tending their flock. The cousins also bred championship ponies, which is how she first learned to ride, and only bareback at that. She later learned how to gentle the wild young ponies to the human touch. She often surprised people when she took a saddle off a horse before riding it, saying that she was uncomfortable in a saddle because she couldn’t feel a horse’s intention with the saddle between them. Now, as a much older woman, she enjoys the luxury of riding in a saddle.

Here on Black Sheep Farm, when orphaned lambs are brought outside from their shed – where they’re normally housed, warmed by heat lamps – for daily walks of fresh air and grass-shoot nibbles, The Shepherd is like a pied piper. Weaving her way through our field of yellow and white daffodils with a menagerie of lambs, the canine crew and my apprentice Ovenmitt cavort behind her. Lambs race about among the flowers while Ovenmitt plays a bouncing game of hide and seek. He will pounce out, prancing on his hind legs, front paws in the air like a dancing bear, at any passing canine or lamb. Sometimes he mistakenly does this to me as I saunter past following the fun, but I rarely take part as I feel it is only for the young and easily pleased canines. He will get an embarrassingly quick smack down from me and soon enough will be off once again, galloping sideways with his back arched, ears flat against his head and tail all a squiggle, pretending he had intended to give me a fright and not in the least embarrassed by our brief fight. On sunny March days everyone enjoys these wanderings among the daffodil-flowered field.

There are many superstitions and old wives’ tails (if you’ll excuse the pun) that travel companionably through time and the history of farming. One of these is to see how the first ewe lambs down (one of many rural terms for a ewe giving birth to a lamb) at the beginning of the season. If it goes badly, there could be problems ahead, but if it goes well then the season might run its course relatively smoothly.

Not long ago we used to lamb in March. I remember the first ewes to lamb were from The Shepherd’s old flock of mixed breeds. However, now, with lambing happening earlier in the year, I concentrate instead on making my morning rounds because egg-makers resume laying their eggs after a few months of winter rest. After hunting there is nothing that grabs me more than tracking down fresh raw warm eggs. Some crafty egg-makers hide their eggs, so I hunt for them in the clean loose piles of golden straw or aromatic hay in the sheep shed and stables. I descend behind and creep between large straw and hay bales. Once in a while I surprise a mouse or a rat to add to the fun when searching for my second breakfast of the day. I’m always ready to inform The Shepherd when I next see her and tell her all about my discovery while I march her to where I think egg nests are hidden. She collects and retrieves them, even if they’ve fallen behind bales of straw or hay. My scrumptious reward is a fresh raw egg. There’s nothing I like better than an egg yolk. Eggs, eggs, glorious eggs … raw, scrambled, fried, but none better than farm-fresh raw eggs still warm from the nest.

I follow The Shepherd as she enters the stables to collect feed. I make sure to point out the bin containing our egg-makers’ rolled barley. One scattered barley scoop is thrown every morning and they happily peck and scratch. After their barley breakfast, egg-makers head out to hunt for delectable insects, worms, grubs and seeds. They also graze on tasty grasses and delicious wild herbs that grow abundantly in our surrounding fields and which give their egg yokes a healthy, lovely deep rich orange colour and a unique gourmet flavour. Their yokes resemble the bright early-morning sun, which projects the arrival of a great day. In my feline mind, my gustatory opinion is that their diet makes eggs an obvious food to eat. A good healthy egg yolk is my favourite part of my favourite food, with the added benefit that it’s great for my glossy fur coat. I can hear an eggshell crack from way across fields even when I am fast asleep in the sheep shed or stables. I arrive at a romping gallop, ears pricked forward, to wherever the cracked-egg noise came from. I’ve heard The Shepherd say that if you feed egg-makers food with a strong distinctive flavour like roast garlic or leftover Indian curry, that flavour will permeate the taste of eggs laid over the next few days. I must say this is very true indeed, but I personally prefer my eggs seasoned by our farm’s insects, field grasses and wild herbs.

Every morning the four canines and I trot across the cobbled yard to a mesh-covered gate which has a vintage sign bolted to the stone pier right above where you open the gate. It states:

The gate must always be closed. If left open, the fine is forty shillings.

This sign is most important because it gives visiting strangers a laugh, so they pay attention to what it says despite its out-of-date numismatic fine. Shillings, pence and farthings have long gone but countryside golden rules prevail. A most important golden rule is that every gate you open to walk through must be closed behind you. Over the years members of my lovely flock of egg-makers have been killed by foxes, or once in a while by neighbours’ dogs that strayed through an open gate. Both times the dogs were caught in the act and the neighbours paid for new egg-makers, BUT when foxes come calling, they usually slaughter all my egg-makers.

Late in March is when the ‘kits’ (the rural name for fox cubs) of our local mother fox (known as a vixen in our agrarian world) are old enough to start to need solid food. The mother will explore the countryside to find the most abundant food source to feed her hungry offspring. She will choose the easiest to take home. If the egg-makers are let out too early in the morning or the door to their house not tightly closed at night, the vixen will come and kill the whole flock, given half a chance. She will then bring one bird home to her kits and pull it apart to make it easy for them to eat bite-sized pieces. After she has fed her litter, she sneaks back as often as possible to retrieve as many of our egg-maker bodies as she can. The vixen trots off to a variety of locations in hedgerows or fields to bury egg-maker bodies. She uses the still-cool March earth as a storeroom, similar to a human’s refrigerator, as a place to keep her extra food. She tries to do this in a timely way before The Shepherd or my canines discover the dead egg-makers.

Whenever we arrive and see what looks like wanton carnage, bloody bodies strewn across the egg-maker’s paddock, The Shepherd becomes very upset. I sniff each body, make sure that it is dead and move on to examine the next. The canine work crew comes in, takes a quick note of the murdered egg-makers and then tactfully avoids even a passing glance at any egg-maker, dead or alive.

Their collective body language screams at The Shepherd: ‘No, we did not do this, no, we did not do this, but we can smell a musky scent in the air.’

To each other: ‘Can you smell that pungency?’

‘Yes, quick, I got a whiff of that foxy musk. It seems to have gone this way.’

Turning to each other, the canines rush off, some with noses in the air and others with noses close to the ground, to follow the strong tang of fox scent. They collectively dash to a fresh hole dug recently under the egg-makers’ fence to enter the kill zone. A few stray feathers would lie near the entrance dig or snagged in the fence wire, fluffed and wafting in the breeze. A trail of feathers is seen among the blades of grass and leaves or caught between sticks, all showing the vixen’s passage across the field with her prized corpses.

Pepper usually leads my hunting pack as they follow an ambient whiff of fox musk that still hangs in the air. If The Shepherd sees our canine crew take off in a race across a field, she worries that the new tiny bat-like Puddlemaker Inca will get lost or killed in a fox or rabbit hole. I must confess I do admire the little dog’s mighty tenacious attitude. She can provoke The Shepherd into a fit of giggles when she grabs Bear’s tail and hangs on with a vice-like grip. She bounces behind, hanging on as Bear races after The Big Fellow. Both bigger dogs run shoulder to shoulder while they snap at each other in play. Bear’s tail is the only one used by the Puddlemaker in her favourite game of ‘Catch the Dragon’s Tail’. The Puddlemaker hangs on till Bear’s tail-feather hair suddenly gives way. When this happens Inca is sent flying and rolls over. She then scrambles up to race after both much bigger dogs, spitting out Bear’s tail-feather hairs as she tries to catch another bouncing ride with her teeth. These shenanigans occur daily and sometimes Pepper deigns to takes part in this silly frolic of tomfoolery, much to my embarrassment.

On good days, when the flock has not been killed or eaten, the egg-makers are usually faffing about at the gate in anticipation of breakfast. Sometimes the large cocky disruptive male, who’s only good for making more egg-makers during the spring and summer months, perches high above my head on the gate and crows as if his life depends on it. I wait as The Shepherd opens the gate to feed the egg-makers and I follow. As soon as barley grains hit the ground, I ask her to come with me into the egg-makers’ house to see how many eggs have been left for me. I really get very annoyed when there are none.

Crows and magpies often fly into the egg-makers’ house after they hear the happy clucks as one egg-maker successfully lays and then proudly struts away from her newly laid warm egg. I find this terribly foolish, advertising to the world that fresh eggs are available – it’s practically inviting their foes into the nests to steal eggs. Occasionally, The Shepherd finds a trapped crow or magpie in the egg-makers’ house when she’s looking for eggs. From time to time a small wren, a robin or a sweet-singing blackbird is attracted by leftover barley. They hop through the small ground-floor egg-maker sized entrance. When they find themselves inside, they feel trapped and panic, having forgotten how they got in and unable to find a way out. When The Shepherd rescues these small birds, she releases them outside. They fly off slightly battered but essentially unharmed.

Once I saw the most beautiful bird of prey, a sparrowhawk, who had pursued a cheeky wren into the egg-makers’ house through their small door, so promptly became trapped inside instead. A clever wren escaped through a wren-sized gap in the egg-makers’ window, but the sparrowhawk wasn’t so lucky. The Shepherd heard a clucking commotion when we came near the house, a noisy flapping and banging on windows. I knew right away that something larger than normal was caught inside, so I remained outside happily while The Shepherd dived in to try and catch the brown-and-white speckled sparrowhawk with her bare hands. The quicker she caught it, the less damage it was likely to do to itself by panicking in the confines of the enclosed space with its rack of roosting poles and nest boxes. When The Shepherd finally caught it, she brought it into the farmhouse for all of us to admire its beauty and stunning big yellow eyes. I padded behind and demanded that she reprimand it for scaring my egg-makers, who had broken their eggs and left a big eggy mess soaking into the wood shavings on the floor of their house, with not a decent egg left for me to eat.

Several egg-makers usually disappear in April or May. If they haven’t been killed by a fox, they return in late May or June, leading troops of baby egg-makers behind them. They peck and chirp behind their mothers, who cluck around the yard, proudly showing off their newly hatched balls of multi-coloured fluff. I have to admit they can be quite sweet.

Mother egg-makers are very protective. I have seen them, wings out and spread feathers all fluffed up like a feather duster, chasing Ovenmitt across the yard, squawking and screaming at him to steer clear of their clutch of young. Ovenmitt has great respect for mother egg-makers, so much so that he will wait for me, The Shepherd or a canine to walk him past a mothering egg-maker. Even then he is very wary and if the egg-maker makes the slightest move towards him, even if only half fluffed up, Ovenmitt will skedaddle across the yard with his tail straight up in the air.

The Shepherd loves birds and often tells me the story of her favourite breakfast companion in Southeast Asia, a hornbill. (Incidentally, I’d like to mention to readers that my egg-makers originated in Asia. Wild egg-makers came from rainforests and were the first to be domesticated and bred. They became the many varieties of egg-maker that we have the world over today.) While The Shepherd was working for the wildlife charity in Southeast Asia, one of her jobs was to make a photographic record of the exercises that were needed to rehabilitate baby orangutans who had been taken into captivity by foolish humans and were crippled from having been fed incorrect foods in human homes. This rehabilitation centre was in Indonesia on the island of Java. It was essentially a kind of gentle physiotherapy for those poor primates. Every morning at breakfast The Shepherd’s companion was a beautiful strange-looking jungle bird called a hornbill, whom she has described to me. He was a young male Knobbed Hornbill, sporting a black feathered body, which he held in an upright way, much like the Indian Runner duck, whom some of you will know due to his or her long neck and distinctive run.

The Shepherd’s friend had a long feathery amber-coloured neck with beady eyes surrounded by pale blue skin, as if someone had smudged eyeshadow all around his eyes. His head actually looks like it was made up of an enormous beak, with a horn-like fixture on his crown that extended onto his huge bill. He waddle-walked around like a penguin and to get the measure of you, The Shepherd tells me, ‘He would turn his head from side to side to peer at you.’ But I still can’t imagine what he’d look like with the illogical hodgepodge collection of odd animal parts she described.

He would sit on the table next to her while she ate breakfast and would ask for some of her fruit salad of grapes, mangoes and freshly picked bananas. This clever hornbill knew a soft touch when he saw one. The animal-loving Shepherd caved in so easily. She fed him one piece of fruit at a time by hand from her bowl until he’d had his fill. After he had taken the last piece he would clasp it in his magnificent beak and swallow it. Then he would toss his head, regurgitate the morsel of fruit unblemished and, with another small toss of his head, thoughtfully place the grape or piece of mango between the outmost tips of his ungainly beak to give it back to The Shepherd. She had to accept politely his regurgitated gift. Once the gift had been accepted, the hornbill would then grasp her hand gently in his large beak and hold it while she finished the rest of her breakfast one-handed. Once finished, she would stroke the back of the hornbill’s soft feathery head. Honestly, if only I received anything like this same attention …

The one time that I have The Shepherd’s undivided attention is when we take one of our working walks over Black Sheep Farm in search of the best nettle patch to harvest. Wild nettles are a spring tonic for our farm’s grazers because their deep taproots pull all sorts of essential vitamins and minerals from our rich soil. Nettles are not foolish plants by any stretch of the imagination since they always choose the best, richest soil to grow in. Even when horses have a nice mineral lick, they will dig for nettle roots in winter. All our herbivores eat nettles once they are cut and left to dry for at least three days, which takes the sting out of them. The Shepherd cooks the nettles in stock made from the bones of home-cooked roast chicken.

I am always on hand when a chicken carcass is stripped before it is boiled into soup stock. We all stand about or sit in a row: Pepper, The Big Fellow, Bear, the new Puddlemaker, Miss Marley, Ovenmitt and I. We each wait our turn to get our morsel of chicken although I sometimes sink my claws into the hand that tenders the chicken morsel as it can be very slow coming round to my turn. It really is hard being a cat sometimes.