It’s now been a couple of weeks of us having, what my blogging friend Tootlepedal kindly referred to as, a pied-à-terre and it’s all going rather swimmingly. The Farmer has utilised its central location to lay his weary head between his airport based night job and his annual train marathon saving himself a lot of road user tax and nighttime driving; The Bean Counter did likewise when an early morning meeting threatened his beauty sleep. The Engineer is enjoying going in the opposite direction to most commuters (and the good old Canterbury sunstrike) and I very much like the shift in gears from animal tending and garden taming to lady about town – but just for a day a week, you understand.

I don’t want to miss any menagerie antics; you know, like those alluded to in this missive’s title…do I?

The sheep, as I mentioned last week, were delighted to finally be relocated to the grass-is-always-greener back paddock which we had, in the interests of potential haymaking, divided down the middle with electric fencing. As the trusty electric netting was too short, we had filled the gap with good old pigtail standards and electric wire reasoning that the grass cover was so good in the allocated section the flock wouldn’t even glance at our handwork.

But there’s always one.

It was during evening feed rounds I noticed one loan wooly back showing amongst the waving grass on the wrong side of the electric divide. Of course it was Horton; it’s always Horton – I blame his airy fairy Mum, Vera, with her fanciful approach to parenting duties. Shaking the feed bucket from the correct side of the paddock quickly caught his attention and thus the breach location; a pretty rookie mistake on our part as it turned out and easily fixed with a couple of lengths of bindertwine and my standard, go-to reef knots. Job’s a Good’un.

I didn’t even mention it as part of our evening dining table patter, light by one as this was the evening The Bean Counter was staying in town, because it was done and dusted, dealt with, and no longer newsworthy. That is until 2.15 in the AM when a doleful baa-ing interrupted my rest. Someone had lost the flock. It’s a relatively regular occurrence so I pulled the covers over my ears thinking, “They’ll sort it out like they always do.”

But not this time. By 2.20 the back paddock was a cacophony of ovine panic. When the Proper Farm paddock-dwellers from across the road joined in the chorus I decided there was nothing else for it than to haul the farm duds over the night attire and venture out. The Engineer and I met on the landing and were quickly joined by Farm Girl who had the presence of mind to grab a torch.

We were not sure how Fred the ram would view three bleary eyed humans stumbling through his dominion under the cover of darkness and so proceeded with caution; totally unnecessary as it turned out. Fred was too busy gazing at the back paddock with an air of “What the dickens…?”.

It seemed Horton had encouraged some of the other lambs (Esme and Janice) to accompany him on a night time adventure through another breach in the fencing he had sniffed out. But Esme and Janice are not parented by hippy-dippy flakes like Vera; their Mums were fast to miss their offspring, quick to sound the alarm and the lambs seemed unable to remember their return path though the fence, back to maternal safety. Our bedraggled appearance seemed to galvanise them. From stock still, panicked shouting on either side of the fence one moment, suddenly the paddock was a blur of running, circling, crashing, stampeding sheep and, having lost one lamb to the fence, we knew the only thing to do was remove it – and fast. But it was still live and the controls were way back through the ram paddock.

Under pressure, instinct takes over. There’s folk that freeze, folk that run…we three tend to be confronters. The Engineer took control but in her bleary state, while disconnecting the fence between electric pulses as we stood at the ready to hoist the standards out of the rock hard ground, rested her free hand on another fence which is controlled by the goat paddock fence unit. The noise she made is indescribable – imagine someone pouring ice water down your back as you surreptitiously indulge in a vat of Creme Brulee and you’re close – but it did seem to give her superhuman strength. Elbowing us and our concern out of the way, she ripped down the fenceline, standards flying in all directions, turned, and then stormed back up again gathering the wire and posts from amongst the thundering hooves of the joyously reuniting flock. Farm Girl and I caught up with her as she was flinging a raggle-taggle armful of tangled fencing into the wheelbarrow in the barn. “Job done!” she declared, her arms dangling at her sides like overcooked spaghetti.

So long story short, it doesn’t look like we’ll be getting much hay this year. It’s also increasingly difficult to lure Fred away from the back fence, so who knows how that’ll end up. The Engineer is fine – a little bit sore in the arms but I think that has more to do with the speed and pure grunt she employed in hauling up the fence than the shock she received as our fences are pretty tame – and I’m spending half an hour a day untangling the fencing.

As for The Bean Counter, who had a blissful night’s sleep in the big, bad city? He kind of feels like he missed out on all the fun.