This was written a few weeks back, and I forgot to publish it. So you’ll be getting two pieces from me today; I hope you enjoy them.
Sunday afternoon. The light is playing on the mountains and the fields. Jacob's ladders reach down over the hills, and the rain promises to return after dark. But for now, the last of the winter sun is shining under a blanket of grey clouds, and I’m at the pub.
I'm not sure if there's a point to this story
But I'm going to tell it again
So many other people try to tell the tale
Not one of them knows the end
Saturday was all about firewood. Manu turned up late in the day with five cubic meters worth of wood that will see us through the end of winter. We’ve gone through four cubic meters already.
He’s a good bloke, young, hard-working, with a plan. The firewood will help him and his partner into their first house, and it’s nice to know that we’re supporting that in a small way. The lad is smart, and we’ll come back to him shortly.
K and I started the day with me playing hired help. Though we only have a few lambs, it doesn’t mean there is no work to do. Today is docking and vaccination day. That means that we have to catch the little bouncing bundles of energy before inflicting what they doubtlessly think is a great atrocity.
Using the yards is out; they are under a few inches of water thanks to overnight rain. It would be a shambles of epic proportions, and the lambs are still small enough that they could probably squeeze through the gates of fences.
So then K wrangles them into the shed, and the process of catching them commences. This dance involves them going around the shed about three times before attempting to stick their head out of the gate. Now, they can get their head through the gate, but nothing else is going through. At that point, K can grab them and pass them to me, and my job is to keep them still while K jabs them and get rings on their tails.
On the upside, it isn’t raining or snowing. I remember doing this with big mobs when it was snowing hard. Grab the lamb. Get it on the docking deck. Rinse. Repeat. But of course, the lambs are muddy, so we are increasingly muddy as we sort out each of them.
K is a deft hand with a needle. Then, each lamb tail is ringed. This is because leaving a long tail on a sheep is only going to lead to two bad things. Dags, when the shit builds into a hard pack or flyblown, which you really don’t want. So, the tails need to be shortened. In the old days, you’d take them off then and there with a sterilised blade, but that could be problematic for all the reasons you’d expect.
So today, to be more humane, a tight rubber band of sorts is placed on the tail in the right place, and over the next few days and weeks, the tail end will drop into the paddock.
Back to firewood and Manu. Every now and again, you get your mind blown apart by the scale of farming in rural. Manu works as a shepherd, as well as the firewood business, on a large block. They haven’t started lambing yet; it’s due to begin in September.
Rams generally go in with the ewes on Valentine’s Day or St Patrick’s Day. We run our rams with the mob all year round, so we fall into the Valentine’s Day schedule.
I asked Manu how many lambs they were expecting on the station this season. “About twelve thousand”, he told me. So here’s the thing. Regardless of our handful of lambs versus the scale of that operation, the locals are still interested in listening to our adventures, providing advice, and remembering our stories.
When I was living in Gisborne and doing occasional labour work inland and up the coast, I learned about lambs’ tails. The locals consider them a delicacy. If you don’t believe me, then google “lamb tail recipes.”
Generally, they are cooked over a fire. You end up with something that is similar to ribs, smoky, with ash (obviously), and quite fatty. It’s such a delicacy, similar to mutton birds (look them up), that people courier sacks of the tails around the country to their family members who live in cities.
There were a lot of strange delicacies in Gisborne and, frankly, across Maori communities in New Zealand. Boil-up was a staple and delicious if done right. You can keep rotten corn, fermented crayfish, tero tero (sheep intestines), and kina though. I’ve tried them all, and it’s a hard no.
Having finished my duty as a farm hand, a hot shower was in order. Once the mud was gone, the beard clipped, and clean clothes put on, it was off to the pub.
Young George was there, a bottle of beer and a cigarette in hand, his pack lying casually against the rail of the smoking area. He’s in standard farming shorts and a shirt. Today is the day that he starts his travel to Europe. He has a large farm here that he runs pretty much single-handedly. I can’t actually remember him going away in the last four years.
Tomorrow, he’ll fly out of Wellington, through Australia, and up through Singapore. “I’m glad to see the arse end of the farm, to be honest,” he tells us.
That morning, and this is so valley living, the stock agent decided that today was the day to take two of his bulls that he had been waiting to get rid of for weeks. It’s just a rule in rural that things happen when they happen, and usually when it’s inconvenient. You get a bit superstitious about this phenomenon. In fact, you get superstitious about a lot of things.
Anyway, the bulls were not happy about being loaded up and sent off. Yards were destroyed, fences broken, and these two did their absolute bull-best to make sure George remembered them for the rest of his life. Weighing in at a tonne a piece, they will make a massive mess when they feel like it. Of course, all on the day that George is setting off on an overseas trip.
As the afternoon progressed, people came and went; we didn’t see any visitors until quite late in the day, unusual for a Sunday. A few had come to see George off on his adventures; good-natured ribbing was involved, and advice was offered. “You should get a money belt, George; tuck in your pants, and everyone will think you have a massive package.”
When you drive from Gladstone back into the valley, you’re a little bit higher; you can see across the valley to the mountains. You can see the clouds hugging the tops, rain and snow falling up there. And there is something about the light at the turn of the season, which we are now in; it’s hard to describe, but I’ll try.
Greens are greener; with the patchy clouds, you have spotlights of sun that light up acres of farmland like a spotlight. The light is … starting to fill with more colour, a richness that is missed in winter or the height of summer.
I also notice that there is more and more infill, small blocks for sure, but more of them. I wonder if the valley will turn into another version of Hunter S. Thompson’s worst nightmare, Fat City. I’ll leave you to look that up, reader; enjoy the rabbit hole.
So it’s home to make a Sunday lamb roast. Yeah, I know, predictable, so sue me.
We are heralded by the dogs, who have no sense of time even though we have been gone for two hours. We might as well have been away for two days. And we were immediately thrust into a criminal investigation. The two-and-a-half kilogram lamb roast is missing.
The primary culprit is obvious. Freya is doing small tail wags, slinks onto the deck, and looks back over her shoulder at us. Arlo is trying his combination of “it wasn’t me, honest” but also looking somewhat guilty.
“Jesus,” I say to K, “have you seen Freya front on? She looks like a pregnant ewe.” Sure enough, the dog has a belly the size of a barrel.
Needless to say, there is no lamb roast for dinner this evening, and two dogs clearly don’t need their evening meal.
While I remember swinging back to high cuisine (yeah, I’ve had three jugs of beer), I tried a new thing this week. Coat and Cook. This unknown substance that Mark, a good friend of ours who reportedly lives solely on a diet of lamb chops, recommended. It’s like breadcrumbs; you just throw protein into it, coat it, and then throw it in the oven or air fryer.
It’s damn good, and I don’t care what it is made from. It makes first-year lamb chops taste like they are hogget. Some of you will know what that means; for the rest of you, hogget is a much older lamb, and the taste is far better than “spring” lamb, which is young and generally what you get in the supermarket.
I can feel spring now. She’s sneaky. Hiding behind the mountain tops, the clouds, behind the shelter belt. But you can see her influence. The pines are flowering, the roses are trying to bloom, the light is changing, and it’s nearly time for her to be in charge and Old Man Winter to retire to his cave under the hills for a while.
She’s just teasing now, but give her a few weeks, and she’ll emerge in all her glory. Slightly arrogant, a debutante in a dress of flowers, smelling like new life, and smiling like the sun.
Thank fuck.
had the same happen for Georgies Birthday, had a big lump of filet steak from a steer we'd processed, defrosting nicely and came home to nothing. bloody dog had nicked it. no big guts to find the culprit so probably buried somewhere for aging! Had to have mince on toast instead, very romantic!