The Shepherd's Life (28 page)

*   *   *

A few years ago we tried a tup from a modern lowland breed, a French type called a Charolais. When the ewes had lambed, it snowed. The Herdwick lambs at two days old were racing against each other and skipping in the whiteout like it was a sunny day. The French lambs of the same age were cowering and shivering behind the walls and we had to lead them into the barn to keep them alive. I swore then I was sticking with the proven native breeds on our farm.

 

6

I love lambing time. In the long, sodden, and wind-lashed winter weeks, I sometimes daydream of escaping the muddy tedium, but I wouldn't want to miss it like my father is now. Every minute of your time counts. I've always loved it, since I used to follow my granddad around helping him, feeding ewes in pens of little hay bales, feeding pet lambs, and sometimes being given one to lamb, like my daughters do now. He would trail endlessly round from first light to darkness and afterwards, until I could not keep up and was sent to bed. He would check and double-check for emergencies, ewes or lambs in trouble.

Bloody hands. Yellow lambs. Stomach tubes. Colostrum.

Early mornings. Late nights.

I always marvelled at how gentle some of the men were at this time of year, how you saw them kneeling in the mud, or straw of the pens, delicately threading a stomach tube down an ailing lamb's throat, over the little pink tongue. You could see how much they cared. My dad would be gutted if he lost a lamb, it would hang over him like a grey cloud, until he had put things right by saving others.

 

7

The arrival of lambs is on some kind of bell curve. It starts as a trickle of one or two each day, peaks a fortnight or three weeks later in a hectic blur of dozens, and eases off into a long tail of individuals over the following three weeks until we eventually say enough is enough and leave the last few to lamb in the spring grass and sunshine without such regular supervision.

Lambing time has a kind of crazy daily rhythm. We are on a merry-go-round of responsibility dictated by the need to get round the lambing sheep at regular intervals—one to two hours. I know when I wake up that I will be at it for many hours. But I cannot predict what is going to happen on any given morning. I sometimes rush around the farm and do not see a single new lamb. Other times I find several new well-mothered and healthy lambs that don't need my help. The sun might be shining, and all can be well with the world. Or, frankly, it can be a complete disaster, with the shit right and properly hitting the fan.

 

8

I start work in the barn, a modern steel-frame building, before daylight, often with the previous day's ongoing troubles needing sorting out and the routine jobs like feeding the sheepdogs. The barn is like the maternity ward and A&E rolled into one. Because of the electric lights I can work in here before dawn. Everything in the barn has issues and needs the closer supervision or the shelter it offers.

As I step into the barn and turn on the light, the ewes in the pens call for their breakfasts. I rush around them with a hessian bag of feed to quiet them and to prioritize problems. I soon see the most pressing cases. A young ewe has got herself bothered and turned on her own lamb that was born last night. She has lamed it, probably broken its leg. She is confused and may settle down later, or she may never mother it again despite my efforts. I curse at her for being so mindlessly stupid and cruel. She tries to jump out of the hurdle pen and I wrestle her roughly back. The lamb needs a splint. I could jump in the farm truck and drive half an hour to the local vet, but that would mean I'd be away too long, and the lamb isn't worth much. The vet will charge me several times the lamb's worth to mend it.

So I do what the vet would do, I've watched him plenty of times. I create a splint, padding on the inside and some strips of plastic to take the weight. It's a respectable job and has worked before. I capture the ewe's head into a head trap (like a medieval stocks) which gives the lamb a chance to steal milk for a few days until she may start to mother it again. She throws herself down in a sulk and nearly smothers the lamb that is displaying a complete lack of good sense by suckling at the wrong end, sucking a dirty piece of wool and not a teat. I curse at her again. Lambing time tests your patience and explores the depths of your good nature.

The length of time a newborn lamb can stay warm and alive varies a lot depending on the weather and how good a mother it has. A bad mother on a snowy or rainy morning and they can be “starved” (our word for frozen cold) in minutes, but with a good mother and on a sunny day they can be okay for two or three hours. My stress levels rise and fall in relation to that survival period.

Mountain sheep like ours are healthiest and most settled lambing outside, but that means I have a lot of ground to cover each day in the valley bottom fields. Many of our ewes lamb in the first two to three hours of daylight, so I need to get around every ewe on the farm as soon as possible after daybreak. I load the quad bike and trailer with feed each night, ready for the morning. Every minute of delay in getting around the pregnant ewes increases the chances of a disaster.

A lamb in a neighbouring pen, brought in last night because it had become separated from its mother in the field and got cold, has started with an ailment called watery mouth, and requires treatment. Lambs that get this start to slaver at the side of their mouths and can be dead within an hour or two. I find the grey and red antibiotic pills that we treat them with and stick two over its little tongue with my first finger. The lamb gags and slavers them out again and I curse and fumble about in the straw to find them. This time I push them over the top of the tongue and it swallows them down. Away at the end of the barn an old ewe I had brought in days earlier, because she looked worn-out, is lambing and doesn't have the strength to push it out. After a fight I get two dead lambs out of her and she looks sick like she may die. I prick her with antibiotics, but I fear the worst. There is no romance in a morning like this. I haven't even got to the fields and most of the sheep.

The sun is only just rising over the edge of the fell.

 

9

By the time I get to the first field of lambing ewes I am already wet. I look into the field and can tell immediately that all hell has let loose. The rain biting cold, and hillsides are just sheets of water. It is a disaster zone. A first-time ewe (a shearling) has dropped her lamb, when giving birth, into the beck, where it is stumbling and falling back into the shallow but deadly water. It is tough, but looks close to giving up, as it cannot climb the bank. I lift it out and put it in the trailer. I send Floss to hold the ewe up and, after some slipping and sliding in the mud, I have hold of her. I will take them home to shelter. The ewe looks uncertain of it now, like the thread between them has broken. A hundred yards away on either side of me lie new lambs that look like they are dead or dying. There is nowhere for even the experienced ewes to hide their newborn lambs from this downpour. Normally dry places behind walls are streams. Sheltered spots turned to ponds. The temperature is murderous. Cold. Wet. Windy. My neighbour says this is the worst lambing weather she has ever experienced.

The first lamb I touch feels stiff and cold. Just a faint touch of warmth on its bluing tongue. I lower it despondently into the trailer. The next two, on an older ewe that has tried to get them up and licked dry, have some life in them but are fading fast, their core temperature dropping. Desperate measures are needed. I do what I have never before done and decide to save the lambs quickly and worry about the ewes later. If I have to catch all the mothers, these lambs will be dead. I will lose too much time. Minutes later I have gathered up five lambs and am on the road home. Another ewe has lambed under a wall and had two, proper strong lambs with big bold heads and white ear tips visible even in the mud. With a full trailer I have to leave them to their mother's attention, but she is an old experienced ewe and knows the game. I meet a friend coming the other way from his own flock. We exchange blasphemies about who has experienced the worse mess.

Minutes later I have the lambs tight under a heat lamp, hung so low it is burning off the slime, mud, and afterbirth. I haven't much hope for any of them. The first one is stiffening like a corpse. There doesn't seem much to lose so I stomach tube it with some warm artificial colostrum, figuring something warm inside might help. But I may kill the lambs, because the shock of the milk is sometimes too much for them, so I am gambling. I leave Helen drying them with towels from the bathroom. The children get themselves ready for school. Chaos. I go back for the mothers.

*   *   *

The fields are so sodden, I am on my backside more often than I am on my feet. Only the bravery of Floss lets me catch them. All are hellish to catch because with no lamb to hold their attention, they are free to gallop off. I fill the trailer with the required ewes (making a mental note which lambs they have each given birth to). Telling which ewes have lambed is made easier because they usually have a bit of blood or afterbirth on their tails, and they will usually hold to the place where they gave birth. Some of the ewes use their last bit of energy trying to evade being caught and look fairly weather-beaten and worn-out. I go back to the barn where Helen has managed to get some life into the lambs, and an hour later miraculously they are all sitting up and warm. Each of them is penned with its mother, bedded with clean straw, and with a heat lamp on them. The one that was in the beck is suckling its mother. By the time we have tended to them and had a bit of breakfast, and shoved the kids on the school bus, wearing the wrong clothes, it is time to get back to the first lambing field, to do the rounds again. The first time round in the morning is mostly about feeding the ewes, identifying any problems that can't wait, and then getting to the next flock. An hour or so later we go round again and sort out the less urgent issues. But some days the troubles snowball, one damn thing after another into a furious blur of activity that makes a day feel like a week in normal time, with the stress mounting with each successive holdup.

It can take one of us all day to look after the problem cases in the barn. If it can go wrong, it will go wrong at lambing time (imagine a couple of adults looking after several hundred newborn babies and toddlers in a large park).

 

10

I see an old ewe hanging determinedly to a sheltered place behind a hillock. When I get close, she stands and her waters break. She is not paining and is in good health. So I know it is fairly safe to leave her for maybe an hour to lamb naturally, then I will return and check all is well. I am now juggling in my head a bunch of things that need doing, being pulled in different directions.

I have a mental map of the sheep lambing at different places, and when I need to check again on each of them. It is like having a series of egg timers in my brain for a number of ewes around the farm at different stages of giving birth. If this ewe hasn't lambed in an hour's time, I will catch her and see if there is a problem. I see another has had twins. I catch them and hold them up by their front legs so I can see how full their stomachs are. They are swollen full of milk, and warm. I don't need to worry about these apart from a quick check later in the day. A few hundred yards away I see another younger ewe stand up and a lamb fall out of her. She turns and licks it, mothering well. I can leave her for an hour or so to get suckled naturally. Then I need to check it. The egg timers in my head are always trickling away reminding me of things I need to return to. Knowing when it is best to interfere and when it is not takes years of experience. My grandfather and father taught me that we have a range of options and the trick is to know which one to resort to depending on the situation. A wild or stressed-out ewe might be best left alone so that you don't make things worse. You can do more harm than good, they'd say, unsettling the ewes. My grandfather had incredible patience with the lambing ewes, would leave them, and leave them, and leave them, as long as all seemed well. He'd stand and watch, leaning on his crook, and seemed to have a sixth sense about when it was better to act or when best to leave well alone. I'd stand with him, wondering if he was right, and whether we shouldn't just catch the ewe and help it.

 

11

As I pass along the road between fields I see my neighbour Jean and she asks how the fell ewes I bought from her are doing. I call the flock I have bred for the last twelve years on our own land the “beauty queens,” and the new flock bought from her the “fell flock.”

I suspect I was on trial with Jean for a few years to see if I was “fit to look after her fell flock right.” She'd put thirty or more years into those sheep, and she'd be damned if she was going to pass them on to some clown who would waste them. She knows enough about me to know I'm not a clown, but I'm also not a born-and-bred fell shepherd either, so I've been on probation. We had spoken about this for two or three years, but then we needed to agree on a price and terms.