| The Good Life
The suspense as Floppy Ear goes through the pregnancy scanner.
Although I’ve been living among sheep for more that a year, I don’t seem to be getting any better at identifying what makes a really top specimen.
My favourites are always those animals that are not quite top-drawer, or are what Miles, the sheep farmer, likes to kindly tell me are “on the cusp”.
It is one of Miles’ euphemisms and he uses it on the way to another: “Going on an overseas holiday.” My sheep, the ones I hand feed every day, are the ones whose bags are kept packed in case they get a call to fly off on a one-way ticket.
My two current favourites are Floppy Ear and Nipper, both ewes. They are too small to be really top sheep, so I feed them up like mad. Small does not mean sweet. They are both possessed of rotten personalities. Nipper, as the name implies, bites. Floppy sneaks up on people (Miles, mostly) and butts them in the back of the knees. She also has a questionable attitude to personal hygiene in the nether regions.
She spat, with admirable accuracy, a cabbage core at me to signal her disgust that it wasn’t an apple. I had to admit to Miles that she had also eaten the plastic toggle off my jacket. He said: “All things shall come to pass.” I have not admitted to Miles that the day after the toggle incident she pulled a paper towel out of my pocket and ate that too.
My taste in sheep is about as good as my taste in music. I was kicked out of the Kaitaia Primary School choir merely because I was tonedeaf and could not recognise, let alone hold, a tune. These still seem slender grounds to me.
Pah, who cares? In the country you can sing, loudly, tunelessly, all day long and there are only the sheep to complain – which they do, even more loudly and tunelessly.
Because I can’t recognise a tune, I can’t remember any but the most basic of songs. However, I do know all the words to the dreadful Morning Has Broken. By some means of musical osmosis, and repetition (the musical equivalent of waterboarding) by hippyish parents, I know most of the words to most of the songs of the Seekers – I Know I’ll Never Find Another You is a particular favourite. I am, in dissonance with the sheep, my own happy choir. So take that, Kaitaia Primary School.
Wednesday morning dawned fine and frosty. It was a corker of a day for singing in the paddocks but I had slept not a wink the night before. Today was the day we were going to watch the ewes have their ultrasounds and Floppy, to my trained eye, did not look to be with lamb. She looked, lumpily, stuffed with apples and pears and a toggle and a paper towel, but she was not, as the other ewes were, nicely round.
The scanning machine is a thing of eccentric genius. It has wheels, a tarpaulin roof and what looks like a seat rescued from a tractor circa 1940. Heath Robinson, the English illustrator of fantastic machines – a gadget for “resuscitating stale railway scones”, for one mad example – would have taken much delight in it. The sheep are marched through, scanned and marked orange or blue or not at all. I am still entirely confused about which colour means twins or triplets or quads but no mark means a single lamb.
Floppy came through, almost last of course, with no mark. I was madly excited, and relieved. “Congratulations,” said Miles. “Could a paper towel show up on a scan as a lamb?,” I thought, but certainly did not say.
“She’s going to be a terrible mother,” said Carolyn the shepherdess. Oh, probably. But I don’t care.
She is saved! She is over the cusp!
Of course you know what I did to celebrate. The following morning I went out to the paddock, with apples, and sang, loudly and tunelessly: “I could search the whole world over, until my life is through, but I know I’ll never find another ewe.”
Nipper bit me.
I was kicked out of my school choir because I couldn’t hold a tune. These seemed slender grounds to me.