Bodacious: The Shepherd Cat. Suzanna Crampton

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СКАЧАТЬ of small bodies asleep under the lamp. Oscar loved to walk with the lambs. While they were his cat size or smaller, his tail often curled over their backs to reassure them as they followed The Shepherd outside the pen for the first time. During feeding time he sometimes flopped on his side and played with a lamb’s tail. Their tails have a lively life as they suckle their mother ewes or lamb formula bottles. Tails spin and wriggle as the lambs’ bellies fill with warm milk. At other times Oscar sat near the lambs’ heads and leaned over to lick dribbles of milk that seeped between bottles and lamb lips as they suckled. Oscar was also a dedicated assistant gardener. He enjoyed nothing more than freshly dug rich earth for a good back roll. He diligently kept our Gardening Boss robin away from any worms that turned up in a recently dug flower bed.

      Unlike me, Oscar’s past is no mystery. He was born on a small farm in Curraheenavoher, near Ballymacarbry in the Nire Valley, County Waterford, in the foothills of the Comeragh Mountains. He came to Black Sheep Farm as a weaned kitten as there was a need for new blood to reduce an expanding rat and mouse population. The farm cats at that time were siblings Tabitha and Bettina, who was called Tina. They were The Old Guard felines from The Shepherd’s grandparents’ days. Both were aged happy cats. Tabitha was a plump tabby and loved a human lap, I am told. Tina was shy, lean and black. They arrived at our farm as kittens, having been thrown in a brown paper bag onto the road by some despicable human. The Shepherd’s grandmother spoilt them rotten with saucers of milky tea and cuts of well-buttered toast. Neither cat had any interest in hunting unless an animal of prey variety literally fell into their laps – which is indeed what happened one day, The Shepherd tells me, in one of the stories she finds so amusing.

      One day, as she sat at the kitchen window, fat Tabitha, in her elderly manner, lounged and dozed under a horse chestnut tree. While Tassie the Terrier snuffled in nearby grass, she unearthed a pheasant who had been crouched and thought itself hidden. It jumped up, raced around the tree, straight into sleeping Tabitha. Tabitha leapt up in shocked surprise, extended her claws and killed the bird in the blink of an eye. The Shepherd ran outside for a closer look. She saw Tabitha proudly drag her prey by its neck between her front legs to a secret location in order to privately partake of her surprise feast just as her wild panther cousin would.

      Cat Oscar, on the other hand, had been raised as a kitten by his mother on fresh farmyard mouse meat and was therefore an excellent candidate for the role of rat-and-mouse-killer-cat. Oscar’s calm easy-going demeanour belied a strong hunting instinct. He was not a chatty cat, but the strong silent type, who always purred steadily but quietly whenever he popped into a human’s lap. What I most liked to do companionably with Oscar, other than to curl up with him on a cold winter’s night in the stable hay for more warmth, was to hunt for rabbits. This was one of his favourite occupations, so I was very glad to be taught by such a keen expert.

      However, I have to confess that from my beginnings at Black Sheep Farm I was a clumsy oaf. I constantly fouled up hunts with my naïve impatient enthusiasm. Often I leapt too soon. I foiled my catch because my hoped-for rabbit had ample time to escape with a powerful jump and twist in the air. Those rabbits avoided my premature leap of long forelegs and extended claws.

      Our other hunting problem arose from my much-beloved Shepherd, who had given me such a lovely new life and home. She occasionally appeared out of the blue and made her way across our hunting field as we silently prowled towards our intended prey, rustling the grass and alerting the rabbit, which hopped quickly away to safety. Our hunts only became efficient after Oscar and I carefully demonstrated our techniques. To give her great credit The Shepherd stood statue still after that and carefully watched how we hunted. The excellent result was that she and we learned to understand each other much better.

      A hunt would often start when we found ourselves of the same mind. We would move out to our favourite place, a long hedgerow in the uppermost hilltop field with lots of rabbit burrows along its western edge. Oscar had found this a perfect location, because the morning sun first lights the frosted grass in front of the rabbits’ burrows, thawing the grass earliest in the cold of winter, so they like to graze there.

      The field is named the Wind-Charger Field because long ago it had a windmill that spun to charge big batteries that provided electricity for Black Sheep farmhouse. When The Shepherd was small, her grandparents and mother told her about The Olden Days before and during the Second Big Human War, known as the Second World War, when the farmhouse was lit with candles and paraffin lamps. After the war ended, they built a windmill to generate electricity. This erratic form of electric current was totally wind dependent: as the wind varied, the lights flickered. The wind-charger’s electricity lit the Black Sheep farmhouse until electric power mains were introduced into rural County Kilkenny in 1946. (These were our earliest days of making what is now considered alternative energy. Back then, fossil fuels were too expensive to use for making rural electricity. That’s why candles, paraffin lamps and this early wind power were the most important sources of our indoor light in The Olden Days.) The wind-charger had been taken down before The Shepherd was born. Recently, she cleared out an old shed and found the long wooden propeller, covered in dust and generations of cobwebs, which had spun in winds to provide electricity so many years before.

      But back to the hunting. Oscar and I would meet up in the small cobbled outer yard. I would follow him through what I called our ‘gate squeeze’, between the gatepost and pillar of the gate, which is fitted with a tight mesh. We’d slide through into the egg-maker’s Plum Orchard paddock: in spring, after plum blossoms have faded, they fall and litter the ground with a dusting of pinky-white petals. We would saunter into the Wind-Charger paddock, a small fenced-off part of the great big field that we often use for sheep that need close observation. As we’d pass close to the lean-to shed where ewes birth lambs in winter and spring and are shorn during summer months, a swallow or two might dive-bomb us until we moved far enough away from their nests.

      We’d wander slowly up the Wind-Charger Field, weave through a few beds of nettles, grass cool underfoot, clover soft on our pads, and we’d step around spiky thistles. Thistle thorns in our paws are incredibly painful, crippling even, so we always tried to avoid them. Having left the swallows behind us, we’d hope no corvids – magpie, raven, rook, jackdaw, carrion crow or even the grey crow, with its grey skull cap feathering – would spot us heading out to hunt and spoil our fun with their warning racket of cackle, caw and crow. We’d have to stop and pretend to clean our toes until they left to look for another distraction to scream about. As we headed up the hill, wagtails would bob about, snatching insects among the grasses, flit up to the tops of fence posts, or perch atop wire fences with tails wagging and heads bobbing as if to say: ‘We see you and we are quite aware of your presence. Move along, move along. We need to get back to our business of hunting insects to feed our young. Move along, move along.’

      Once we’d travelled far enough away from the sheltered nesting sites of the swallows, they would resume darting, diving, gliding after insects disturbed from the grass by our passing through. Out in the field they never flew low or close enough to enable us to leap and catch one of them for a tasty morsel. When and if we ever caught a swallow, it was usually in spring when they had just returned, exhausted from their marathon migration north to us from South Africa.

      Oscar and I were lucky if we got past all the natural early-warning systems of other species and made it up to just below the brow of the Wind-Charger hill. There we’d pause to lower our bodies and flatten our ears sideways so their tips didn’t break the horizon line and give our silent crouched-low position away. We’d cautiously peer over the field as it sloped down away from us. We remained stone-still, with only a telltale twitch of a tail to betray our presence. We’d watch a few rabbits grazing along the hedgerow – luckily, no russet-red hare could be seen. Hares are far more wary and attentive to our intentions than their cousin rabbits.

      Early in our hunting relationship, I found it tedious and boring to wait for the correct moment to begin – sometimes I just sat bolt upright and scared rabbits away when my ears and head broke their visible horizon line of clean grassy hill. Oscar was very СКАЧАТЬ