Called to see my old mother, and looking out of the kitchen window could see the Shepherdess walking nonchalantly down the field, her flock following excitedly behind her. In her early twenties, 6' tall, statuesque, her long blonde hair loose, she was wearing a pair of stylish, slightly grubby, dungarees, her almost luminously pale arms and shoulders bare, her breasts gaily unrestrained, unabashed, the very symbol of youthful fecundity. Mother laughs in accord, and when she comes into the kitchen we tell her that she resembles some Greek Goddess of fertility. She laughs, 'even despite the sheep shit?' 'Yes', we tell her, 'even despite the sheep shit'.
Walking across the field, the thick, sweet, sickly stench catches the back of my throat even before I see them. The Shepherdess and a young vet are kneeling amongst the tall grass and docks in the corner of the field, concentrating on their grisly task. The ewe had been sickly for weeks, ever since giving birth to her two lambs, and despite constant attention, she had died the night before. Her head is bent back, the open eyes glazed. The Shepherdess looks up and offers a weak, ironic smile. 'Not so much of a Goddess now'. The vet is carefully lifting and prodding amongst the mass of tightly-curled intestines, excising samples here and there, photographing viscera with her cellphone. 'No visible sign of fluke,' she says, cutting into the liver, 'no worm'. 'But I've not seen this before, there's something very unusual about the mesentry. I'm going to photograph it and take some back to the lab, they've got more experience than me'. She is a diminutive twenty-something Malaysian girl, almost swamped in her protective green waterproofs and gloves. Crouched low over her subject, she looks up to me and explains that the organs don't merely flop around inside the abdominal cavity, but are held in place by the tissue that has offended her. As she does so, her left eye slightly narrows, and I notice a little dimple that appears on her cheek. I notice it again later in the yard as she explains some other techicality of her trade whilst sponging her waterproofs down with the frothy yellow disinfectant. She is intriguingly, fascinatingly pretty, and I reflect ruefully on the two opposing forces of nature that decree that it is spring, and I am old.
During their ministrations over the cadaver, the Shepherdess had told me that this might not be the worst of it. Three more sheep and four lambs had gone missing. I set out in search of evidential pathways through hedges, but a call eventually comes in from a woman who had retrieved them from the road much earlier, and had apparently herded them into her dog run. She makes her irritation relentlessly clear, and even deems to lecture the Shepherdess on her responsibilities. The Shepherdess, concerned and apologetic, makes no headway amongst the increasingly aggressive assault, and is eventually reduced to hurt, frustrated tears. We call on the help of a neighbouring farm manager, a Yorkeshireman well attuned to the vagaries of itinerant sheep. The house is set within several featureless acres of savagely mown lawn, a paradise to its owners, a vision of over-preened suburban hell to me. The now sulkily silent rescuer leads the Shepherdess to her sheep, and, in the dying light, we herd them home.