The Shepherd's Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

the name of the farm for clarification. Sometimes the name of the farm kind of replaces the surname in general discourse.
    I met a man in a pub recently and he knew my grandfather—“You’ll be a fair man if you are half the man he was,” he said sternly, then bought me a drink, the accrued interest on some unspoken good turn my grandfather had done for him decades earlier. Anyone new to the community or common would be watched carefully until they showed themselves to have integrity and play by the rules. They say you have to be here for three generations before you are a local (people laugh when they say that, but it carries a lot of truth).

 
    10
    Floss and Tan are working hard. They cut backwards and forwards, driving sheep across the land. Sometimes one of them will bolt off into a dip or a hollow and return with some ewes that have been out of sight. We sweep the scattered ewes and lambs across the peat hags and the expanses of heather towards Wolf Crags. I see the dogs of the man I am expected to join with. I can’t see him, but they are working to his commands from somewhere unseen, so we have effectively joined up. He will have seen my dogs over the brow of the fell and will know I am there. He cuts beneath the crags and meets up with the old shepherd who is in charge of proceedings. I see them a few hundred feet below, swapping notes about how we are doing. Occasionally an arm will extend to point some information or other. Their dogs are scattered across a wide area, working sheep homewards. The crags beneath me are steep and dangerous. If I took five steps forwards, I could easily tumble to my death. I can see for maybe twenty miles.
    The first time I gathered these crags I was with an old shepherdess who I was dealing with to take over her flock of fell sheep. We had been friends for many years, but I was being observed to see whether I could manage sheep with a dog on a fell, a kind of unspoken test. Half a dozen ewes and lambs were sticking a hundred yards below us on a grassy ledge halfway down the rock face. I sent our old dog Mac down the cliff face through a little grassy descent between two rocks. He threaded his way and brought them out gently but firmly at the bottom. He made me look good. She said he had done all right, which from her is the highest praise.
    *   *   *
    When we have cleaned out the crags, we have the sheep in one swirling mass, a woolly carpet laid over the lower slopes of the fell. The noose of men and dogs is tightening now, and many hundreds of ewes and lambs are threading home in front of us. Sometimes in bad weather we lose a man, and wait patiently for him to reappear out of the clouds or mist. So we pause sometimes and wait, holding the line. Then when everyone is done, we drive the massed flock of maybe four hundred sheep down into the sheepfolds that are littered along the lower slopes of the fells. Usually these consist of little more than a drystone wall surrounding a gathering pen and a couple of fenced or wooden-railed collecting pens for sorting them in.
    We chase the ewes through the narrow sorting race (a walled alley, down which the sheep flow, with a gate that sorts them left or right into different pens at the end), where they are divided up into their own flocks. You need a great eye and fast hands to shed (switching the shedding gate left or right to divide the unsorted flow of sheep into their different flocks in different pens) because you get, if you’re lucky, three seconds to identify the sheep’s flock mark and open the gate the right way. I work them into the race and shout out any badly marked sheep or lambs (occasionally a “white” lamb will appear, that is, unmarked having been born at the fell, and we will find its mother and thus its ownership). One of the other shepherd’s dogs nips my hand as I push the sheep through.
    I yelp and threaten to kick the dog.
    His owner shouts to ask what the