Category Archives: Animals

The hellscape of 2019

by . Posted on
07 May

After the drought and the fires we knew that this would be a year of healing.  When the rain fell on Christmas Day, we all felt a glimmer of hope.  Never before have I been so glad to slam the door on a year as I was at the end of 2019.  We were broken people.  Brittle and hard, dusty and withered by the heat, the dry, the exhaustion of trying to save our cattle.  

And then there were the fires.  Three months of fear as they circled us, finally blazing through the bush and rainforest we take such pride and joy in.  Helicopters scurried to and fro overhead day after endless day, making long journeys to the Hastings River for fire fighting water.  They tried to collect from one of the rapidly dwindling pools in the river below us, but it was too dangerous.  We were grateful not to have that stress as well.  

The river stopped flowing in October.  The baking sun evaporated inches every day and rather than the cool depths we are used to refreshing ourselves in after hot days of farmwork, there were just a few muddy warm puddles for us to flounder in.  The same water which served our stock and the house, that we wash our bodies and our clothes in.  The home of our precious platypus population.  Never before, in living memory, has the Ellenborough River stopped flowing.  

Our once verdant pastures were desiccated dust bowls.  Our beautiful Jerseys dropped to their knees and we battled to save them.  We stressed about money as we paid for tonne bags of pellets and small mountains of luxurious lucerne.  We nursed and nurtured the fallen as we begged them to get up and get well.  We sold others rather than lose them too.  Every day seemed to be a weighing of the scales with death.  The Grim Reaper wielded his scythe mercilessly.  We have seen horror before but this was different.  Millie, Milka, Henrietta, Damson, Clara were all hand fed and much loved pets as much as quiet and peaceful matriarchs in the herd.

Big Red was a huge cow with monster horns.  She went down and we kept sitting her up but Ged went away for work and I couldn’t do it alone.  But by buggery I wasn’t going to let her die so I used every ounce of my ingenuity and strength during that week – erecting shade over her, hoisting her up onto her knees so she could eat and drink and try and regain her strenght.  She died anyway.

Damson had been abandoned by her mum the day she was born so was hand reared by us.  She and Petal were inseparable.  I was worried about her birthing for the first time so checked on her daily.  She went down and I tried to help but she ran from me and slipped into the river.  That was a long day of literally trying to keep her head above water until we could lift her out.  Once dry and safe we fed her up, to no avail.

I lost all my favourites last year.  All my four legged friends.  It was brutal.

We had the joy of Goldie and her puppies.  8 little parcels of love.  And then Goldie went off for a wander with Mudji and never came home.  We hunted high and low.  With no body to bury and her babies to raise, there was no time for the deep grief of her loss.

Even the neighbours in their 80’s who have farmed this land their whole lives said beasts were dropping like flies.  None of us knew that the drought would go on so long and that it would be as bad as it was.  We were relying on spring rains.  They never came.  We all started feeding too late.

Added to the heat, dust and fire stress then was the sweet stench of our friends’ rotting flesh as we weren’t allowed to burn them.

I’ve never been in a war zone.  My experience can’t compare but that’s what it felt like – heat, smell and smoke.  Choppers whirring overhead.  A constant feel of threat and dread.  By December Ged and I were ready to walk off the land.  It was too much.  We were too scarred, so tired, broken.

We promised ourselves ‘no rash decisions’ as I restlessly googled farms for sale in New Zealand.  We knew 2020 would be a year of healing, of finishing projects, of letting time and space separate us from our grief.  Little could we know what this year had in store . . .

And yet.  Covid has forced us home and stopped the rush and scurry of our lives, leaving the farm to take Ben to school etc.  We have had more rain in the first few months of 2020 than in the past few years in total.  The grass has hurled itself out of the ground.  Mother Nature is recovering.  And so are we.  Time to be.  Time to be here.  To let the sounds seep into our souls.  To sleep, at last.  To watch the meandering river and its quiet life.  To listen to its burbling over rocks.  To watch eagles soaring, the cormorant drying his wings, the platypus paddling on the surface before duck diving once more.

And in these quiet pleasures comes peace.  A deep stillness settling in my soul  as Nature heals the deep heart she has wrought.  As we rest easy in her abundant embrace after wrestling with her and The Grim Reaper last year.

I guess I’m a farmer now.  I guess I learnt just why they can be dour and taciturn.  I learned about the pain lodged like a stone in their hearts.  And I have become quieter as a result. 

 

Learning to live with Change

by . Posted on
02 May

It’s been a long, long time since I have written here.  I couldn’t bear to replace Phee’s gorgeous pic.  It meant admitting that he was gone.  It meant moving on.  And how do you do that?  How do you accept that your best friend is no more?  How do you face the world when someone you love so deeply and wholeheartedly isn’t there any more?

Phee had been my partner in all things for 12 years.  He went almost everywhere with me.  He slept on my bed, curled at my back or feet.  He snuggled under the duvet every morning when I drank my tea.  He ruined countless sheets and duvet covers with muddy paw prints.  He welcomed me at the gate every night when I came home from work or town.  He loved me.  Unconditionally.  No matter what.

And when he died it seemed like a part of me died too.  Because only he had shared all those years before Ged with me.  Moving to Australia, Tamworth, Kangaroo Valley.  He was not just a part of my life, but a part of me.  The better part.  With animals we can truly be ourselves – raw, unfiltered and vulnerable.  He saw my insecurities, grief and loneliness and comforted me.  He shared my soul story and healing.  He was a pivot around who my life turned.  He tethered me to the planet when the darkness threatened to consume me.

He, Baby, Tom, Tinkerbell and I were family.  Now only Tinkerbell is left (and she is cranky, not cuddly!) and I am alone.

Not really.  But the fabric of my family as was has been ripped apart and there is a deep loneliness in that.  Daisy gone too.  When I go for walks now I don’t have the joy of looking for her and seeing her head raise at my call.  I miss laying myself against her flank and smoothing and stroking the short silky nape of her skin.  She brought me so much comfort,  joy and peace.  I miss her so much.

No one who has gone can ever be replaced.  We are all unique.  But over time I have begun to understand that we can love another, love again.  Time is truly the great healer.  That and the tears that have to be shed so the heart can open once more.

Grief is such a long and lonely journey.  It seems incredible that the world can keep turning, that the sun gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night when the one we love is gone.  And yet, the world is still a beautiful place – birds sing, flowers bloom, life goes on.

And one day, we will be gone too.  I think a lot about that now.  Where to be buried or burnt.  How I want my body touched and prepared and by who.  And now, after 50 years of intermittently not wanting to be here, now I don’t want to die (there’s irony for you!)  I don’t want to say goodbye to the people and land I love, as well as this amazing planet.

But I’m applying to have a burial ground where Baby died and was burnt, where Phee used to sit and wait as I sobbed for her.  Where Daisy often hung out with Baby.  I will go there when my body is spent.

In the meantime, I have things to do, books to write, a legacy to leave.  Something that lasts so my life’s experiences have some meaning.

And others to love.  It has taken me a long time to truly open my heart to Goldie and Mudji.  To realise that loving them is not a betrayal of Phoenix.  On the contrary, it is a celebration that his legacy goes on.  And that all that he taught me about love has been embodied.  That will make him happy.

Paw prints on my Heart

by . Posted on
18 Jun

For five weeks I have been in denial, braving the world and keeping going by just putting one foot in front of the other.  We all have.  All avoiding the elephant in the room, too locked in our own pain to speak to the others, too scared of speaking of Phoenix in case we upset the others.  But Ben’s behaviour has deteriorated rapidly at school and we have been forced to each talk about our own guilt – Ben blames himself because he didn’t call out (but there was no time), Ged blames himself because he was driving, and I blame myself because I didn’t give Phee enough time, love, attention, play, appreciation and I had kept shouting at him to ‘stop licking’.  Poor little Ben was the only one of us who actually saw the whole thing.  I can’t begin to imagine how that memory must be seared into his mind and soul, and how scarred he is from that experience.

We have all been in shock.  That day I had been cleaning the house, and made a new step stool for him to enable him to get on the bed which had become hard for him.  I showed it to him, explaining jump here and then here, he looked at me with such love in his eyes because I was bent down and talking to him, wagging his tail and his whole body with joy.  Later, I planted a kiss on him as I passed him watching out over his world from the comfort of the cane sofa on the verandah.  Later still, I came home from my walk in the dark and as always he launched himself off his bed and then the verandah to give me, or anyone, his joyful wagging welcome.  And then, when he wanted to come into the house, I wouldn’t let him.  If I had, I wouldn’t be penning this now.

It doesn’t seem possible that my friend, who has been my faithful shadow, my stalwart companion for over 12 years, is gone.  How can it be that someone so full of life and love can have left.  Where is he?  The farm is so still without his busy body as he ran to welcome us all at the gate, took himself off to swim in the river, ran up to the Tree House if there were raised voices or a row, licked the noses of each and every one of the animals he loved and looked after.  He was the shepherd for us all.  He was our anchor and our light.  I don’t know who I am without him.

Of course I took him for granted.  I knew intellectually that we would not have him for much longer.  He has had a lump on his head for a long time (that the vet said was fine) but we had found a much bigger mass along one side and I was procrastinating going to the vet about that – well, waiting for the cooler weather when he could have a day with me in the car and office.  He would have been 13 next week.  He was very deaf and his arthritis was getting worse.  It is over a year since he stopped walking with me every day and a long time since I let him come with me for a walk.  He begged to come only a few days before he died, and I denied him.  I so wish now that I had let him come for that last walk over the farm he loved so much.

He loved it here.  He loved the river, he loved his freedom to roam, he loved his favourite spots on the verandah.  He loved us all.  But most of all he loved me.  He made room in his huge heart for Ged and Ben when they came along, and I’m afraid to say that he was sidelined in so many ways once I was busy with Ben.  But we always had our runs and then walks when we could share time and space together.  He hated that he couldn’t come anymore (because of his arthritis) and it took me a long time to get used to walking on my own.

Now I have to get used to being on my own, without my little black shadow following me wherever I went.  So do Ben and Ged.  We all loved him so much.  He was the fourth member of our family.  He was the brother Ben didn’t have.  And now he is gone.  I still can’t believe it.  I can’t wrap my head around it.  My heart can’t accept it and keeps screaming ‘No!’

The house is very clean. No more muddy paw prints, no more farm dirt on the bed, no more muddy paw prints on the bath mat.  No more Phee foraging in the pig bin, or eating chook and duck food with them, or licking timber in the Giraffe shed (I will never know why!) or mousing in the feed shed.  Just paw prints across all of our hearts.

An indescribable loss of my friend, comforter, angel, shadow and anchor.  Beautiful boy, best dog in the world. Phoenix McGoenix, Phee McGee we love you so much.  Wherever you are, be happy, watch over us, help us through this time of pain xx

Vale Ping, beautiful friend

by . Posted on
21 Feb

Soon after we got here, almost 8 years ago, we got our first ducks.  Just some little ducklings from the rural store.  Of course we knew nothing about ducks and some of them drowned in the washing up bowl of water we had given them to swim in.  Two survived.  They were Muscovies and as they grew with their red beaks and crowns we decided we wanted prettier ducks so we went online and bought Peking ducklings.  Little bundles of yellow which Phoenix happily herded around the yard in awe and wonder.

One was called Ping after the little yellow duck on the Yangtze River in the story of the same name that I loved and treasured as a child.  Ping & Pong were the favourites of 6. They grew into gorgeous glowing white bundles of feather with glossy golden beaks.  Waddling from the house paddock to the river where they bathed, primped and preened before gliding over the river below us.  They huddled down at night in front of the tie rail and it was from there over a serious of nights that 4 were taken by a wild dog creeping right into the house paddock night after night.  Such brazen thievery deserved the death penalty which Ged duly delivered when he was home.  We do not tolerate predators who treat us and our animals as an all you can eat buffet.

And then there were two.  Ping and Pong remained.  We were given an Indian Runner x Peking and the girls had a boyfriend.  A happy trio.  Always a joy to see on land or water and very noisy at feeding time when they waddled to the feed shed and demanded to be fed.  Not long after Brave (Ged’s horse) came to live with us we found Ping in a terrible state with a broken leg and broken wing.  We can only conjecture what happened but my feeling is that Brave, young, cheeky and a bit wild and excitable probably kicked her.

Sometimes we have to make cost-efficiency calls about sick animals.  We were unlikely to take Ping to the vet.  So we amputated half the wing (secateurs) and splinted the leg with paddle pop (lolly) sticks.  We dosed her up with antibiotics (wing was infected) and Flower Remedies and Homeopathics, our go to staples for physical, psychological and all other ailments.  We kept her on the verandah for about 10 days, every morning expecting her to have died overnight, every night exhorting her to live.

It was a miracle that she recovered.  But she did.  And she has lived a lovely happy life.  Only stressed by the visitations of the sea eagles which have shown me what duck diving really is!  But she has slowed down a lot over the last year.  Presumably with arthritis in that broken leg which never set completely straight having broken right above the knee joint.  Ged and I have watched her and known that at some time we were going to have to do the right thing by her and end her life.  But who wants to end the life of such a true and trusted friend who has delighted us so much over so many years?  Not I.  Not Ged.

But that decision has thankfully been taken from us.  She is gone.  Ben woke us up yelling at us one morning ‘the sea eagle, the sea eagle’.  And since then we have not seen Ping.  Ben has said he saw the sea eagle low and carrying something white.  Whether that is true or not we will never know.  But we know that Ping is gone.  Vale, friend, thank you for all the joy you gave us.  I hope the end was quick.  We will never forget you, always remember you with great love.

 

When fear is a missing friend . . .

by . Posted on
27 Dec

Ged left the farm at about 3pm to meet Ben on 10th December and I for Ben’s final preschool presentation.  All was well.  Phoenix had been in the office with him and following him around all day – situation absolutely normal.  After the event, we went into town for supper and then I stayed to do the shopping.  Ben and Ged were home by about 7 – no Phee.  So after getting Ben to sleep Ged went out calling and searching, but didn’t tell me he was gone.  I didn’t get home til 9, exhausted, and was then told that Phoenix wasn’t home.  I was pretty hysterical.  Didn’t sleep a wink.  Terrified that I was never going to see his sweet face, brown eyes and waggling tail again.  He’s getting old, my friend.  All of a sudden.  Lame and slower.  Time has suddenly stolen his essential puppy-ness.

They say that about spaniels.  They say that they are eternally young until just before the end.  I don’t want to lose Phoenix.  I don’t want him to ever leave me.  Especially not so soon after Baby – I can’t bear the thought of another two years of grief.  I have been worrying about him going and realising that our time together is limited.  But not so soon, please.

At first light we were up and searching.  Nothing.  We hit the phones and rang all the neighbours.  When he was much younger he would occasionally go walkabout – but not for more than 5 years.  I went driving – it was a foul day, chucking it down.  I saw George and told him and he gave me phone numbers of other occasional neighbours to call. Eventually we all had to get on with our day.  I had to clean The Tree House for the visitors arriving later.  Ged took Ben to preschool & went off to work.  Phoenix didn’t have a collar or a tag on.  His collar had just broken & a new one on the shopping list.

I was scrubbing & polishing when Ged rang and said that our lovely neighbour Pat had just rung him to say Phee had been spotted – over 5 klms away and heading for the highway.  I got in the car and drove through the river and cross country over her land.  She met me at the house gate and told me that the fencers had come in and seen him on Wallis Road, heading out to the highway – looking exhausted, apparently.  A big storm was hot on my heels and Phee hates thunder and lightning now he is old.  Apparently all dogs do.

So I drove as if the hounds of hell themselves were yapping at my tailgate.  Trying to get to him before the storm made visibility impossible.  Thunder was rumbling and booming.  Lightning streaking the sky. My poor boy was out there somewhere, terrified.  Pat said that her neighbour, Barb, had heard a dog barking outside her house all night – it must have been Phee.  She had rung Pat to ask if it was one of hers.  If only we had rung her the night before.

Oh well . . . hindsight is a wonderful thing.  And wouldn’t find my friend.  I drove all the way out to the highway.  There was a tree down across the road – I just drove over it such was my haste to find him before he got run over on the busy Oxley Highway.  He wasn’t there.

I turned round and retraced my route.  Stopping at the few isolated farms to ask if they had seen a small black spaniel with a white front.  No sign.  I drove slowly on the return trip, scanning the surrounding countryside.  The rain was lashing the windscreen.  I met the fencers as they drove back home ‘any sign?’ I asked them.  ‘Nothing’ they said.  They had chopped up and moved the fallen tree.  I was despairing.  And then there he was on the road in front of me.  Wild eyed, soaked, bedraggled.  Thank God.

I grabbed the rug from out of the boot and wrapped him up in it, sitting him on the passenger seat and hugging him over and over again.  He was wet to the bone, violently shivering, and he barely recognised me, such was his terror.  My poor, beautiful boy.

We got back to Pat’s and told her the glad tidings.  And then I took him home before yet another storm hit.  Dosed him up with Emergency Essence and Arnica for his poor tired muscles and bones.  He must have run over 20 kilometres.  But why?

When he was safely home and in recovery there was the time and space to ask that question.  Ged spoke to Pat and asked whether there had been a big storm after he left that day.  Sure enough, she said there had been.  He must have been scared and just started running.  Why he ran that way and not home we will never know.  He must have become disoriented and just kept running.  Maybe he thought Barb’s house was our house and that’s why he barked all night.  Why didn’t he stop at Pat’s house?  She would have recognised him . . .

What a wake up call.  That every moment is precious with my dearest friend.  That we can’t take our time together for granted.  That one day, inevitably, everyone we love has to leave us.  That I have to make time, carve time, to spend just being with the ones I love.  There’s no point taking them for granted and then mourning them when they are gone.  Take the time to love them when they are here on planet earth.  Take time to PLAY, to connect, to have fun, to stop treating them all like annoyances.  So what if Phee traipses mud all over the floor – he’s here with his loving energy, his unconditional love for me whatever I do or say.  The last words I spoke to him before he ran away the following day were to yell at him for making a mess.  That’ll learn me – or will it?

 

Life Lesson

by . Posted on
08 Nov

It’s been almost two years since my beloved horse, Baby, was released from her pain by Ged and his gun.  Almost two years of grieving.  Brought to my knees by the physical pain of loss, feeling like my heart has been torn in two, flung to the ground by tsunamis of tears and aching, shaking misery at never touching or holding or seeing her again.

I have knelt on my yoga mat with her halter clutched to my chest and wept oceans of tears for my friend, my mother, my comforter, my saviour, my rock.  She was all those things to me.  Just to walk alongside her with her lead rope in my hand, chatting or silent, brought me incalculable happiness.  I didn’t spend enough time with her.  I didn’t make time to spend with her.  I was too busy with renovating the house, falling in love, all the work involved in getting married on the farm, improving the farm, looking after all the other animals, having a baby, being tied to the house and Ben . . .

Poor Baby didn’t get a look in.  And yet when I did make time to take her swimming or stand in the river and wash her down, or give her a bath with shampoo and conditioner, I was filled with a simple happiness and joy.  Feelings that were so rare in all my post natal and menopausal depression.  Why didn’t I realise that I could create feelings of peace, contentment and light-heartedness simply by being with her, feeling her immense solidity and roundedness.  She was an anchor for me for 12 years, tethering me to the planet when my depression and despair urged me to leave it.

Whenever I drove or walked past her I would whistle and she would lift her head and whiffle at me.  So much said in that sound.  ‘Hi. I miss you.  I love you.  I see you.’ So much connection in that simple exchange of love.  Yet she wasn’t a great cuddler.  Normally walked away from me and was hard to catch.  Loved to turn her ass on me and have her put scratched while she swayed against my hands and body, loving the satisfaction of a human scratching post.  She would never let me kiss her soft sweet muzzle.  I would kiss her eyelids and stand forehead to forehead with her.  And I loved to fondle her hairy tipped ears.  I knew every inch of her so well, I can still visualise her beautiful hooves, knees, legs (she had great legs!) soft, warm, rounded coat and body.  The strands of silver in her mane at the wither, the thick tangles in her tail to be combed out with patience and great love.  The wild little plaits in her mane that she and nature created that I would tease out, loving standing with her – another opportunity to just BE with her, forgetting all the ‘to do’ lists for once.

I have been a slave to those lists for so long.  As if achievement brings happiness, when all it does is bring the next ‘to do’ closer.  I haven’t stopped to smell the roses or take time to rest or play for years.  Those are things she has taught me in her passing.  I guess she had to leave to teach me that.  Now I take time for Second Chance who really is Baby come back to me.  She loves to stand and smooch with me and loves me to kiss her muzzle and stand nose to nose, breath to breath, just being, breathing, communing.  As with Baby we stand third eye to third eye, sharing spiritual space.  Chancy lets me drip tears and snot on her as I still weep for Baby and in gratitude that she came back to me in this new form.  This new bay with her pretty, dainty, feet and floating movement.

I have learned so much from Baby and her passing and I have changed.  I have slowed down, become much less impatient, more willing to stop and spend time, more understanding that the lists are endless and always will be and we can only do one thing at a time, and do it well.  And that taking time to play and be with the ones we love is not wasted time, but the most precious time of all.  That is not DOING but BEING that we will be remembered for.

Yes, I want to make my mark on the world, but I have realised that if I can love and be loved, if I can shape and grow a healthy, happy, engaged and engaging child with a conscience.  If I can act with integrity, follow my heart and dreams as well as crossing things off the list, I will be happier and mentally healthier, as well as improving the lives around me.  In fact, by slowing down, breathing and be more present, I and everyone around me are happier.

I am so much happier recently.  I have never known such peace, happiness and contentment.  I have rediscovered music, singing and dancing. I have had time to be outside engaging in hard physical labour and am loving the peace of mind and stillness that brings.  I am more relaxed, less tense, and more aware of what makes me tense and beginning to love myself enough to avoid those things and situations (self sabotage is still pretty strong in me though!).  I am growing older and growing up.

And as I pondered my new-found happiness the other day as I talked to Baby, sitting on the beautiful cedar block Ged carved to mark her resting place, I realised that maybe the ultimate gift she gave me was in her passing.

She gave me the gift of grief.  An opportunity to clear out a lifetime’s pain and sorrow by howling out my pain and heartbreak.  Grief brings all loss to the surface.  It allows us the opportunity to spring clean our damaged souls.  All the heartache and heartbreak I have sobbed for has cleaned me out, cleared out the backlog, detritus and junk creating that eternal melancholy in my mind.  Now I can be happy.

The ultimate gift, the ultimate sacrifice, by she who knew me better than anyone, who came to save and ground me, without whom I never would have found this farm and land which soothes and heals me as well as provides the home I have looked for all my life.  She, who I have known in so many lifetimes, left me in order to heal me.  Thank you, Baby, I will never forget you, will always miss you and will always be grateful for the many and myriad lessons you have taught me – both in life and in death.

Bodies and burning

by . Posted on
Mythri
05 Sep

Our lovely neighbour, Pat, rang a few weeks ago to say that there was a dead Jersey cow in the river by the electric fence which attempts to keep her cows on her property and ours here.

Of course I had to go and see which one of my beautiful girls had left us.  It was our lovely Heidi, Mother to the gorgeous Patch.  She must have slipped down the steep bank (what was she doing there?) and broken her back or neck and drowned in only 8 inches of water.

I didn’t really cry.  Do we become immured to death eventually, seeing as much as we do?  Or is it that once the spark of life – the soul, spirit, call it what you will – has left the body, that person, animal, being that we knew and loved is gone.  All that is left is the flesh.  Flesh and skin we have loved, for sure, but without the animus or force of life, it is just a body to be dealt with.

Ged pulled her out of the river with the tractor and a chain and then pushed her into a big old pile of logs several owners before us left behind.  She forced us to light it up and feed it day after day, creating a beautiful clearing next to the bees, opening up the landscape near the spring fed dam.  I asked Ged to remove her horns for future biodynamic preparations, and they’re sitting on a tin roof over the calf shed, hollowing out.

On my walks on the other side of the farm I had a few whiffs of something dead as I turned down the track for home, but hadn’t thought to investigate.  Then Ged asked ‘have you seen Bonnie?’  I hadn’t and went looking.  I found her lying so peacefully with legs straight out under a giant tallowwood tree.  As beautiful in death as in life despite the maggots in her eye sockets.  Golden all over and with creamy hair like eyeliner round her beautiful brown eyes.  She was gone.  Another Jersey cow that we had bought and bottle fed and loved and nurtured.  Another body to be moved and burnt.

Ged pushed her into another old pile but with the fire bans everywhere we didn’t dare light it up.  I forgot to ask about the horns and he didn’t think to get them.

Two cows gone out of our small herd – that is a huge loss.  But more than that, these girls were our friends.  We knew them so well, loved them so deeply and now they are gone from us for ever more.  Poof!  Snuffed out, gone in an instant, with no chance for goodbyes.  Life is so fragile, nature so cruel sometimes.  We have no idea what happened to Bonny.  We will never know.

And then there was Gypsy, who I had renamed Mythri (Friend & Comforter) when Ged brought her onto the farm 6 years ago.  She was a huge (17hh) grey thoroughbred mare who he found starving in the last big drought on a friend of his father’s farm and rescued.  She was a wild child.  Terrifying.  She double barrelled the side of the red Pajero when it was still my road car and Ben was just a tiny baby.  She scared my two horses witless when she first arrived and they swam the river to get away and finally went missing and ‘bush’ for days.  She was a two faced bitch.  When she finally calmed down and I wasn’t so scared of her, she would be that friend and comforter to me when I was upset, but meanwhile she was vicious in thought and word and deed to my horses.  We had to keep them apart for years.  Two on 200 acres, and two on the other 200!

But eventually, on some very bad advice from a so called animal communicator, we put them together.  She killed Baby.  She was so foul to her and Baby couldn’t bear her life with Mythri in it so she got cancer and died. She couldn’t help it.  She was lovely in her heart but she had been so damaged in her early life and she was so jealous and bitter and she couldn’t bear that I loved Baby so much.  Baby had everything she ever dreamed of and she thought by getting her out of the way, she could have me and my love.  But it didn’t work like that.

She was a bully and the herd dynamic was so different whenever she was in it.  She and Brave would swim the river and end up on the Pitt Street Farmer’s place every time they were together on ‘the other side’.  And she had cancer.  First just protruding growths all around her anus and vulva and then a lump that got ever bigger on her throat gland.  It was all through her.  Lump after lump appeared.  The writing was on the wall.  But she looked so well.  Ged wanted to shoot her a year ago but I kept saying ‘she looks great, she’s fine, she’s happy, she’s well’.

But last week after the hoof trimmer had been I let her out with all the horses on the other side, and sure enough, within a day she had led Brave on a merry expedition to the mad, bad neighbour’s place.

We retrieved Brave easily but Mythri resisted all attempts at capture.  Ged went out alone on Sunday morning and caught her.  He said that when she did a poo she groaned with pain.  It was time to do the dastardly deed.  When he came home it was done and he was devastated.  He shot her in the same pile where Bonny was.  In the drizzle and dark that night we did our best to pile up a good pyre around her big grey body and get a fire going.

It has been my job this week to feed that fire which was neither big nor hot enough to get rid of such a big body.  I have seen sights this week that firemen, police officers and paramedics have all seen many times before.  Charred flesh.  That sweet sickly smell.  Bones in the ashes.

I have done my best by her, talking to her all the time, sending her spirit to the light, sorrowing over her body, together with my beautiful Bonny girl.

It has been horrible.  But somehow we just deal with death and the gritty reality of disposing of bodies.  Can’t let grief get in the way.  And what I have learned this week is that once the soul is gone, and just the body remains, it is just flesh and organs and bones.  And the spirit who inhabited it, looking on from the starry realms, would rather that it was made use of rather than just disposed of.  That the body had purpose in some way rather than being left in the ground to rot or using up valuable finite resources to be burnt in a building that will always have connotations of the holocaust for me.

At least Bonny, Heidi and Mythri forced us to get rid of other people’s old rubbish piles and clean up our land.  But still the waste of a life is harrowing.  Every death is a body blow and heart felt.  How and where and why doesn’t matter when faced with the soul-less body to deal with.  Just as many of we humans would rather our flesh and blood were used for the greater good when we are gone

Wild Horses

by . Posted on
Brumbies from Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association
29 Jun

For a horse lover, it is the stuff of legends, bush ballads and rangers of yore – taking wild horses from the Australian bush and making lifelong friends with them.  Call me a mountain dreamer, but it’s always been on my to do list. I found out about the wild brumbies of the Australian Bush many years ago, and the plight they face as their numbers expand and various State and Federal Governments dream up ever more evil ways to get rid of them (aerial shooting).  These are the iconic horses of Banjo Patterson, Ned Kelly and the original aboriginal horsemen (and women).

Small, compact, strong, hardy, kind, gentle and sure footed, they have turned their hooves to everything from cattle mustering, polo, transport and more and have stood shoulder to shoulder with Australians as they settled and dominated their landscape.

Never a fan of a big horse (too far to fall!) as I started seriously looking for a horsey heart to love in some vain desire to fill the hole left by the irreplaceable Baby, it was clear that we would have to go and look at some brumbies and see if we liked the reality as much as the idea and ideal.

On a bitterly cold May day we took the Dorrigo road out of Guyra to the Guy Fawkes Heritage Horse Association holding property and waited for Erica and Digby to turn up in their ancient Toyota.  I spent the time picking the paper like everlasting daisies – like little golden suns.  There was a beautiful Palomino stallion in the yards and Ged and I talkedto him through the rails as we waited for Digby and Erica to calmly and quietly herd the horses into the yards for us to look at.  So many horses! So hard not to fall in love!  I immediately fell for a pretty bay mare but she was sold, next I set my heart on a stunning buckskin mare and we spent a long time looking at her but finally noticed that her hocks were blown up like footballs.  Something wrong there so Erica said she would turn her out and wouldn’t sell her until she was well.  Meanwhile Ged and the stallion were deep in eyeballing conversation.  There was an undeniable connection between the two alpha males.

Erica suggested another buckskin mare with foal at foot that we might like ‘out the back’ so we set off in the jalopy with some hay, calling ‘c’mon’ and watching horses emerge from the scrub.  A few times we got out and got close to horses but we couldn’t find the buckskin!  At one clearing I got out of the car and turned around to be met by the curious stare of a horse who was the reincarnation of my beautiful ‘Baby’.  Hot tears streamed down my cheeks in the cold wind and I turned to Ged ‘doesn’t she look just like Baby?’  I couldn’t hear him, but he took one look at my face and told Erica we would definitely be having that little bay filly.  Still no sign of the bucky and we had to go as we had left Ben with a friend.

We had also agreed to take a 25 year old wild and pregnant mare who we felt sorry for.  The horses are trapped with hay in a series of yards in The Guy Fawkes National Park, and then trucked to this holding property where they were branded, wormed and sold out into the wider community as projects, pets, and horses of all disciplines – never for meat.

I paid for ‘Second Chance’ as I called her and had a sleepless nights over the old wild mare.  Finally Erica called me and said the sale of the stallion had fallen through – did we want him?  I hesitated for a moment and then said ‘It’s Ged’s birthday in a couple of weeks, that can be his surprise present’ and I explained my reticence about the old girl.  Erica understood and agreed to keep her through her dotage.  So the truck was booked, the Stallion paid for and the new steel yards to hold them, ordered.

These cheap horses were starting to cost a fortune!  Oh well, we desperately needed new yards, anyway.  As ever, at Avalon, we need a deadline to move heaven and earth to get things done!

It was so exciting having this huge secret to keep from Ged.  A couple of times I thought I had blown it, as I am the world’s worst poker player, and everyone around us knew of the surprise.

The week before I rang Erica and asked about the Buckskin mare – after all, if we were paying for a truck, we might as well fill it up!  She checked her out and said the hocks had gone down a lot, but still a bit swollen so we could have her at half price (pregnant to boot!)  I can never walk past a bargain so the deal was done!

Then we just had to wait for the yards which came early one morning and were erected incredibly quickly by the manufacturer (a nice man from Tamworth) together with our friend Ian (who is fixing the road with his excavator) and the lovely Jean Philippe (our French wwoofer from last year returned to his Aussie home from home for a month of hard labour!)

All was ready for the arrivals and two days later they weathered the winding road down the Great Dividing Range and leapt out of the truck into the new yards littered with piles of hay.  They were calm from the outset.

The following morning Ged, Ben and I walked down the paddock together to inspect the new arrivals as Ged & Ben had come home after dark the night before.  It was such a thrill to see the look on Ged’s face when he saw the stallion and to be able to say ‘Happy Birthday, Darling’.  What a fantastic surprise and wonderful gift.

Day by day the ‘bubble’ of space they have needed to keep them separate from us has got smaller and smaller.  Even the stallion is able to be just a metre away from whoever is feeding them.  Food is a wonderful ice-breaker!

We are gradually giving them more and more farm to explore and graze.  I spent some good ‘join-up’ time with Second Chance in the round yard yesterday.  The buckskin is called ‘Beauty’ and the Stallion is ‘Sandy’.  Watch this space for developments as they journey from wild and unhandled to friends and companions for life, and our hearts are healed and horsemanship expanded along the way.

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep . . .

by . Posted on
28 Feb

I do know where to find them.  All dead.  All gone.  Bodies strewn around the farm in various stages of decompositions.  Wanton wastage to the wild dogs.  All my beautiful children gone.  No more kisses at feeding time.  No more chasing them away from the alpaca food bowls.  No more racing antics as they run from one to the next . . . no more watching them grazing quietly on the hill above the house, or racing down same helter skelter when I go to the feed shed with the yellow bucket.

No more pitiful bleating when bollocky boy loses the flock (again!) and wanders the farm over trying to find them . . .

I woke up at 5am on Monday and went to the loo.  Looked out of the window into the grey gloom and saw three sheep being herded in terror.  Raced into Ged and woke him up to get the gun which was locked away in the gun cabinet.  By the time we were both up and dressed there were only two sheep huddled on the hill and no sign of the wild dog.  Typical!  There never bloody is when Ged and his gun are around.

Still, we went for a drive and a wander and luckily found the third sheep hiding with her head under a fallen she oak down by the river, her body screened by a huge clump of weed.  She was exhausted, terrified, in shock.  We fetched the Emergency Essence and dribbled it into her mouth and on her poll.  We reikied and talked to her.  She didn’t appear to be injured and eventually she got up and wended her way back to the others.  She was limping on a foreleg, but otherwise seemed ok.

Ben and I spent the day building a yard below the hill where they have been camping out with the thought that we could tempt them down there with food.  We laboured hard and were proud of the results and our efforts.  But of course they were so traumatised by being hunted every night – so skittish and scared, that they wouldn’t come near us or our brilliant construction.  So we just had to pray.

On Tuesday at feeding time first I tried to tempt them down, and then, in frustration, tried to herd them.  Which is impossible with just one person.  It didn’t work.

On Wednesday the prayers seemed to be working, since nothing else was.  On Thursday we came home and couldn’t see any white woollies on the hill.  I raced in to put supper in the oven and then Ben and I drove up to the top of the hill.  Two sheep.  One badly injured.  We tried to tempt them closer with food but instead they limped off the hill, down the flat and up into the bush.

I had to leave them there and feed the small person and got Ged to sing him to sleep over the phone so I could go out and feed the alpacas.  Then I ‘went bush’ and she had lain down in exhaustion and let me pet her and examine the injuries.  I assured her that she would be ok and went home to fetch a bucket of hydrogen peroxide, clean cloth, and a syringe of penicillin.  Cleaned and dosed her up and realised there was no way I could leave her stuck in the bush all night.  She was a sitting duck, or a lying sheep.  Easy prey.

(Language takes on a whole new meaning out here on the land with Nature as your friend and foe)

So I had to get her home.  We weigh about the same and at first tries it didn’t seem possible that I could move her out.  But sheer grit, determination (some would say bloody mindedness!) and adrenalin fuelled my endeavours.

She was on a hill of loose rocks and leaf matter so my feet could get no purchase and a couple of times we slipped and went roly poly together as I tried to haul her out.  Finally she was wedged by some young trees and I couldn’t budge her.  So I had the bright idea of getting bandages and ropes and hauling her behind the car (I admit that Ged and I started watching Django last weekend which may have inspired me).  I retrieved what I needed from the shed and bound her front legs together (back legs would have been better but one had a deep two inch rip in it that was bad enough already without further stress).  I positioned the car and was about to attach the rope when I realised I couldn’t drag her past the trees.  Back to the drawing board.  I tried to persuade her.  I lifted her up onto her feet and finally she got the messages I had been exhorting into her ears.  And me holding her up we walked step by step down the hill.  I told her that she need only make it onto the flat and then I could drag her behind the car but she was very brave and we probably did 50 metres before she stopped and said she could go no further.  I felled her and bandaged her and ‘hog tied’ her and very very slowly dragged her behind the car to the house.

In retrospect I should have made a sled.  I’ll know for next time.

Got her home, cleaned her up again and liberally administered the Emergency Essence and Reiki.  Covered her with a red blanket so she looked very Red Cross Emergency victim.  And went in to clean up me and the house.  By the time Ged came home (a day early to try and shoot these bloody dogs) she was doing well.  Ged stayed home on Friday to nurse her and work while Ben and I went to preschool and yoga respectively.

When I got home she looked fine.  I didn’t check her before we went to sleep.  But I woke at 3 and after tossing and turning for a while decided to go outside and see what, if anything, was happening, before waking Ged up to go for a walk with his gun.  Fleur as Ben and I had named her when we talked about her in the car yesterday, was in trouble.  Wedged upside down on the hill by the fence.  Breathing really laboured.  Eyes dull, leg so hot and throbbing.  More Emergency Essence, more Reiki in the rain.  But after 15 minutes or so she started spasming and then there was a slowing of the breath.  And then the final breath and she was gone.  I came in and had a hot sweet tea.  And then lay in the dark sobbing for the rest of the night.

Such an emptiness in my heart and on the farm without our little blobs of cotton wool littering the landscape.  I love their wise citrine eyes, the short crop of black hair on the head and legs, sinking my hands deep into their luxurious fleece and imagining all the products to enrich our lives.  I love the shearer and the huge event that is the annual shearing, I love their sweet faces and eager antics to steal every last morsel of food from the alpacas.  I have loved them from near and afar and now they are all gone.

Our last remaining has long been crazy and won’t come near us and I don’t like her chances on her own.

What a waste!  Like a fox in a hen house, the wild dogs have just brought them down, gnawed at them and then abandoned them to the ants, goannas and eagles.  It has just been sport.  Hunting practice.  And it has felt like a war zone.  And now there is a war.  Me against the wild dog population.  I am going to learn to shoot today.  And I am going to hunt them down.  They have wilfully destroyed my ovine family.  It’s personal.

Waking up in a War Zone

by . Posted on
07 Feb

Last Saturday we woke up to a bloodbath.  First our lovely German wwoofer, Matthias, found one dead sheep, then another, then another. Floating in the river or dead on its banks.  Four beautiful girls, all with puncture marks on the inside of their hind legs, victims of a concerted attack by a pack of wild dogs.

We walked the river banks and bed looking for the rest of the herd.  We found one girl resting between two logs with blood around her.  We turned her and found that she had been ripped open and mauled.  The only solution was going to be a bullet, so we fed her and I wept tears of despair and frustration at the senselessness and waste of the attack.  Like a fox in a hen house, this had been a terrorist attack with no other purpose than the thrill of the hunt.

The herd that we had built slowly over so many years, who were so friendly and relaxed with us, decimated.  Mattie had found another dead sheep earlier in the week, and the dogs had taken the lovely little lamb a few days before.  Clearly lamb is on the menu for the feral dogs this autumn.

Mattie is a sensitive soul who returns to Germany to begin his training to be a vet.  I mentioned to him how the energy of the farm had changed overnight – from a peaceful oasis to a place of grief and devastation.  ‘It’s like a war zone’ he said.

We dragged the carcases of my lovely girls into a row beneath the house so that Ged could sit and watch, sniper-like, overnight in the hope that the predator perpetrators would return to feast on their kill.

We found two sheep exhausted and terrorised, perched like goats on a rock on the far side of the river, barricaded behind branches and logs.  No amount of coaxing or tempting with lucerne could get them out and we could see they were injured.  We had to grab them and carry them across the river and tend their wounds.  They hid for two days this week, just so weary and stiff after their night of abject terror.  The little boy recovered mid week and came calling for food at feeding time.  But the ewe was still secreted away at the top of the hill, dragging her leg behind her when she moved.  Mattie and I tried to catch her twice but for a three legged sheep she sure can run fast.

Finally, on Thursday night, we cornered her after she had fled from us down to the river.  In a scissor like movement we approached and she made a dash for it.  Mattie’s long legs in pursuit and he managed to grab onto her fleece and amazing held on and wrestled her to the ground.  We turned her onto her back in shearing position and found a huge bulge of infection around her rump but I couldn’t squeeze it out.  I administered the milky penicillin and then we lifted her, with great difficulty, into the back of the farm car where Mattie held her while I drove to the yards so we could secure her for a week to heal her.

Needless to say there’s been no sign of a dog since.  The howlers are coming at 6 tomorrow.  Normally I have a very live and let live philosophy to the wildlife we are privileged to live alongside.  But when our babies are hunted down I become biblical.  An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.

The howlers are coming at dawn tomorrow.  I want 5 dead dogs, especially that big black one which has been terrorising the alpacas and sheep for so long.

What a waste.  The wild dogs normally take one or two sheep a year and we accept that as our rate of attrition, but this has been appalling.

The only consolation is the old farmer’s adage ‘where you have livestock, you have dead stock.’ And apparently we had to have this devastation before taking defensive action.  My poor girls.