The shearers came. Late in the evening. A day before we had agreed. A quick scrambled call gave us an hour to be ready. It’s that way with any harvest on the farm. Work is done when the weather and the workers are there. Schedules are a kind of moveable feast.
We gathered metal hurdles from the four corners of the farm. These hurdles are short sections rectangular metal frames with horizontal bars, that can be connected together to make four sided folds, or corridors, to contain or move sheep. We stripped gates, fencelines, barns and stables of their hurdles, strung them together to makes pens in the open field that we funneled, ushered, rushed, cajoled and rugby tackled our sheep into. Gentle rugby tackling. More collapsing in front of a ewe trying to get tangled up in her. The ewes field became a spiderweb of carefully laid electric fencing to guide the ewes to the solid hurdle folds.
Gethen the ram, and the flock of hoggets we called down to the barn and locked in while they wolfed down a plate of feed.
So, penning Gethen and the rams is always tricky. I’ve seen Gethen take off a riveted sheet metal door, his skull -curled horned and thick – booming off the metal, the entire trailer shaking with each thump. He lowered his head at me, in the close, small warm barn, as did one or two of his sons, as I built the fold around them, all of us milling around the barn together. Circled, head down, eyes up, looking for a way past the folds I carried in front of me to catch me with a square strike. A broken leg, a smashed hip, a clatter of broken ribs maybe… I built the fold around me to keep them out, and then unfolded it piece by piece until it I had halved the barn with them, rams on one side, shaking heads down, horns cocked and waiting, me, on the other, furiously tieing off joints in the folds so they would hold if they hit them.
The shearers were done in short order. 18 ewes in two fields, done in under two hours, including setting up. My son worked with us, gathering fleeces in the late evening heat, running at top speed to plop them down on the sorting table, rolling around in the fleece pile loving the snuggly warmth. He made a bed from the bags of fleece, lay down on it, and got coevered up with the rest, beaming happily at the sky as he sunk in.
The shearers worked carefully, with sure hands all the while, calmly, handling and rolling the sheep with minimum fuss, done quickly with each sheep and done with care. Ewes tucked in tight under the crooks of arms as fleece peeled off in a single piece then tucked and rolled fluidly to unlock the wool across the back and flipped for a final trim around the cheek. Work well done by practised hands has it’s own poetry.
Gethen yielded a beautiful fleece. Fawn in colour, and fine fibred. We have white fleece too, black fleece, pure white, and mixed black and white which will become a kind of worsted grey.
Leaving, the shearers gave five euro of their fee to my son. It’s a small thing. Other contractors – hay suppliers and other shearers too – have done the same. None of them making much money from their work and time. All happy to share a little of their small something with a little boy. It’s a warm, generous, and touching tradition. Seeing the will to work in a small child and rewarding it meaningfully from their own means.
We have 16 kilos of useable Shetland fleece, which will spin to less than that, when washed, dried, carded and sorted. A beautiful harvest for the evenings work. The warm barn where it hangs rich with the hot smell of lanolin and wool
