Behind my house rises a 1000 foot hill that I have climbed more times than I could ever count, and, knowing – as I hope I do – that I will spend the rest of my days living here, I’ve often wondered at what point my body will cease to have the strength to get up it. It overlooks the long straight road that leaves Wales for England through the fertile Marches, all the way to the city of Oxford in the end. I used to watch headlights on that road at night as a child, full of the incantations of an urban world I did not know. And when I left for that world, I did so in the knowledge that I would come back, and that here would be the final place for me. In some way neither dark nor conflicted, I’ve aways associated the landscape of Mid Wales with death.
This episode, or conclusion to the previous, will be brief, and I feel I need a content warning. I will keep for another outing the second of the anecdotes I mentioned before, and its implications. What follows should stand alone. It is painful and not for the faint of heart, but it cuts to the centre of what I am trying to achieve, and so I will give it to you, and if you do not like it you can cease to read.
Moana was the first lamb born on the property, to Lottie, a placid ewe with extensive, streaming white lederhosen, little confidence but indomitable mothering skills. Moana was born to her in February, during a blizzard – one of the hazards, I would realise, of keeping my own ram. Barry (big-balls, blonde-chasing Barry) was Moana’s sire.
She was beautiful, with the teardrop white markings under her dark eyes that are characteristic of the best of the Torwen breed, and she was aptly named by my daughter. Moana grew far braver than her mother, frequently pushing her way through the holes in the willow fence and leading the other lambs – all at least a month behind her in age – out into our larch woodland. The flock would let me know. I came to recognise the particular bleating and kerfuffle of bells that warned of lambs straying. The mothers expected me to round them up and return them without delay and made all efforts to convey this requirement. It was my fence after all.
She was a single lamb – Lottie’s first – and grew strong and large. By the time she birthed her own lambs, she might have been the largest ewe on the property – though not the boss. My matriarch sheep, Lucy, boasts more than size as battlements against displacement.
Moana wasn’t entirely convinced about mothering herself and I saw more of her progeny than she did over the first few days. She also birthed early and the weather was cold and dry as the twins she had this March grew strong enough to stand for her milk, and the birds stopped circling.
Until I tried to eat from the land I live on, I didn’t understand the meaning of things like this; couldn’t decipher its most basic signals. The three crows on the field beside the ewe or the red kite wheeling. I don’t know what it means to farm in other places, like Texas – where by this early point in the year, drought had already been declared – but in Mid Wales the manner in which you comment on the life or death fortunes of such things as the weather are a measure of your ability to speak this language and survive. To comment without fear: a measure of your equanimity. It’s a language in which words are the flowering tips of metres-deep tap roots. Maybe not a language of words at all, but of intent.
“Could do with a bit of rain now.”
April marked a third month without any and, by the end of it, our early false green spring was ochre. The sheep ceased to pay attention to my nominal boundaries. Once again the days were strapped round guerrilla grazing and emergency fencing; a third year of battling to give them what they need. All my life, or most of it, living amongst these fields, but it took owning sheep myself to understand the import of their surrounding cries.
I alternated the sheep from field to field where each week a little might have grown. Trustingly they followed me back and forth. Nonetheless, by the time the rains finally arrived and twelve weeks with no substantial growth was relieved, they were used to little – and I was used to feeding them.
So when Moana made her final move to the suddenly lush, wet pasture and I encouraged them, as always, with a bucket of corn and oats and sheep nuts, I was utterly ignorant of the potential harm. I moved – and fed – them in the evening. In the morning I came thoughtlessly back to feed again. Moana was a shape on the ground at distance. I could see her two boys milling at her sides.
She lay stiff, as yet untouched by birds, her pretty eyes not yet even glazed. She was on her side and gigantic. Through the series of deaths I have dealt with, both intended and unintended, I had never seen one like this. Her belly had expanded to awful proportions, her limbs forced into perpendicular angles by its size. I had fed her to death. On reading later that morning, in panic and horror, possibly the entire flock – as the luscious new, wet grass combined with the feed I’d offered, overwhelming Moana’s capacity to digest. It must have been a terrible way to die.
In grief, in my onesie, without breakfast, I got the wheelbarrow and tried to save the meat. Never again will I let my attempt at ethics drive me to work so hard for such cruel irony. The effort of wheeling her out of the field to privacy from the flock and attempting to get her up in the gantry on my own left me sobbing and incapable. I tried to bleed her out – as any meat must be bled out – because I could see that she was only recently gone, but the task of hoisting her was impossible, the blood already congealing. And when help came and we managed to skin and process her, the smell was worse than anything I’ve ever known.
Twice I would try to cook and eat her and twice I would fail. I have processed dead meat before, but the stench of death from frothy bloat is more pungent and awful than any I’ve encountered. Even frozen, in a last ditch attempt to make her death less futile, her meat remains impossible to be near.
I learnt. After discovering what I’d done wrong, in dread I went back to the others, who’d eaten even more. I dosed them all with bicarbonate of soda and left a further dilute tub.
We salted Moana’s skin for tanning.
What else do I take from it?
In her wake, at 5am the next day, getting up in fear to check on the other sheep, I watched them graze in the near light and dew. Lottie let her new lamb feed and looked at me, ready to run if I produced an oral syringe of bicarb. She didn’t mourn. I crouched with Lucy and found myself crying as I marked Moana’s absence with a few human words: her name, “hurting”, “gone.” Lucy stayed with me and looked with her universe eyes into mine and after a while grazed again. She did not mourn. Moana’s lambs were strong enough to be grazing also, not crying out for her anymore.
I was crying. I still am, as I write this. I mourn.
On every side now, we’re assaulted by the message of humanity’s intrinsic evil. But we are not evil. Our compassion is unmatched in nature.
Raised to worship the twin ideals of conservation and socialism, I never questioned human beings’ wickedness. But we are not evil. To raise our children to believe they are part of a virus afflicting the earth is genuinely to instil in them our own era’s original sin. We are not responsible for the crimes of the few. Humanity’ capacity for empathy represents the greatest evolutionary leap nature could produce. We shouldn’t seek to nullify our place in the ecosystem. We must count the cost of it, individually, hold the burden of it as best we can, and utilise the gift we have been given as a species: to love selflessly. To care.
Thanks so much! What a lovely thing to say. :) That means loads to me.
Hi Bex, the last blog post was such a rollicking read I just had to subscribe. Bravo, it’s brilliant!