Bog Myrtle & Peat

Triplet lambs came out of the morning. I was at another job in the hour before sunrise, and I looked up to find them strewn through the rushes like laundry blown from the line. The ewe stamped her foot at me but she couldn’t run for fear of leaving the new arrivals, so I walked in and found them fresh and fit at her belly, growing bulbs of yellow shit beneath their tails to show they were sucked and rising. They’re almost two months early, and probably my fault for leaving a stane on a cross-bred wether. I never found the offending gonad when he was killed for Christmas, but it’s fair to say I wasn’t looking hard on a cold day when I needed the skin pulled off and his guts for a hole in the ground.

Born on a rough hill in the rake of a northerly wind, it’s hard start for wet new life. These days look bright, but we mustn’t be gulled by the frogs which bell in cundies, or the sudden song of the old, deceptive thrush. It’s cold – and a breeze slips between the rocks like a drawer of knives. That smiling moon’s a killer by night, particularly when she comes with a halo of ice which the old boys say is a bringer of snow. Anything could kill a lamb that’s born in the depths of February; even the smallest eddy of sleet could snuff them out forever. So I brought them into the shed and dressed a pen with chaff and summer hay. The ewe spoke in mumbled huffs and the echoed suck of water from a bucket.

I went to see those lambs in the evening, but worried they’d been lost or stolen. The ewe stamped a note of warning, but she seemed to be on her own in the pen. It took a moment to realise that the youngsters were curled together in a nest beneath a sheaf of oaten straw. When I put my hand down to feel the bunch of new skins, they rose and blinked and shook in cosy confusion; slips of bone and silky joints, with only the palest ribbons of muscle to move them. 

Outside, the hill had fallen suddenly dark and still. Snipe had begun to call for the moonrise, and at this time of year, the little birds have two calls; one that is a rich, incessant whimper which falls like a pulse from the sky. The other is strong and harsh – a two-part squeak that is made from the ground or the height of a mouldy post. This is the call they make at first when the time’s unripe for drumming. In the past I’ve called it chipping or chacking, and these calls offered a gesture of comfort out beyond the steading – the first of the year. But even as I tried to hear them made, the chill was sore enough to bust my knuckles open. 

I see they burnt a piece of Clenrie Hill last week, but not enough to do a proper job. Perhaps the stick was blackened through, but it’s hard to run a decent fire in February; the flames just skim across the tops and you end up doing more harm than good. When I met the boys in town, they were happy to admit that it was a false-start, and little more than a chance to smoke the goats. Good fires won’t be made for another month, and we’re still only looking at spring in the guise of an uncashed cheque or the plate-glass chill of a shop-front window: you can see what you want, but you just can’t touch it yet. For now it’s only hope overlaid upon the memory that things worked out last year, and all was well for a while.