Moon over Martinborough

Rick and I each picked up a long stick on the way down to the bottom paddock.

The bottom paddock: scene of the crime

We were about to chase some sheep off our property, and if one thing was certain it was that we had absolutely no idea what we were doing.

This was during our first summer here, when we were even less experienced at country life than we are now — if that’s at all possible.

But how hard can chasing sheep be? They’re just sheep. They’re fat and slow and stupid. Right?

The first sighting

A month earlier we’d seen four sheep down at the river. It was hot and there hadn’t been much rain. The river was shallow and slow.

They were drinking on the far bank. One had a black face and the rest were all white. Their wool was thick and mangy, as though they hadn’t been cared for in a while. But they looked peaceful there by the water’s edge.

As soon as they saw us they ran.

Before moving out to the country, I never understood that sheep really are sheepish.

The three white ones disappeared immediately, but the black-faced one stopped and actually looked back at us for a moment. Then he turned and ran through the undergrowth, breaking branches and snapping twigs, until he was gone.

Second sighting

A couple weeks after that we saw them again, this time on our side of the river, which by then was only ankle deep in spots. They were foraging around, eating whatever they could find. I was sure they looked hungry, although truth be told I have no idea what a hungry sheep looks like.

Summer river

When they saw us they bolted again, the black-faced one once more looking back a moment longer, then running off to join the others.

I mentioned them to John, our neighbor, and asked him what we should do. He keeps sheep, and he knows things.

“There’s nothing you can do,” he said.

“Shouldn’t we try to tell somebody?”

“Sheep go missing all the time.” He shrugged and looked off at the hills. “There are farms all along that river. They could be from anywhere.”

That would have been the end of it, I suppose, if they hadn’t found their way into our bottom paddock.

A ramshackle fence

That summer our fenceline closest to the river was a bit worse for wear. River silt from a previous flood had half buried the posts in spots. You could hop right over them. So could sheep.

When we saw those wild sheep the third time they were right in the middle of our bottom paddock, grazing happily under the mammoth White Poplars as though they owned the place.

They must have been happy to find all that grass. After their days of wandering, this was the land of plenty.

I called our neighbor Duane. “Are you missing four sheep? Including a black faced one?”

“No,” he said. “I saw them. They’re not our sheep.” His voice was steady and slow.

“What should we do about them?” I asked. “They’re in our bottom paddock.”

“Well, you could keep them.”

This is how a farmer thinks. City boys do not see flea-bitten sheep in the bottom paddock as an opportunity.

The fact was that Rick and I had neither the time nor the know-how to care for those sheep, and our fences needed work before we could keep stock anyway.

At that point it was all we could do to care for our olive grove. Trees can’t hop our fences and run away.

Rick under the White Poplars

“We can’t keep them,” I said to Duane.

“Well, you’ll have to get them out of your paddock then.”

“How?”

“Just chase them,” Duane said.

“Where will they go?”

He laughed. “Who cares? As long as they’re not in your paddock.”

I pictured those four sheep out foraging again, looking for grass, wandering around with nobody to care for them.

But I felt like we had no choice. We had to get rid of them.

City boy shepherds

When we got down to the bottom paddock — both of us carrying a carefully selected long stick, and ready to chase some sheep — our goal was to drive them over towards the section of fence that was the worst, so they’d jump over it and leave our property.

‘Easy peasy,’ as some say in these parts.

We started walking towards them, spreading out a bit and holding our long sticks out to the side. Rick started making noise. “Whoop! Eh! Uh!” He must have seen somebody do that on TV.

I followed his lead, making noises of my own. “Yoop! Hay! Yah!”

The sheep started running immediately. We ran after them, like fools.

I have since watched farmers herding sheep. Real farmers. Not wannabees like us. First of all, real farmers have dogs that help, and there’s a special whistle they have that tells the dogs what to do. If for some reason they don’t have a dog with them, they certainly never resort to running after their sheep. Instead, real farmers walk in a measured and calculated way, arms out, and the sheep go magically where the farmers want.

That didn’t happen for us.

The sheep ran towards the bottom corner, where the fence was high. Okay. Now we just had to get them to move along the bottom fence and jump out at the low spot.

These sheep, however, were independent thinkers. They had other ideas.

They eyed the situation quickly. Their tiny brains churned. I suspect they realized pretty quickly that they were dealing with a couple of extraordinarily stupid humans.

Suddenly they turned together and ran directly towards us. We were being charged by sheep! Oh no! They’d suddenly turned aggressive! They must be rabid!

Then I understood.

Rick and I had spread out too far, and we’d left them an opening as big as Texas.

The moment our rookie brains figured out what those scheming, devious sheep were doing, Rick and I started running towards each other as fast as we could.

It was like a bad slow-motion movie. Sheep running towards gap. City boys running to close gap. Who will get there first?

You might have guessed it wasn’t us. That day I learned a brand new country lesson. Sheep run fast. Really fast.

They not only slipped effortlessly between us, but they continued running all the way to the far side of the paddock – the exact opposite side from where wanted them to be.

The black one looked back. I swear I heard him laughing.

Or maybe what I heard was our neighbor Duane, hiding out in the trees somewhere, watching his new neighbors running around like idiots after four mangy sheep.

I don’t know how long we chased those sheep around that paddock. Suffice it to say it was a long time. We chased them up, down, across, and back again. It’s a big paddock. It was hot. We were dripping with sweat.

In the course of all this running, I became convinced that the most obvious explanation for our difficulty in herding them was that they were freak experiments escaped from some nearby, top secret genetic modification lab. They had the body of sheep, the speed of cheetahs, and the strategic intelligence of Russian chess champions.

Finally, when Rick and I were both ready to collapse, a wonderful thing happened – not so much because we’d planned it well, but because the Four Woolly Terrors of Martinborough apparently decided they’d had enough of toying with the stupid humans.

They ran to the low section of fence and jumped gracefully over, one at a time, and headed back towards the river.

At a cluster of willows on the other side, the black-faced one turned back and, somewhat reliably, looked at us again. He was clearly the ringleader. Then he too disappeared, right behind the others.

We never saw them again.

Left here wondering

Animal bones by the river

That was two and a half years ago. Lately I wonder what would have happened if we kept them. They could have grazed in that bottom paddock as long as they liked. What harm would it have done?

I like to think that some kind, knowledgeable farmer downriver took them in, gave them a lush green paddock to graze in, and sheared off the heavy wool that must have been so hot in the middle of that long, sweaty summer.

And if I’m right about their genetically modified origins, in return they could have given the kind farmer a few pointers on his chess game, or perhaps built him a rocket ship.

Every once in a while we find animal bones at the river — complex things that look like vertebrae, jaws that still have teeth.

I think of the Four Woolly Terrors of Martinborough.

I hope it isn’t them.

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Read the next post: Noah’s olives go in the jars

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 10:56 pm and is filed under New Zealand, Paddocks, Sheep & cattle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.