There are many superstitions and old wives’ tails (if you’ll excuse the pun) that travel companionably through time and the history of farming. One of these is to see how the first ewe lambs down (one of many rural terms for a ewe giving birth to a lamb) at the beginning of the season. If it goes badly, there could be problems ahead, but if it goes well then the season might run its course relatively smoothly.
Not long ago we used to lamb in March. I remember the first ewes to lamb were from The Shepherd’s old flock of mixed breeds. However, now, with lambing happening earlier in the year, I concentrate instead on making my morning rounds because egg-makers resume laying their eggs after a few months of winter rest. After hunting there is nothing that grabs me more than tracking down fresh raw warm eggs. Some crafty egg-makers hide their eggs, so I hunt for them in the clean loose piles of golden straw or aromatic hay in the sheep shed and stables. I descend behind and creep between large straw and hay bales. Once in a while I surprise a mouse or a rat to add to the fun when searching for my second breakfast of the day. I’m always ready to inform The Shepherd when I next see her and tell her all about my discovery while I march her to where I think egg nests are hidden. She collects and retrieves them, even if they’ve fallen behind bales of straw or hay. My scrumptious reward is a fresh raw egg. There’s nothing I like better than an egg yolk. Eggs, eggs, glorious eggs … raw, scrambled, fried, but none better than farm-fresh raw eggs still warm from the nest.
I follow The Shepherd as she enters the stables to collect feed. I make sure to point out the bin containing our egg-makers’ rolled barley. One scattered barley scoop is thrown every morning and they happily peck and scratch. After their barley breakfast, egg-makers head out to hunt for delectable insects, worms, grubs and seeds. They also graze on tasty grasses and delicious wild herbs that grow abundantly in our surrounding fields and which give their egg yokes a healthy, lovely deep rich orange colour and a unique gourmet flavour. Their yokes resemble the bright early-morning sun, which projects the arrival of a great day. In my feline mind, my gustatory opinion is that their diet makes eggs an obvious food to eat. A good healthy egg yolk is my favourite part of my favourite food, with the added benefit that it’s great for my glossy fur coat. I can hear an eggshell crack from way across fields even when I am fast asleep in the sheep shed or stables. I arrive at a romping gallop, ears pricked forward, to wherever the cracked-egg noise came from. I’ve heard The Shepherd say that if you feed egg-makers food with a strong distinctive flavour like roast garlic or leftover Indian curry, that flavour will permeate the taste of eggs laid over the next few days. I must say this is very true indeed, but I personally prefer my eggs seasoned by our farm’s insects, field grasses and wild herbs.
Every morning the four canines and I trot across the cobbled yard to a mesh-covered gate which has a vintage sign bolted to the stone pier right above where you open the gate. It states:
The gate must always be closed. If left open, the fine is forty shillings.
This sign is most important because it gives visiting strangers a laugh, so they pay attention to what it says despite its out-of-date numismatic fine. Shillings, pence and farthings have long gone but countryside golden rules prevail. A most important golden rule is that every gate you open to walk through must be closed behind you. Over the years members of my lovely flock of egg-makers have been killed by foxes, or once in a while by neighbours’ dogs that strayed through an open gate. Both times the dogs were caught in the act and the neighbours paid for new egg-makers, BUT when foxes come calling, they usually slaughter all my egg-makers.
Late in March is when the ‘kits’ (the rural name for fox cubs) of our local mother fox (known as a vixen in our agrarian world) are old enough to start to need solid food. The mother will explore the countryside to find the most abundant food source to feed her hungry offspring. She will choose the easiest to take home. If the egg-makers are let out too early in the morning or the door to their house not tightly closed at night, the vixen will come and kill the whole flock, given half a chance. She will then bring one bird home to her kits and pull it apart to make it easy for them to eat bite-sized pieces. After she has fed her litter, she sneaks back as often as possible to retrieve as many of our egg-maker bodies as she can. The vixen trots off to a variety of locations in hedgerows or fields to bury egg-maker bodies. She uses the still-cool March earth as a storeroom, similar to a human’s refrigerator, as a place to keep her extra food. She tries to do this in a timely way before The Shepherd or my canines discover the dead egg-makers.
Whenever we arrive and see what looks like wanton carnage, bloody bodies strewn across the egg-maker’s paddock, The Shepherd becomes very upset. I sniff each body, make sure that it is dead and move on to examine the next. The canine work crew comes in, takes a quick note of the murdered egg-makers and then tactfully avoids even a passing glance at any egg-maker, dead or alive.
Their collective body language screams at The Shepherd: ‘No, we did not do this, no, we did not do this, but we can smell a musky scent in the air.’
To each other: ‘Can you smell that pungency?’
‘Yes, quick, I got a whiff of that foxy musk. It seems to have gone this way.’
Turning to each other, the canines rush off, some with noses in the air and others with noses close to the ground, to follow the strong tang of fox scent. They collectively dash to a fresh hole dug recently under the egg-makers’ fence to enter the kill zone. A few stray feathers would lie near the entrance dig or snagged in the fence wire, fluffed and wafting in the breeze. A trail of feathers is seen among the blades of grass and leaves or caught between sticks, all showing the vixen’s passage across the field with her prized corpses.
Pepper usually leads my hunting pack as they follow an ambient whiff of fox musk that still hangs in the air. If The Shepherd sees our canine crew take off in a race across a field, she worries that the new tiny bat-like Puddlemaker Inca will get lost or killed in a fox or rabbit hole. I must confess I do admire the little dog’s mighty tenacious attitude. She can provoke The Shepherd into a fit of giggles when she grabs Bear’s tail and hangs on with a vice-like grip. She bounces behind, hanging on as Bear races after The Big Fellow. Both bigger dogs run shoulder to shoulder while they snap at each other in play. Bear’s tail is the only one used by the Puddlemaker in her favourite game of ‘Catch the Dragon’s Tail’. The Puddlemaker hangs on till Bear’s tail-feather hair suddenly gives way. When this happens Inca is sent flying and rolls over. She then scrambles up to race after both much bigger dogs, spitting out Bear’s tail-feather hairs as she tries to catch another bouncing ride with her teeth. These shenanigans occur daily and sometimes Pepper deigns to takes part in this silly frolic of tomfoolery, much to my embarrassment.
On good days, when the flock has not been killed or eaten, the egg-makers are usually faffing about at the gate in anticipation of breakfast. Sometimes the large cocky disruptive male, who’s only good for making more egg-makers during the spring and summer months, perches high above my head on the gate and crows as if his life depends on it. I wait as The Shepherd opens the gate to feed the egg-makers and I follow. As soon as barley grains hit the ground, I ask her to come with me into the egg-makers’ house to see how many eggs have been left for me. I really get very annoyed when there are none.
Crows and magpies often fly into the egg-makers’ house after they hear the happy clucks as one egg-maker successfully lays and then proudly struts away from her newly laid