Tragedy struck in our small valley leaving
our near neighbour without a husband and with three young daughters to raise on
her own! Her house is just three quarters of a mile from the main road, in a
rural setting, so there is no street lighting and a young woman on her own with
three daughters, had every right to feel vulnerable. As a security measure she
decided to buy a dog. Of course the girls got to choose the cutest puppy this
side of Cook’s Straight – and why not? They chose a black Labrador.
Everyone knows that Labradors are
soft-mouthed and the only danger they present is to lick you to death. The
attention given him by the girls did nothing to increase his ferocity, to make
him useful as a guard dog. I’m not sure if I ever heard him bark, but anyway the
family felt safe and that could only be a good thing. On rare occasions the dog
would arrive in our yard and I would shoo him off home. Not angrily, but
firmly.
To help pay the bills, the widow took in a
boarder, a young fellow who was lucky enough to score a job at the sawmill. The
sawmill sat squarely between the widow’s property and ours. During my forestry
days I sold a lot of logs to the mill, was friends with the manager, who lived
on site but I knew all the other workers quite well too. Back in the day, at
our annual cricket match, we forestry lads would regularly give them a hiding! The
mill boys seemed to think that their new recruit was going to fit in well.
Springtime was a busy time for me, because
springtime is lambing time. I managed a tree nursery and spent fifty minutes
driving to start my team at 7:30am, so my farming operation needed to be
efficient. Sometimes when ewes give birth there are complications and they need
assistance. I had a regime where I limited feed to the ewes over the last few
weeks of gestation, before they gave birth. If there’s an abundance of feed,
the lambs grow too quickly and large lambs are more likely to be problematic to
birth. I saved pasture for the ewes and their new-born lambs because good feed
equates to good lactating. It’s just management practice because if I had to
lamb a ewe in the morning… well it’s a time consuming process and my job was my
bread and butter.
When I arrived home at about six, or
shortly after, I would do my rounds to check on my sheep and attend to any
mothering up, or lambing tasks before darkness set in. Busy as I was, I began
to notice some lambs missing. I took pride that most of my ewes had twins, but
there would be a birth during the day, but only one lamb would be suckling. Or
I had moved a ewe and her lambs onto the better pasture and one of her lambs
would have disappeared!
It’s not unheard of for townies come out
to steal the odd lamb for their kids to rear it on a bottle for a pet, but that
might happen once in five years or so. I had lost seven during the first week
of lambing! I’m a good enough tracker and for the life of me I couldn’t find anywhere
anyone could have jumped the fence and if it was a hawk, there would always be
a tell-tale sign. Wild pigs will take young lambs and wild pigs do occasionally
come down from the hills but very rarely these days and they always leave sign.
The mystery was solved when Albert phoned
me one evening. His son worked at the sawmill and he saw what was going on. The
widow was away all day earning a crust and her daughters were at school, so
they tied the black Lab up. The boarder, feeling sorry for the dog, as soon as
everyone had left the house, returned to let him off his chain, to wander playfully
around the mill yard. Albert’s boy saw the dog return to the mill with a lamb
in his mouth and the boarder promptly quickly buried it in the sawdust heap, saying
nothing!
I didn’t want to confront the widow, she
had troubles to burn, and she had done the right thing by chaining the dog
while she wasn’t at home. If I saw the dog on my property I had every right
shoot it, but that too would bring woe to the widow and her daughters. So I
stayed behind one day and sat with the dog until the boarder arrived to release
him. I waved my finger at him!
Before the next lambing season, the widow
took a job in another region, and the dog became an issue for her. They must
have decided to put the dog down because the boarder came to my door one
Saturday morning wanting me to shoot him! He did offer to do the burying. Here’s
the thing: Because I shoot rabbits, stray cats, and because it was my job to
hunt deer and pigs to protect the environment, the perception is I’m a callous
bugger. Yet I’m careful not to run
bumble bees over with my lawnmower, I have three worm farms and if I’m digging
or disturbing soil, I won’t let a single worm dry out! I told him that if I
shot the dog, it might be a doing a favour for him and the widow, save a vet
bill, but those girls would always remember me as the bugger that shot their
pet!
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