In 2022, Reginald, my ram lamb born to my now dead and always adored ewe, Elizabeth Jane, was given the coveted title of Ram Lamb of the Year. By me. He was adorned with a red ribbon and presented with a bouquet of carrot ends and a bendy parsnip. Elizabeth Jane pinched the carrot ends.
Now Reggie, the last of Miles the sheep farmer’s flock, has gone. I always regarded Miles’s flock as my flock, too. I would check them every day when they were at Lush Places.
No longer. The paddocks are now empty. I miss the cacophony of the sheep calling to me every time I went outside.
One morning not long ago, June, our wonderful rural postie, pulled up in her decrepit van and tooted her horn, as she usually does. I was in Orchard Tree Paddock talking to the sheep who were talking back to me. June rolled down her window and said, “They’re singing to you.” I reckon they were.
Reginald was taken away last week on the back of a trailer. While he is a “teaser”, which means he has been vasectomised, he is still all ram. He had to be rugby tackled, with amazing grace and care, by two lovely blokes with enormous beards and the build of brick shit houses. It was like watching a ballet involving a great big ram and two giants.
The second to last of the surviving lambs born to Elizabeth Jane, he became the last of Miles’ sheep flock to go. Nobody wanted him. If I hadn’t saved him he would have had to have been killed. Not on my watch.
Once Miles and his flock went, Reggie was left on the farm alone. He was becoming a bad-ass bugger. He began jumping fences looking for his ewes. The situation was of my own stupid making. I had arranged for him to live with my mate Pru, the patron saint of animals needing a new home.
Before this move, he was brought back here for a couple of weeks to live with my pet ewes – Xanthe, S’peri’ment and Becky – in Apple Tree Paddock. They are our last three sheep. Reggie’s mum, Elizabeth Jane, is buried there. I saw him sleeping against her burial mound. I don’t ascribe any meaning to this. The mound probably simply made a nice pillow.
It was very nice having him at home for that fortnight. But it meant we couldn’t go into the paddock. He rushed to the gate for a face scratch and biscuits. But I realised that he had a thing for ladies. He would do that disgusting ram thing at me over the gate: the Benny Hill mouth thing, the lip-poking out thing, the tongue sticking out thing. I started to fear he might attack Pru the way he had once attacked me and knocked me down. He does, I think, regard ladies as his ewes.
Greg said, “what about John?” John is the geezer up the road who we call “the Mayor”, mainly because he has a local road named after him. He is what we call a thoroughly good bugger. We buy our firewood from him. He is a lovely farmer whose sheep are healthy and happy (some farmers are shit and in Masterton we all know who they are). We like him, and he seems to like us. I don’t know if he actually believes, as we like to taunt him, that we are Commies, but it amuses him to believe it and it amuses us to pretend to be the Reds under his bed.
When he and his giants came over to get Reggie he said quietly to me, because he is a kind man, which is why he is a good farmer, “It’s hard, isn’t it?” I cried.
