About Us Stories from the farm

It was summer. It was hot, it was dusty. We had a thousand sheep to sort, mark and drench. 'Come on Fatso!' called Ray. I didn't take offense, he was calling the dog! We all jumped onto the motorbike, with Ray driving, me on the back and Fatso, Ray's Border Collie, on the front. We all screwed up our eyes to the wind as we tore out into the heat of the morning, with our hair streaming out behind us and Fatso's ears blown back flat on his head.

'Way up!' Ray called, and pointed his arm. Fatso was off the bike at a run, and circled around behind the sheep. He got a large mob on the move and slowly started pushing them in the right direction. Suddenly, a small band of escapees made a break for the scrub.

'Fatso! Waaaaay uuuup!' shouted Ray frantically, gesturing with his arm like a windmill. I didn't know how Fatso could possibly interpret this, but he streaked off and disappeared into the bush after them. We continued to the gate several kilometres away, pushing the sheep in front of us. We came over the hill to the gate, and Ray stopped, shaking his head in wonder.

'How he knows which gate to go to I'll never know, that dog must be psychic!' Ray pointed up ahead. There was Fatso, with the missing sheep cornered near the gate! 'Good Booooy, Fatso!' Ray yelled, and the dog rolled, wriggling and ecstatic with delight under our pats, knowing he'd done a good job.

Unfortunately, the sheep were unable to see the open five metre gateway right in front of them and they milled around in confusion, scurrying straight past the opening and running headlong into each other. Occasionally an enterprising sheep would make a kamikaze run towards the fence next to the gate, smacking into it head first and bouncing back in surprise. When the lead ewe finally spotted the laneway, she stood in front of it stamping her foot and refusing to budge, while fifty others ran down the fenceline, spied a tiny wallaby hole, squeezed through one after another and escaped into the next paddock.

'Just look at them!' said Ray in exasperation. The sheep were running all over the place as if they were in Mont Python's 'race for people with no sense of direction,' and we simply stood and stared helplessly at the chaos.

Working with children or animals are supposed to be the surest ways to go insane. Let me be a little more specific on the animal side of things. SHEEP! Working with these particular animals can turn any reasonable, calm, sensible person into a screaming, swearing lunatic! Luckily we had Fatso to help, or we would have gone baa-king mad! After all our screaming and swearing proved ineffective, Fatso retrieved all the sheep more efficiently than two farmhands on motorbikes, and we finally got them all into the laneway and down to the sheep yards.

Ray called to me from his position next to a swinging gate at the end of the race. 'I'm going to separate the ewes from the wethers, so Jenny, it's your job to get all the sheep into the race, then mark the wethers with a red crayon on their back.' It sounded easy, but of course, like everything on the farm, it wasn't! After all the chasing and hat slapping to get the sheep into the race to begin with, I had to ask a stupid question.

'Ray, how do I tell if the sheep is a male or female just by looking at it? The wethers no longer have their....er...equipment.'

'How about you try the two finger test?' suggested Ray with a grin.

'What's that?' I asked, not liking the smirk on Ray's face.

'Well, you poke two fingers under the tail of the sheep, and if both fingers go into a hole, it's a ewe! Simple!'

Somehow I could never tell whether Ray was joking or not, but as there was no way I was doing that, the only alternative was to stick my head down there and look for the two holes. It was no picnic, checking out a thousand sheep's bums at close quarters. But somehow, there were still several unmarked wethers in with the ewes at the end of the day. The only explanation I could give was that with all the eye strain, I was seeing double!                                                                       Jennifer Armstrong