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When all the sheep had been counted and driven into the pens which they were to occupy for the night the shepherd would invite the farmers to his house and entertain them with oatcakes, Wensleydale cheese and home-brewed beer; meanwhile, the conversation turned upon the past lambing season and the prospects for the next hay harvest.
It pleased Joanna to talk of Socknersh and herself as "we," though she would bitterly have resented any idea of joint responsibility in the days of Fuller. The rites of lambing and shearing had not dimmed her faith in the high priest she had chosen for Ansdore's most sacred mysteries. Socknersh was a man who was automatically "good with sheep."
For a long time the game went on, and then the players slunk closer, the shaggy heads thrust skywards, and the long whining cry rose on the night; then away they ranged, running flank to flank through the peat hags and over the rise of the hill we had crossed the night before. "He'll be a bold man that shepherds these hills in the lambing," said Dan.
In all the wild species of goats and sheep the horns are larger in the male than in the female, and are sometimes quite absent in the latter. I have been informed by a trustworthy witness, who purposely inspected a flock of these same sheep during the lambing season, that the horns at birth are generally more fully developed in the male than in the female. Mr.
The shepherd of each flock marched behind, a bundle containing his kit for the week strapped upon his shoulders, and in his hand his crook, which he used as the staff of his pilgrimage. Several of the sheep would get worn and lame, and occasionally a lambing occurred on the road.
He would in one breath give orders connected with the lambing of his sheep, in the next break into football talk, calling out signals and imploring his men to hold them or to break through and get the ball. Once he broke into curses, but his very oaths seemed to come from a clean heart and missed the vulgarity they might have had.
A superintendent of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all more or less distant from each other. He is a busy man. His head-quarters, like those of General Pope, may be said to be in the saddle. His note-book is in constant use.
"Not that I believe in this new plan of putting soda in the pot. If the dear Father had meant soda to be put into soap what would He have made milk-bushes for, and stuck them all over the veld as thick as lambs in the lambing season?"
They gave away to the dry-farmers in the vicinity the supplies and halves of mutton she furnished them. In the lambing season they left the lambs whose mothers refused to own them to die when a little extra effort would have saved them. When stragglers split off from the herd they made no great attempt to recover them.
It was known as the 'Murdering Hut', and no shepherd would ever live there after, so it was deserted. We weren't afraid of shepherds alive or dead, so it came in handy for us, as there was water and feed in an old lambing paddock. Besides, the road to it was nearly all a lot of rock and scrub from the Hollow, that made it an unlikely place to be tracked from.
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