It’s 3 in the morning, and I can hear something moving on the deck—a skittering of sorts, then nothing, followed by clattering. Strangely, the dogs haven’t exploded into life; all it usually takes is a cow looking at them sideways from a hundred yards to drive them into a rushing, barking frenzy.
I hear it again. Slightly louder now, almost under the bedroom window. I’m going to have to go and find out what it is. If we were still living in the city, it could be all manner of foul things, but it’s most likely a hedgehog in rural life. Whatever is out there, it’s large enough to have turned on the security lights.
Bravely I throw open the curtains, and there, standing before me on the deck, looking up in surprise, is Satan himself.
Long, twisting horns, a goat-like head including the classic Anton Szandor LeVey goatee, and mad cat-like eyes on either side of its head.
“FUCK ME!” I shout in surprise1; behind Satan are half a dozen other satanic looking creatures, some with horns and some not. All of them, including Satan, look very surprised to see me.
“BAAAAAAA!” shouts Satan, and I realise that I am looking at the ram and his entourage, who have undoubtedly escaped the paddock and are looking for lodgings on the farmhouse deck.
*Some time passes as the ram and sheep are wrangled back into the paddock*
The local farmers take great delight in the various cock-ups that lifestyles have as they adjust to their new lives in rural New Zealand. Lifestylers are known as “overstayers” or “unicorns” in the local dialect.
Unicorns are city folk who have bought a place in rural New Zealand by throwing a million dollars or more at it2, often locking out locals who can’t afford those prices.
And overstayers, because usually having bought the rural lifestyle they leave it empty during the week appearing only on the weekend.
Of all the mistakes you can make, the one that rates as the most annoying and potentially most amusing is your stock escaping. There are many reasons why it is a major sin.
The danger of stock that hasn’t been appropriately treated carrying disease, a ram deciding that an entire paddock full of the farmer’s ewes require impregnating when that activity is strictly controlled, being a danger on the roads if they get that far, and the inconvenience of having to trek the stock a long way to get them back home.
It’s 9 pm on a warm summer evening when my phone rings. It’s Mike, the farmer across the road.
“Mate,” he says, “are you missing some sheep?”
“Ummmm…” I respond, having had a few beers and looking wildly around to see if I still have sheep.
“Because I think they are on my deck.” Mike finishes.
Yep, Satan and his harem have managed to escape, hike half a kilometre down the road, and are standing on Mike’s deck. His wife and kids wrangle them back into our paddocks.
I should clarify, the ram is not called Satan; he’s called Rammstein, and he’s been working up to his big escape.
K is working with Freya, the GSP, training her in moving the stock around, in and out of paddocks. A far easier job with a good dog. Now, Freya obviously enjoys this work, but at this point, she’s young and sometimes gets a bit over-enthusiastic.
Rammstein has had enough of being herded and makes a break for it. Now, he can’t run because his testicles are so massive (seriously), so he’s bounding across the paddock at high speed in a series of leaps.
Freya won’t disengage; this is waaaay too much fun; she’s in hot pursuit with an idiotic grin on her face, tongue lolling in the wind. She’s pretty sure she will round him up in the paddock because the fence is coming up quickly.
Then, in some acrobatic display, the ram bounces through the eight-wire fence and keeps going. K and I turn and look at each other because that is not meant to be able to happen. Freya pulls up at the fence, panting, and Rammstein is still going.
Through another paddock, he bounds, ghosting through a second fence as well, then, down through the house paddock at high bounding speed, through another fence, across the lane, another fence, and off over Mike’s paddocks into the distance.
Well shit.
Now Rammstein lives with Mike’s cows. We often see him grazing with them. Mike tells us that he wanders into the milking shed with them in the mornings and resists all attempts to be recaptured. Rammstein’s life is with the cows now, it seems.
The heifers escape into another neighbours property and are brought back; they make a sport out of trying to ruin the electric fence. Thanks to the heifers that smashed the door down, the chickens invade yet another neighbour's deck after escaping from their coop.
The cat takes to pawing and meowing pathetically at yet another neighbour’s windows at 3 am after they make the fatal mistake of feeding it; Simon (the cat), meows like a shrieking baby and I think they wonder if some demonic horror-child has taken up residence in their garden.
“Are you feeding him enough?” The neighbour asks me when she calls to report the nocturnal goings-on.
“Hell yes,” I reply, “have you seen the size of the bastard? He’ll be mistaken for a leopard!”
Time passes.
“Shit, K,” I said one day after another heifer escape attempt, “the neighbours are going to stage an intervention at this rate.”
We certainly are living up to the lifestyle reputation of livestock in all directions despite our best efforts. K has significantly upgraded hundreds of meters of the electric fence now only to have her work undone by one of the neighbours dropping a tree on it.
This fence is mean now. If grass brushes up against it, then it is promptly set on fire; Koda, the Wolfhound, gets his tail electrocuted one afternoon and refuses to speak to us for a day as if we had done it on purpose. Lightning flies from it, it crackles and burns, your hair stands up when you get near it, and the heifers still seem to be able to teleport through it at will.
Every time the fence fails, one of the neighbours who share it with us (don’t even get me started on that complicated arrangement), starts coming across the paddocks on his quad, we can always hear him coming. We take to hiding behind the deck from time to time to avoid the conversation about the fence.
We’re having a beer with a farmer friend of ours who is trying to get us to take on some goats. They are cute, but I am now wary.
“How do you keep goats in?” I ask.
“You build a goat proof fence, mate.” He replies.
“How do you know your fence is goat proof?” I bounce back; I’m not falling for that.
“Well,” he considers, “if you throw a bucket of water against your fence, and any gets through, then that is not goat proof.”
Indeed.
Then we learned something.
It happens to everyone.
One day, I’m working in the office, and I notice a cow walk past the front gate.
“That shouldn’t be there,” I mutter to myself. Am I seeing cows now?
And then another, and two more. Then a couple of dozen, slowly walking and turning into our driveway.
“Woah woah woah!” Is all I can say as the beasts wander happily down the driveway eating everything in sight and putting divets in the home paddock.
I ring Mike.
“Hey, you missing any cows?”
“Ummm…”
“Because I think they are all pretty much on my front lawn right now.”
Mike has A Man. Something that we do not have.
“I’ll call my man and sort them out!”
Mike’s man, Kerry, appears over the hill in a cloud of dust, standing upright like some kind of farmhand god on his quad. Lickety-split he speeds around in complex, almost magical manoeuvres, rounding up the two dozen heifers and sending them back to their paddock. As it turns out, the heifers had all crowded in on the gate, no doubt bored, and lifted it clean off its hinges.
Still, it’s nice to think that it happens to the professionals and those who are relearning. As an aside, over the next couple of weeks, it happens again, and even our other neighbour has a beefy somehow make it through two electric fences to find itself standing in our paddock, looking bewildered. We see the neighbour trying to sneak him back through before he’s caught, but as we hide behind the deck, it goes unnoticed.
A few weeks later, we’re having a drink on the deck in the sun.
“I’m jealous of Mike.” K says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Mike has a Man. When something needs doing, Mike calls his Man, and the Man comes and does stuff. I need a Man.” She concludes.
“I’m not sure we can afford a Man.” I respond “Mike’s place is about twenty times larger than ours.”
“We could hire a shorter Man. Maybe half the size. He’d be cheaper surely.” She opines.
“True,” I answer “We could buy him a very cheap cellphone and a bicycle instead of a quad bike.”
“I have the perfect job application process as well,” K says, “Whoever is the shortest man, on a bicycle, who can bring back the errant Rammstein, shall have a job and live in our woodshed forevermore!”
It’s not a bad plan.
Postscript:
Sheep at the pub…
My language has gotten considerably worse since I moved to the country. Fuck knows why. I think it’s probably because everyone out here generally cusses more than city folk. Maybe there are more things to swear about?
Dear readers, I can assure you that we did not do this.