The Brand New Normal - For Sam.

So this is the brand new normal, a hole in my heart and soul.

I’m bereft since you left; disbelieving, that you suddenly had to go.

Where once I complained when you shouted, now I just miss your bark.

And that you’re no longer hogging the sofa, and claiming the comfy part.

You’re not there in the middle of the doorway, underfoot, refusing to budge.

Nor there when the fridge door opens, at mealtimes I don't feel your nudge.

You’re no longer leaning against my legs, with your head and ears to smooth.

No more are you insisting that you lick mine, sat on me so I can’t move.

Of course you knew all this made my life sweeter,

with just the touch of your cold wet nose.

So this is the brand new normal, I’ll get used to it, I suppose.

Dreaming of Sheep

The other night I had an upsetting dream. I awoke from it at 3.44AM and in that halfway house between sleep and full wakefulness, in the predawn gloom, I lay experiencing a profound sense of loss. I felt emotional all day; I was merely tired and being stupid I told myself. But no, it was more than that; I was actually in mourning, in mourning for lost friends as it happens.

You see the last image I recalled from the dream was that of Janet, or Jannie as we used to call her. Now Jannie was special, a born fighter; one who had survived against all the odds. She had her own personality and knew her own mind; which is odd when you consider that Jannie was a sheep.

I remember when we got her. We bought her and her “step sister”, Annie, from the livestock market. We had actually gone to get some chickens for our small holding, but something made my parents get these two orphan lambs as well. 

We already had 4 black faced Suffolk ewes. To identify them my father put a blob of paint on their ears. So we had Left Ear, Right Ear, Two Ears and Tufty… Tufty got her name for the patch of wool on her forehead.

Jannie was a little white faced Southdown and Annie was a brown faced Hampshire. Both lambs were under nourished and cold. Jannie was scouring badly which could be seen by the state of my mum’s coat as she carried the poor lamb. “You’re wasting your time with that one.” Farmers told her as she tried to keep it warm. Now my mum would take this “advice” as a challenge to her mothering instinct so really, in retrospect, there could only be one result!

Back home, both lambs were warmed by the Rayburn. For a while they lived in the living room with us, having a temporary pen in the room, while we fought to bring them back from the brink; much to our Springer Spaniel, Snoopy’s disgust! They were hand fed using a bottle with a teat and they did more than rally; they thrived!

Back in the fields, with the other sheep, these two lambs would bound over to us if we had a bottle of milk or not. If Snoopy went wandering they would accompany him; they thought they were dogs at times!  My dad would show off Annie to relatives who visited. She’d actually jump up to him like a dog and my dad would pat his robust Hampshire sheep proudly.

Of course they weren’t really pets; we now had 6 ewes as breeding stock and we raised their lambs for meat and sale (we supplied organic lamb before the term was coined!). To that end we acquired a Dorset ram at a bargain price. Sam the Ram had a bad case of foot rot in his front hooves which was making him lame. A commercial shepherd would probably have seen him as a liability but, as with the two orphans, we had the time to put effort into his care. He always had a slight problem hoof but he thrived too; the monarch of our fields and Lord of his Harem. He didn’t take kindly to human visitors in his fields when tupping time approached, as instinct and raging hormones made him aggressive. We all learnt to stay out of his way if we could, as the bruises on our legs testified to. His favourite ewe always seemed to be Two Ears, although you had to be wary when Annie and Jannie would come over to say hello!

When the lambing season began, both Orphan lambs couldn’t be more different. Annie was distinctly unimpressed and didn’t initially take to motherhood very well at all. We had to confine her and her lamb in the goat house until she realised that the insistent lamb bothering her was her responsibility. The opposite was true of Janet; you would be hard pressed to ever find a more devoted mum. She rarely let her lamb out of her sight and would but any ewe who tried to bustle her lamb away from them. Both sheep were still friendly though, that was until two years later.

A terrible storm was raging through the early summer night. That years’ lambs were about three or so months old at the time. We had by then built a shelter for the sheep out of galvanised corrugated steel and apple wood (the fields were old orchards and we reused anything!). There was a gate tied to it which we used when we had to confine the sheep, for dosing them with worm drench or treating foot rot etc.

We awoke to Jannie bleating and running around the field like a thing possessed. Her lamb had got its head between the bars and the gate had fallen over breaking the poor creature’s neck. Jannie was distraught; it was heart breaking to see. The stress of it all actually made her wool fall out. Don’t let anyone tell you that animals don’t feel or don't have emotions because I know that it’s simply not true. Poor Jannie changed that night. No longer did she come over and say hello, she was forever stand offish with us. The sheep that thought she was a dog had died; the poor baby.

So why have I written this post? After all, all these animals I mention here are long gone and my parents were eventually forced by family commitments to abandon their self-sufficiency dream, and return to the suburbia they had escaped from. 

It’s because I think these creatures deserve being remembered by me, they were part of my upbringing and so part of me. So here’s to Annie and Jannie, Sam the Ram, Two Ears, Left Ear, Right Ear (I knew them by their faces eventually, who needs paint?!), Tufty, Snoopy and Brock my beloved dogs, Arabella and Bluebell the pigs, Jessica and Juba the goats, Clarence and Clara the geese and not forgetting the chickens, Eric the Red and his girls, including Penny and little Banty; I miss you all… Banty? Now Banty has a story all of her own to tell, but that can wait for a future post. ;-)

 

 

Another Woodland Tale.

We are a noisy species, we humans. I suppose it is because using sound is our chief form of communication. I can frame my thoughts into words and speak them to you. You hear these sounds and instead of hearing grunts and growls you discern information from my mammalian chatter. Most amazing of course is our ability to draw sounds on the page; sounds with meaning, sounds with names. You’re making sounds through your eyes right now. As you read this, a voice you hear every day is silently speaking. Try SHOUTING, go on, give it a GO. Was that louder in your head? Yet beyond the confines of the personal word within your skull, nothing was heard. Of course this is assuming that you follow the modern trend of reading quietly. Believe it or not, this only became the norm in the Middle Ages; Monastic libraries and scriptoriums must have been quite noisy places. You see watching QI does have its uses…

Interact with other species and you have to employ different forms of communication. My dog can understand a few words, his name, sit, walkies etc. But his main form of communication is smell. Messages are written and left for other dogs to read using urine.  Not having the olfactory skills (or indeed the stomach) to read his lamp-postings (see what I did there?), he talks to me with certain barks, the tilt of his ears and the look in his eyes. Yes, he really can speak to me through his eyes. Eyes are the window to the soul, or so they say, and therefore two souls can understand each other, even if they’ve never met, through their organs of sight. I have no empirical evidence for this of course, only experience...

I was in my late teens, yet again escaping into the woods seeking solitude, and wondering what I would see. This time, hearing the occasional blast of shotguns in the distance, I had climbed the slopes above our house and was in the belt of woodland between our neighbouring farm’s fields and the Steep heathlands of Bracken, Heather and Gorse that rise to the summits of the Blackdowns. I knew these woods well, had followed the hedgerow edges, the tree covered curves and promontories, knew where the big oaks and beech avenues were, the high boggy woods and the old stone pits. These were where people had once excavated stone for buildings. Now consumed, by the wild wood, they were steep sided and thicketed; not a place to stumble into, especially in the dark, but that's another story...

However on this day it was bright and sunny, during the college summer holidays, if I recall correctly. I let my feet lead me. I came to the edge of the woods – a hedge of Beech trees and a ditch carved into the red earth and rock by winter rains. It was very deep and difficult to get out of. Jumping across the ditch I followed the curve of the slope. I liked to walk the woods as quietly as I could, still do in fact, although my children who accompany me these days tend to underline my “humans are a noisy species” statement.

I slipped between branches, walked on the balls of my feet, trod as lightly as possible, as I practised my woodcraft of avoiding the snapping of twigs and a tell-tale trail showing my passage. I climbed up through a stand of Ash trees, avoiding the brambles that hung down from the lower branches; I endeavoured not to crush the thick waxy leaves of the wild Garlic now past their flowering, likewise the drooping foliage of the blue bells, their glory spent. Atop the mini summit I looked back through the light dabbling canopy, now at eye line, to see glimpses of the fields and the grazing cattle below. I heard a rustling behind me. I turned and saw her.

She came to a sudden stop, bursting through the undergrowth, four feet in front of me. Her eyes were fearful, her dark nose glistened, and her red flanks rose and fell quickly showing she had been travelling at speed. She, of course, was a Roe Deer.

We both froze, her ears twitched. We both held each other’s gaze, unblinking. I stared in wonder and I saw her fear dissipate in her eyes; I stood on two legs, yet I was not a threat to her. She knew, she saw it in my eyes. The spell was broken when we heard human voices through the timber to the right, behind her. Her ears suddenly quickly twitched back and forth, as did the flesh on her legs, her instinct to run returning. Still holding each other’s gaze, I understood her need to escape and blinked to give her answer, releasing her eyes.  Her head turned, and with a near silent bound, she disappeared into the woods to my left. I was left smiling but my smile disappeared when I heard the voices through the trees again. I had come into the woods seeking solitude and these interlopers had broken it. I don’t know why, but something inside me told me to avoid meeting whoever the voices belonged to. They were noisy and lacking in fieldcraft, or so it seemed…

I followed the deer’s path eastward a short distance and then, hearing voices behind me, struck south, up the slopes to the edge of the heathland, abandoning stealth for speed. On the edge, between wood and moor, I ran as lightly through the chest high bracken as possible, doubling back westward until I reached a long abandoned and overgrown hedge that ran up the slopes to the summit of the hills. I relaxed, on the far side of it; once  more I was alone. I looked back the way I had come and then I saw them.

Two men, both dressed in cammo. In their arms they carried broken shotguns. They were following my path through the bracken. It was then that I realised that they had been hunting the deer and had picked up my trail; following the sound of my passage through the woods and my carving of a path through the virginal bracken. Hunting deer with shotguns though? That was plain wrong.
I remembered when, two months before, the neighbouring farmer and I had gone shooting rabbits for the pot, on the edge of these same woods. We had failed in our expedition but we had come across a recently deceased deer. It had suffered terribly before it had died; its skin and flesh blasted and torn on its flank. My companion had shaken his head and muttered angrily. “Shooting a deer with a shotgun? You should use a rifle.” He had said, patting the 0.22 in his hand. “Using a shotgun on such a beast, it’s so wrong. It won’t kill ‘em outright, not unless you’re feet away. This poor bugger probably ran for miles until the shock of her wounds killed her. What a waste and a shame.”

I wondered if these hunters were the self-same culprits. Well then, I’d lead them a merry dance. Nothing on two legs knew these woods like me.

Uphill and downhill they followed me; through the deepest thickets, through the boggiest parts of the woods. You needed to know where to put your feet and which rotting logs could take your weight; otherwise you could all too easily sink into the treacherous stinking mud, in which the birches struggled to grow in without drowning.

I tired of the game eventually and headed for home through the fields, running doubled up, keeping low behind the thick hedgerows. I looked behind me, but of the hunters there was no sign, they hadn’t left the woods. I hope they enjoyed the hunt as much as I had. That ditch carved by the winter rains WAS awful deep… ;)