‘I’ll go down and have a look,’ said The Shepherd. Of course she said she’d have a look – she loves animals and has a whole menagerie of us on the family farm, but more of that later. She told me that when she came into the shop, she saw me wandering around in amidst all of these brightly coloured transparent plastic toilet seats. They were all full of strange things like barbed wire, straw, even coral reefs and tropical fish. She, of course, assumed I owned the place, but I had only been there for three days. Cheeky! As if a place that sold novelty toilet seats would in any way be suitable for a cat like me. She also told me that I was found wearing a pink collar with pictures of blue mice running around it – clearly somebody’s idea of a joke, but it showed that once, someone else loved me, too.
The shop owner had done everything possible to find my original owner, and there wasn’t a person in Kilkenny who hadn’t heard the radio appeal, but no one came forward. I could be sad about that, I suppose, but I’m not, because if I hadn’t walked into the toilet-seat shop a few days before, I would never have met The Shepherd. I would never have had the life I have now on Black Sheep Farm, in small green fields above the banks of the River Nore. The land has been in The Shepherd’s family for many generations, so every building and field has a name and a known unwritten history, like the Wind-Charger Field, where once a windmill stood and spun to generate electricity for the farm in the 1940s.
The Shepherd kept me inside at first, because she said she didn’t want me to disappear again, at least not until I knew the place as home. It was thoughtful of her, but what she didn’t know was that I thought of it as home from the moment I set foot in it. Still, for two weeks I curled up by the Aga, or looked out the window at the huge horse chestnut trees with mountains beyond, which were quite pleasant. I got to know others in my family, too, which was useful because I was able to establish myself firmly as almost Top Cat.
I was trained in the ways of farm life by Oscar, now long gone. He was an odd-looking feline, with his pure white body possessing a few sizeable tabby spots, tabby ears and a tabby tail that looked as if it had been painted and stuck on as an afterthought. Later, there came Miss Marley, whose owners had emigrated to New Zealand and couldn’t afford the expensive quarantine. She is a shy, unassuming feminine feline, who loves her job as wool inspector. I allow her this important task, even though all she ever does is test its softness by curling up and falling asleep on piles of raw wool, or sometimes even on our woven blankets made of wool from our rare-breed Zwartbles sheep, just before they are shipped off to some distant place in the world.
Cat Ovenmitt, my Shepherd Cat apprentice, was another late arrival, which is just as well, because, frankly, he has a lot to learn – and he is bog lazy. He acquired his name soon after he was brought to the farm. The Shepherd’s mother had opened the Aga door and she reached over for what she thought was an oven mitt to pull out a roast chicken. When her hand landed on the then nameless new member of the menagerie, she remarked, ‘Oh, I thought you were an oven mitt.’ And so he was baptised. His aims in life are to spend as much time as possible with his grey-black tabby body stretched out against our kitchen’s warm Aga or in a big bowl on top of our tall kitchen press, cosy from rising Aga heat. One of his favourite sports is to annoy Miss Marley as often as possible. His most recent favourite toy, much to my disgust, is the new canine Puddlemaker (more about her later), who is hardly bigger than a rat.
I also met my best canine friend at Black Sheep Farm: a slightly scruffy Border Collie/Fox Terrier cross named Pepper, a handsome fellow, with his black wiry coat and lightly salted beard. Over the years I’ve watched his coat mature into a distinguished-looking full-bodied mix of salt and pepper colours. ‘The Einstein of dogs’ is what many humans call him, joking that if he were human, he’d probably be a bearded pipe-smoking scholarly writer. He is, most importantly, a tenacious ratter and hunter of grey squirrels and rabbits, of which there are plenty on the farm. The softer-hearted among you might see this as terrible cruelty, but I have learned so much about nature since I began to lead my agrarian life here. Rodents would destroy everything if we let their population boom. They eat and foul hay and grains and even chew electric wires, which could cause fires. Rabbits, if they overpopulate, catch a terrible virus called myxomatosis, which means that their population plummets and foxes and buzzards go hungry. Grey squirrels kill our native red squirrel and also strip bark off young trees, which kills them or stunts their growth. The Shepherd is passionate about her trees and gets very upset when she finds one squirrel-stripped.
The Shepherd adopted Pepper from a local puppy rescue centre. Someone had brought him there after he had been discovered with his siblings in a paper bag on the side of a busy road, not far from Black Sheep Farm. The kindly woman who runs the puppy rescue did not want money or even a contribution of dog food to the centre in return for the adoption. Instead, she asked for a small basket of figs. She remembered that many years before, she had visited the farm and The Shepherd’s grandfather had given her a delicious freshly plucked ripe fig to eat. (Long ago, The Shepherd’s great-great-grandmother had planted half a dozen fig trees that had flourished against the stone walls in the garden and those trees still produced scrumptious figs every summer.) The Shepherd explained that figs wouldn’t be ready to pick for some months as they didn’t ripen till some time in August. The kindly lady said that was fine. She could, and would, wait as she recalled that her fig had been so memorably delicious.
Months later, The Shepherd brought her a small basket full of fresh ripe figs as the purchase price for Pepper. She also brought him along to show how well he had matured into a lovely dog. But when the car door opened at the canine rescue centre Pepper told me that he took one whiff of the local air and refused point-blank to exit the car. The poor fellow thought The Shepherd was about to return him. He sat trembling on the car floor, terrified of what might unfold. The Shepherd comforted him and left him in the car while she delivered the basket of figs. The lady was delighted, Pepper later told me, because, as it happened, she had completely forgotten the planned exchange.
The matriarch canine when I arrived here on Black Sheep Farm was Tassie. She had also been adopted by The Shepherd from the kindly lady at the rescue centre. She was a pure-white coarse-haired, tenacious Jack Russell Terrier, who was terrified of nearly everything because of her experience at a previously abusive home, but her main passion in life, when not cleaved to The Shepherd like a shadow, was hunting rats. She was brilliant at her job, even climbing trees and walls in pursuit of her prey. People would often phone The Shepherd to bring Tassie to their house when they had cornered a rat, as she was so very quick and efficient at dispatching them.
It is my understanding that The Big Fellow arrived as a small black puppy who could fit into a shopping bag. He is a large black wolf-like German Shepherd. When I first arrived and heard his bark, I would nearly jump out of my furry skin. It was truly deafening, but I now know that his bark disguises a heart like a soft marshmallow.
Then there is capricious Bear, who arrived here more recently as a tiny pup, so used to be known as the Puddlemaker. Puddlemaker is an apt name for young canines as all they seem capable of is leaving puddles all across the kitchen floor, which we must all navigate around until they’re cleaned up. A mixed mutt, Bear has the nose-scenting prowess of a Beagle, the glossy fluffy coat of a King Charles Spaniel, the tenacity of a Jack Russell Terrier and the disloyalty of a Labrador. His stubby turned-out legs make him look like a very odd Corgi. His mother had been a rescued canine whose new owners had mistakenly allowed her to get pregnant. She had been at the vet’s to get the procedure when she was discovered to be in pup.
Bear, I merely tolerate, but as for the new Puddlemaker, well … she is small with a black-brown coat, with ears that are far too large for her tiny body, which give the impression of a fruit bat, and a pert upright tail that some humans call ‘cute’. To me, she is a nuisance, even with her sophisticated Peruvian name – Inca!!! The time can’t come soon enough when she learns how to respect and behave towards authority. Meanwhile, I am quite happy to oblige in her further education with well-aimed clawed smacks at appropriate moments convenient