Our other hunting problem arose from my much-beloved Shepherd, who had given me such a lovely new life and home. She occasionally appeared out of the blue and made her way across our hunting field as we silently prowled towards our intended prey, rustling the grass and alerting the rabbit, which hopped quickly away to safety. Our hunts only became efficient after Oscar and I carefully demonstrated our techniques. To give her great credit The Shepherd stood statue still after that and carefully watched how we hunted. The excellent result was that she and we learned to understand each other much better.
A hunt would often start when we found ourselves of the same mind. We would move out to our favourite place, a long hedgerow in the uppermost hilltop field with lots of rabbit burrows along its western edge. Oscar had found this a perfect location, because the morning sun first lights the frosted grass in front of the rabbits’ burrows, thawing the grass earliest in the cold of winter, so they like to graze there.
The field is named the Wind-Charger Field because long ago it had a windmill that spun to charge big batteries that provided electricity for Black Sheep farmhouse. When The Shepherd was small, her grandparents and mother told her about The Olden Days before and during the Second Big Human War, known as the Second World War, when the farmhouse was lit with candles and paraffin lamps. After the war ended, they built a windmill to generate electricity. This erratic form of electric current was totally wind dependent: as the wind varied, the lights flickered. The wind-charger’s electricity lit the Black Sheep farmhouse until electric power mains were introduced into rural County Kilkenny in 1946. (These were our earliest days of making what is now considered alternative energy. Back then, fossil fuels were too expensive to use for making rural electricity. That’s why candles, paraffin lamps and this early wind power were the most important sources of our indoor light in The Olden Days.) The wind-charger had been taken down before The Shepherd was born. Recently, she cleared out an old shed and found the long wooden propeller, covered in dust and generations of cobwebs, which had spun in winds to provide electricity so many years before.
But back to the hunting. Oscar and I would meet up in the small cobbled outer yard. I would follow him through what I called our ‘gate squeeze’, between the gatepost and pillar of the gate, which is fitted with a tight mesh. We’d slide through into the egg-maker’s Plum Orchard paddock: in spring, after plum blossoms have faded, they fall and litter the ground with a dusting of pinky-white petals. We would saunter into the Wind-Charger paddock, a small fenced-off part of the great big field that we often use for sheep that need close observation. As we’d pass close to the lean-to shed where ewes birth lambs in winter and spring and are shorn during summer months, a swallow or two might dive-bomb us until we moved far enough away from their nests.
We’d wander slowly up the Wind-Charger Field, weave through a few beds of nettles, grass cool underfoot, clover soft on our pads, and we’d step around spiky thistles. Thistle thorns in our paws are incredibly painful, crippling even, so we always tried to avoid them. Having left the swallows behind us, we’d hope no corvids – magpie, raven, rook, jackdaw, carrion crow or even the grey crow, with its grey skull cap feathering – would spot us heading out to hunt and spoil our fun with their warning racket of cackle, caw and crow. We’d have to stop and pretend to clean our toes until they left to look for another distraction to scream about. As we headed up the hill, wagtails would bob about, snatching insects among the grasses, flit up to the tops of fence posts, or perch atop wire fences with tails wagging and heads bobbing as if to say: ‘We see you and we are quite aware of your presence. Move along, move along. We need to get back to our business of hunting insects to feed our young. Move along, move along.’
Once we’d travelled far enough away from the sheltered nesting sites of the swallows, they would resume darting, diving, gliding after insects disturbed from the grass by our passing through. Out in the field they never flew low or close enough to enable us to leap and catch one of them for a tasty morsel. When and if we ever caught a swallow, it was usually in spring when they had just returned, exhausted from their marathon migration north to us from South Africa.
Oscar and I were lucky if we got past all the natural early-warning systems of other species and made it up to just below the brow of the Wind-Charger hill. There we’d pause to lower our bodies and flatten our ears sideways so their tips didn’t break the horizon line and give our silent crouched-low position away. We’d cautiously peer over the field as it sloped down away from us. We remained stone-still, with only a telltale twitch of a tail to betray our presence. We’d watch a few rabbits grazing along the hedgerow – luckily, no russet-red hare could be seen. Hares are far more wary and attentive to our intentions than their cousin rabbits.
Early in our hunting relationship, I found it tedious and boring to wait for the correct moment to begin – sometimes I just sat bolt upright and scared rabbits away when my ears and head broke their visible horizon line of clean grassy hill. Oscar was very displeased with my impatient hunting behaviour and would give me a stern look.
As we crouched and watched rabbits move about, dining on our sheep’s grass, we hoped no hungry hunting buzzard would coast overhead and spot our rabbit prey before we could try to catch it ourselves. Whenever we chose a rabbit to catch, we separated so that we could come at the creature in a pincer movement. Oscar usually swung out at a trot low to the ground in a big circle away from me and to the other side of our selected rabbit. Once in position, he aimed at the selected rabbit, flicked his tail as a signal to me and started his cautious prowl, ears flat, one calculated light step at a time. The tiny tip of his tail came to life under his concentrated pressure and flicked back and forth. I started my approach towards the rabbit from the other side, with the same concentrated vigilance, cautious with each step I took. Gingerly I placed each paw to advance by increments. At such a slow pace it seemed to me that time stretched out, slower and slower and longer and longer. If the wind wafted just the right way and no bird squawked a warning cry, we could draw closer to the end game.
In the beginning, before I learned properly, I would be the one to break first. Like the release from an over-wound spring, I would leap out from my low-crouched prowling stance to pounce. I’d bound through the gap that separated me from the rabbit. The rabbit would leap and twist in the air to evade me, most often fleeing directly towards Oscar, who had remained hidden in the long grass. He would leap into the air, claws full out, and bring down the rabbit, just like our lion cousins who dwell on the great plains of Africa. We would feast on scrumptious fresh rabbit and feel fat and lazy for days afterwards.
I miss Oscar terribly now he is gone as, although I have finally got the hang of it, I can only do my rabbit hunting in spring, when the rabbits are young and foolish. I haven’t yet been able to train Miss Marley or Ovenmitt to hunt with such intelligent skill and cooperation as good old Oscar, although I hunt alone too, which, I have to admit, sometimes has its benefits.
3
Horses, Horses and More Horses
I cannot begin to tell you how much The Shepherd loves horses, from her earliest days as a child on Black Sheep Farm to her cousins’ Maryland pony farm and to her schooldays, when she sought refuge from bullying by working at a local stable. There, she mucked out and cleaned the owners’ stables and gave riding lessons to beginners. In exchange for her work she was allowed to ride horses. Later, while at agricultural college in America, she would work with draught horses – sometimes known as cart horses – in Vermont; she would break and train Morgan horses, a popular American breed, in upstate New York, and later still, she would ride in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, which are so like our own Irish Blackstairs Mountains that we can see from our farm’s upper fields. Caring for and riding horses enabled her to develop and hone her skills at reading the unspoken language of the body that communicates across species, within herds and between prey and predator animals.
Each species communicates