A Job for All Seasons

by Phyllida Barstow

  As the silence lengthened, she said impatiently, ‘What’s the matter? Can’t you do that?’

  ‘Well, it’s a good fifty miles each way – ‘

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll pay for the petrol.’

  Oh, you will indeed, I thought. You certainly will.

  Luckily, such buyers are rare. Much more often I find myself selling to a variety of sheep-fanciers ranging from the young couple who have spent their all on a house with five or six acres and want to start a flock for the smallest outlay possible, to the ageing empty-nesters where the wife hankers after animals on whom to lavish love and attention, and the husband is looking for an outdoor hobby to liven up his retirement.

  There’s no haggling over price in the second case. Buyers are keen, the cheque-book poised, yet even at the risk of losing a sale, the vendor’s conscience won’t be easy unless a few tactful enquiries are made, and all too often a few minutes’ conversation reveals a hidden snag. Arthritis. Emphysema. A dodgy back or a hip in need of replacement. A field half a mile from their house. Yes, it is thick with grass now, but it won’t be by February, and they may find that carrying hay is more than they can cope with. Hungry ewes can be quite rough when competing for their concentrates, and anyone not too steady on his pins may be knocked over in the rush. Have they got anyone – er – younger who could lend a hand?

  I find it a relief when these private sales are over and done with and the money banked. Selling in the nearest livestock market is very much simpler, and this is where we take our culls; for the last, rather melancholy task of my shepherding year is to get in the ewes, get out the lambing record, and make a hard-headed decision on which to retain for breeding, and which to send for slaughter. After two months’ steady grazing, free from the cares of motherhood, their teats will have shrunk almost to invisibility and any hollows in their flanks filled out until they look plump and jolly, well able to cope with another set of lambs, but the record book may tell a different tale.

  The first consideration is age. Years of surrendering to the impulse to keep some elderly favourite for just one more season has finally convinced me that breeding from old ewes is a mug’s game, because it is bound to be the one winter when everything goes wrong. A long and bitter freeze-up in January. Continuous deluges in February which turn the pasture into mud soup. Cutting winds straight from Siberia in March. While the younger ewes adapt easily enough, the dear old lady may begin to struggle. She will need extra food, and that means arranging special, solitary meals, shutting her in a pen while her mates circle like the troops of Midian, then remembering to come back to let her out rather than waking with a jolt at 2am, realising she is still confined.

  And even if she lambs without difficulty and presents you with healthy twins, she may not have the bodily resources to produce enough milk for them both, which lands you with a whole other set of problems.

  No: even among sheep, child-bearing is a job for the young and strong. Some breeds last longer than others – I have a photograph of a Welsh Mountain ewe aged 23 with her latest set of twins – but in general I think it sensible to call time no later than eight years of age.

  So out go the oldest ewes, making room for the shearlings I have retained, and after checking for physical defects such as deformed feet or the residual lumpiness of mastitis, I get out the stained and scribbled-over log book in which I noted down lambing events as they happened, I check for those who gave the most and the least trouble last spring. Who needed assistance or medication. Who tried to toss one of her twins out of the pen and had to be restrained in the Adopter Box; who refused to let her lambs suckle.

  It is only six months since all these dramas were at the forefront of my mind, but it is amazing how quickly you forget them once the peaceful routine of summer becomes established. By the time I fill in my official record book and send off forms to register the new lambs in early autumn, the bald statements of breeding, ear-tag numbers, sexes and dates of birth give little idea of the highs and lows, triumphs and disasters which followed each other in swift succession during the fraught fortnight of lambing and this may, in itself, be a mercy.

  If I knew precisely the annual cost in physical and emotional energy that keeping a small flock would entail, let alone the expenditure in time and money, would I forego the pleasure of watching ewes and lambs scattered across the green fields on summer evenings, and opt instead for gang-mowers to keep the pasture tidy? I don’t think so, but it might be a close-run thing.

  It was only when I learned to spin and Duff commissioned a beautiful new spinning-wheel from a master-craftsman of the Somerset Guild, for a Christmas present, that my Wiltshire Horns’ lack of wool began to seem less of a plus than a problem. Though clumps of the crinkly kemp that covered them could easily be gathered from the fences in Spring, with the best will in the world you couldn’t spin it. The staples were too short and coarse to card: it was far more suitable for lining the nests of birds, who did indeed make the most of it. For a few months I bought or begged small quantities of sheep’s wool from friends and relations, but a whole fleece was more than I could cope with, and these odd bits and pieces tended to be ones that wouldn’t make the grade for the wool marketing board.

  Imagine my delight, then, when for my next birthday Duff presented me with three young alpacas – Shadrach, Meshak, and Abed-Nego – whose dams had been imported by air from Chile when long-standing restrictions on bringing livestock from South America were relaxed in the 1980s.

  For a spinner, alpaca fleece is the creme de la creme, its long, soft, silky staple has exactly the right texture to retain a twist; gossamer-light, because every strand is hollow, and very clean since it contains no lanolin. There is, moreover, just enough crimp or crinkle in each strand to prevent it slipping through the spinner’s fingers, and instead of being limited to a choice between boring white or black, alpacas come in a whole palette of colours: apricot, chocolate, grey, ivory shading to pink, ginger, and russet as well as black and the purest snowflake white. Blend two or more of these, and you have an unlimited number of combinations: black, ginger and grey, for instance; or apricot, ivory and chocolate. For a spinner such variety opens the way to a undreamed of possibilities. Very excited, we drove over to Sussex to collect the animals.

  The long approach lane to the alpaca farm was lined with well-spaced trees, and flanked on each side by close-nibbled paddocks fenced with high-tensile wire. As we wove slowly over the potholes, I had plenty of time to stare at the dozens – possibly hundreds – of grazing alpacas of all sizes, colours, and gradations of fleece from huge, unshorn teddy-bears to slender, elegant creatures that might have looked like deer if their little heads had not been topped with frivolous fluffy tufts, like Ascot hats.

  Young and old, large and small, they padded abstractedly over the turf with the graceful gliding movement of animals whose front and hind legs move laterally, like camels, exuding such a sense of exotic serenity that we were instantly captivated.

  But how to choose two from such an embarras de richesse?

  ‘Here are the young geldings,’ said Terry, the rangy Australian showing us round as he opened a gate. ‘No use for stud now, but there’s nothing wrong with their fleeces.’

  These were what we wanted. After a shocked look at the price list for females, I had no wish to breed alpacas, but the geldings were a more reasonable £500 apiece; quite enough to pay for materials to keep a spinning-wheel busy.

  Curious eyes followed us as we moved through the bunch of two-year-old males, their long necks undulating, and a persistent high-pitched humming vibrating through their ranks.

  ‘That’s the noise they make when they’re just kinda worried,’ said our guide. ‘If they’re frightened, it’s more like a bark. Now, which do you like the look of?’

  Of course, I liked them all, but one in particular had caught my eye. Most of his coat was a clear blue-grey, but black legs and a shaggy black cap with a white fringe distinguished him from his mates. His face
and throat were also white, and his neck seemed extra long since it rose abruptly from his back, almost at a right-angle instead of a gentle curve.

  ‘That one,’ I said, pointing, but for some reason our guide took no notice, urging us to look at the others and feel the luxuriance of their fleeces before deciding.

  Since we were complete newcomers to the world of alpacas, I thought we had better follow expert guidance, and before long we had chosen a fine, tall, ivory-fleeced gelding with a long aristocratic face, and a delicately-boned chocolate overlaid with russet. These allowed themselves to be separated from the rest with very little fuss. Together we had begun to herd them through a series of gates to where we had left our trailer when, seeing me glancing back yet again at the grey-and-white alpaca, Terry stopped abruptly.

  ‘You really fancy that little fella, don’t you?’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes…’

  He nodded. ‘I could tell you did, but the trouble is, we can’t sell him ’cos he’s got dropped fetlocks, see. Never straightened out after he was unpacked.’

  ‘Unpacked?’ It conjured up an image of a yummy mummy with a Louis Vuitton suitcase.

  ‘Dropped. Born.’ Terry grinned. ‘Look at his front feet – they look twice the length of the others, because his pasterns are flat to the ground, but they don’t bother him any. He gets about just fine. So if you want him for a pet, like, I’ll throw him in for free.’

  Unerringly, I had fallen for the only deformed animal in the field, but if Terry really was prepared to give him away, who could refuse such an offer?

  After a brief lesson on the best way to restrain them (one arm round the base of the neck and the other clasping the body against you) and how to trim the toenails which projected beyond the oval padded feet, plus some advice on jabs against clostridial diseases (our old friend Heptovac-P again) and worms (don’t try to drench them: they spit) we drove away in triumph with our trio of alpacas lying good as gold on the floor of the trailer. We all had a lot to learn about one another.

  The first surprise, to me, was their indifference to bribery. Every animal I had ever known had a weakness for some kind of titbit, with which one could entice them to approach or follow, but none of the alpacas showed the slightest interest in eating anything but grass, leaves, twigs and bark. Carrots – usually a surefire favourite – were nibbled and discarded; ditto oats, flaked maize, apples, sheepnuts. In stark contrast to sheep and horses, they seemed devoid of ordinary greed.

  They were, however, extraordinarily easy to herd. Two people had only to walk behind with a long rope held between them, and the alpacas would drift peacefully wherever you wanted them to go. It never seemed to occur to them to break back, jump the rope or duck underneath: sometimes it made me think that perhaps they were not very bright. The same suspicion arose when they walked past an open gate time and again, without seizing the opportunity to dash through it and raid the vegetable garden, whereas the sheep would have spotted in a flash the gap in our defences.

  Transporting them was a doddle, because they travelled lying down, making a commendably low centre of gravity in the trailer. Better still was the demonstration of what to do if you haven’t got a trailer. Pen the alpaca, place a long, medium-weight rope or cord – climbing-rope is perfect – over its loins and tie it in a loose loop. Pick up the alpaca’s hind legs one at a time and thread them through the loop, and it will then lie down. A strong man can then pick up the whole animal and put it on the back seat of a car, where it will stay quietly until you undo the loop of rope.

  I wouldn’t have believed this was possible until I saw it being done, and the alpaca chosen for the demonstration was far from tame. Once tied, it simply accepted the situation and made no move to escape.

  When confined to a pen, Shadrach (white), Meshak (brown) and little grey Abed-Nego would start the plaintive high-pitched humming which in alpaca-speak denotes anxiety. They really didn’t like being shut in, and I soon realised that although they would tolerate contact with humans, they didn’t enjoy it. No chance of having a cosy cuddle with that soft, luxurious fleece. Having reached the age of two without being handled except for the necessary jabs and foot-trimming, they were wary of being touched, and Shadrach in particular would kick energetically when I lifted his hind feet. But the next surprise was to discover how fragile they were physically. Under all the fluff and fleece was an animal much lighter than my big ewes, and nothing like so vigorous a fighter. Kick they might, but their feet did little damage, and so long as the handler refused to let go, very soon they gave up the struggle.

  There was a new vocabulary to go with them. Like 95% of the imported alpacas in Britain, mine were Huacayas, pronounced Wuh-kay-as, whose immense fluffy fleeces grow outward to give them a rounded, teddy-bear outline; the remaining 5% belong to a breed called Suris, with long corkscrewing ringlets like those worn by Hassidic Jews, which hang down, floating and rippling as they move. Twenty years ago, when alpacas were new to this country, the males were referred to as Machos, and females as Maidens or Dams, while baby alpacas were Crias. Nowadays there is a tendency to called them simply Boys and Girls, which in my eyes removes some of their exoticism and glamour.

  It was yet another surprise to find that despite their usual gentleness and serenity, there would be times when terrible fights would break out among our three alpaca geldings – real knock-down, drag-out affairs when they plainly wanted to hurt one another. It was hard to detect what provoked these ferocious spats. One moment the trio would be grazing peacefully. The next they would be flying about the field with mouths open, making harsh braying screams that sounded like rusty hinges being violently forced open.

  ‘That is certainly the cry of some large carnivore,’ said an Indian naturalist who was staying with us, and would not believe it was the alpacas until he saw them with his own eyes.

  It was usually Shadrach and Meshak who ganged up on Abed-Nego, but even when chased into a corner he gave as good as he got, and the deformed fetlocks seemed to be no hindrance to his nimbleness. At a standstill, the antagonists would wind their necks together and rear up, then one would seize the other’s foreleg and bow down to the ground, apparently trying to bite his opponent’s non-existent testicles. Altogether, it was a most unsettling performance, but it would end as abruptly as it started. After a final bout of spitting copious gobs of green slime at one another, the combatants would turn away, mouths hanging open, and all would be peaceful again.

  Some of their personal habits were curious, too. Like antelopes, they seemed to be programmed to deposit dung in the same place, all at the same time, and would make quite a long pilgrimage from one end of the field to the other in order to visit their communal midden. Here the over-nitrogenised grass would grow so thick and rank that no other animal cared to eat it, and the only way to rid the paddock of these unsightly blotches was to strim them close to the ground. They had the sensible habit of urinating backwards, Nature’s way of keeping their belly-fleece clean, but a far less sensible – indeed downright dangerous – tendency to cast themselves down in the embers of a bonfire, squirming to and fro in an ecstatic tangle of necks and legs as they worked the ash deep into their coats. A young alpaca boarding with a neighbour singed himself badly in this way, and thereafter we were always careful to ensure that the fire was cold and dead before allowing our boys into any field where we’d had a burn-up.

  Summer arrived, and when Shadrach started climbing into the water-trough it was clear that he wanted to off-load his winter woollies. Not that he much enjoyed the process. Shearing alpacas is a specialised job, completely different from shearing sheep, and round here it is generally performed by teams of strong young Antipodeans or South Africans who spend our winter, their summer, shearing at home, and bring their skills to the northern hemisphere between May and August.

  We loaded our trio into the trailer and drove to the nearest stud where a team of five were already hard at work catching, shearing, vaccinating, and foot-and-teeth trimming
the residents. Instead of sitting them on their haunches like sheep, which would emperil the long fragile necks and legs of alpacas, one brawny shearer would, with a cunning lift-and-twist, cast his client on its side on a carefully-swept square of carpet and, while his mate held down its head, stretch out and shackle fore-and hind legs. With swift, practised strokes, he then shaved away the coarser fibre around neck and legs, before peeling away the fine-textured fleece of the ‘blanket’ covering back and sides.

  A quick flip, and the process was repeated on the alpaca’s other side until the whole ‘blanket’ came free in a beautiful soft springy mass. The shearer’s mate, meanwhile, had been scooping up and stuffing all the second-grade fibre into a paper sack and as the creme de la creme fell upside down on to the carpet, he would carefully – almost reverently – roll it into a neat bundle and put it into a separate sack.

  Let no one suppose for a moment that Shadrach and Co took this treatment meekly. On the contrary, they bellowed their displeasure in an ugly guttural grunting roar known as ‘urgling,’ which continued nonstop throughout the medical rituals that followed. Toenails were trimmed, teeth levelled with an electric angle-grinder that produced an explosion of white powder, followed by booster jabs for every known disease.

  Worst humiliation of all, when the smoothly shorn alpaca, near-naked except for a tuft on the head and tail as protection against flies, was released and returned to his mates, they laid back their ears angrily and spat at him as if he was a complete stranger.

  True to form, the English summer turned chilly and windy the week after the alpacas lost their fluffy, insulating coats, and I worried that they might catch cold. Since their fleece contains no lanolin, rain goes right through to the skin, but though they look miserable and depressed in wet weather, nothing would persuade them to shelter voluntarily under a roof. Instead they lay like tiny camels, backs to the wind, long necks stretched out flat to the ground, presenting as low a profile as possible for the elements to batter.