After posting yesterday’s bout of self-pitying neepery, I switched off the comp and went outside to take in the evening.
There’s a field outside our door, where sheep graze. It’s just one of several linked fields they spend their days wandering in and out of, following the grazing; it has a couple of pens in it where shearing, dipping and the other arcane rituals of sheep-care are performed.
Last night the field was almost empty except for a ewe, with a lamb alongside her, bleating loudly; she was answering an even louder bleating from a second lamb, inside one of the pens. Going into the field, I went to the pen; the lamb inside stopped bleating and looked at me with mixed hope and fear in its black button eyes.
It obviously couldn’t get out. And for the life of me, I couldn’t see how it had got into the pen in the first place – the gate was latched shut. However, there were a couple of gaps in the fencing. In previous years, I’ve seen lambs squeeze themselves through improbably small fence openings in order to reach fresh grass, and the pen’s lush, ungrazed grass must have been incredibly tempting to a herbivore.
I did consider that it was being kept in the pen deliberately. But separating out one animal from a herd like that takes people and a dog or two, and I hadn’t seen anybody working in the field. Plus the lamb looked perfectly healthy and didn’t have any spray-paint markings that would distinguish it from the others in the herd. So it had clearly got itself into the pen and couldn’t get itself out.
Now, I’m describing it as a ‘lamb’ , so you probably have a picture of a cute little feather-light scrap that an old granny like me could hoick over a waist-heigh fence with one hand. Actually, these lambs are all seven or eight weeks old, which makes them hulking great teenagers in sheep terms. This particular ‘scrap’ probably weighed at least a couple of stone. So lifting it out was a no-no.
I unlatched the gate and wedged it open, then stood at outside the pen flapping my arms and shouting. This had the effect of convincing the lamb that I was a huge horrible lamb-eating monster; it panicked and started racing around, completely missing the open gate. So i had to go inside the pen and try to frighten it out from there. This very nearly ended in disaster – the frantic creature tried to get out through one of the fence gaps and jammed itself. I had got myself ready to pull it free (and anticipating getting kicked), when it freed itself, dodged around me and finally found the open gate.
Which it shot through so fast that it ended up going through the open gate of the adjoining pen. Where it stopped, quivering and panting. So I had to get around to the far end of that pen and do the arm-flapping business all over again.
Finally, it dashed out into the open field and made a beeline for Mum (or, to be accurate, her udder). All this time, she had stayed in the furthest corner with her other lamb, unwilling to leave her trapped offspring but determined that the huge horrible lamb-eating monster would not have her remaining child as well.
For about thirty seconds the ewe bestowed a world-weary gaze on me, then moved off to join the rest of the herd. And that was that.
The evening went on, silence returned. And I went back indoors, having done my bit of good for the day.