The wine was a very fragrant Hawke’s Bay merlot I was enjoying immensely as Jane had offered to be the sober driver for the night.
I was smacking my lips at the prospect of some fine cheeses and perhaps a little port or liqueur as a chaser while trying to ignore my cell phone vibrating in my pocket.
Finally, I thought I’d better see who was ringing me at 9.30pm on a Friday.
It was my neighbour Tom telling me I had a mob of sheep rampaging and roaming the district.
We hastily and reluctantly bade the function farewell and Jane drove us back the hour south.
I had a pretty good idea which mob of sheep had decided to explore the district’s roads and possibly every open gate therein.
It was most likely to be the freshly shorn mob of 330 stud ewes that were cleaning up the house paddocks.
We had just had an enthusiastic Wellingtonian lad who thinks farming may be the occupation for him staying with us for the week so I’d spent the week teaching him a few skills but also hopefully pointing out that farming is hard, physical work and at times not as romantic as portrayed on television.
He and I had come in and as I was rushing to meet Jane in town to get to the function I entrusted him with letting the dogs go for a run then feeding them.
He enthusiastically trotted off while I had a quick shower.
He came back to tell me Ditch’s chain was stuck in the grating. I told him he hadn’t clipped it on properly and would have to crawl in there and wriggle it around to free it and to be mindful to close the gates properly as the sheep were next to the house.
He returned and we left to drop him off in town and for me to get to the function in time. He then told me he had failed to free the dog and I realised I’d have to do it later in the dark dressed in my glad rags with a likely skinful. Something to look forward too.
When we got home my suspicions were confirmed as the small gate from the house yard to the paddock of sheep was wide open. There was ample evidence that all 330 sheep had lined up and taken their turn to pass through the gate.
I grabbed the torch and rushed first to the pool. I’d been visualising all the way home how this will have gone. A panel of the fence was off as I was repairing it and the rampaging mob of sheep will have been directed by Jane’s garden layout straight through the gap.
The first ewe will have rushed headlong into the ground level pool, giving a lemming-like lead to the other 329 or as many as could fit into the pool.
There they would remain dog-paddling furiously but then slowly start to succumb, much like in that scene of the movie Titanic as the survivors began to perish from the cold. As an aside, there was plenty of room on that floating door for Jack.
As they struggled and died, the drowning ewes would evacuate their bowels and bladders which the filter would find difficult to deal with and the pump would quickly burn out.
However, I was in luck as there were no dead ewes floating in the pool and in fact there were no sheep around at all.
But there was sheep shit everywhere. Around the pool, through the gardens, on the lawns and all over the verandas.
Again, we got lucky because, though it was a very hot evening, at the last minute of leaving I’d shut the open doors for security. We could easily have had several hundred sheep through the house, quite able to have closed the doors on themselves and spending several hours waiting for me to return to free them. Now that would have been a distressing sight.
Meanwhile, poor Jane was viewing the garden she had spent several long weeks preparing for her garden group’s visit then the big family gathering for Christmas.
The ewes had eaten and trampled everything.
Well, not quite everything. They had completely levelled garden plants and her vegetable garden including tomatoes, potato foliage, herbs, cucumbers and such all ready for Christmas but shunned the lettuces. What do sheep know that we should?
Every garden plant above sheep head height had been perfectly pruned. The lower ones had disappeared. She took it well considering.
I set off in search of my errant flock. Amanda, who works with Tom, had done great work shutting them into various yards. I mustered up the stragglers in the dark and returned home to bed.
But not till after having crawled into the dog kennel to free the dog, which is where I would have stayed if it had been me that left the gate open.
