The Reluctant Shepherds

We pile into the back of the dirty Jeep, sweeping mud and rope off the benches to make space for our bums. The bumps in the avenue down to the fields jolt us about; we bounce off each other and wince as bones are thrown into metal and laugh at the pain. Holly is black and white and skinny, like all sheepdogs, and her eyes are wild and amber, and she's running about climbing on Tara's shoulder when she's trying to drive. The Jeep's gear-stick is grime and rust-encrusted, unweildy. Please be second gear! Oh thank God! We all scream as our bums and spines clack against metal, then laugh.

Someone open the gate! is met with a chorus of SHOTGUN NOT ME! I volunteer, run to lift the rope from the fence and scramble over the gravel, nearly falling. Hop back in and on we go, through the next gate, and the next, over the bumpy fields in the big park and carrying on up to the sheep we're after.

We skirt round the edge by the dry-stone wall. At the top of the field, we all tumble out. Adam has Holly, tied to a scrappy rope we found in the Jeep. She's pulling it taught, tongue out, whole body pointing towards the sheep as though every cell in her body knows what she was bred for. They don't.  She doesn't have a clue, she just wants to bite sheep's legs.

The sun shone over the sodden fields as we spread out, circling the sheep, uttering strange sounds and clapping like mad-men, laughing as we ran over thistles and cow-pats and dark puddles full of the choppy clouds. The sheep sporadically sprinted or dawdled, followed each other or made singular breaks for freedom. We were a motley crew of reluctant shepherds, in a bizarre arrangement of what barely constituted as farming clothes, with a sheepdog that had no idea what she was doing.Tara brought up the rear in the Jeep, engine spluttering and roaring. We chased them through gates with no more ease than had we chased them through the eye of a needle; they were simultaneously utterly stupid and deviously clever. One sheep, hanging at the back of the herd with a limp, collapsed and refused to get up again. Baaa! Baaaa! Carry on without me! It seemed to say. Adam gathered it up into his arms and carried it to the back of the Jeep like a weary babe. When we brought it out again its leg was miraculously fine enough to make a break for freedom.

After we'd rounded them into their pen we all collapsed on the lawn in the sunshine, listening to their baaas of defeat and laughing.