Clipping
The end of a long job in the darkness, and the various weights and measures of mules and blackie ewes.
The last few ewes came down to the pens towards darkness. A heron called from the burn in the moonrise, and the puffing, oily shapes of sheep churned around our knees in the tin-walled bucht. We grabbed them one-by-one and rolled them onto the points of their arses, but it’s hard to clip the homebred mules which reared their own lambs this year. They’re heavy, stubborn animals, and after I have gripped seven or ten of them between my knees, I begin to wonder how many more I can handle. The strength ebbs out of me, and the work slows in the heat of that pen. Even by ten o’clock at night, I bend over and find that sweat is still pouring to the point of my nose, pooling in the bays of my spectacle lenses; then it falls in a plop, and the sound is matched by a sizzle when it strikes the purple, upturned belly of a sheep at my feet.
In easier times, we have used a generator and mechanical clippers to do this work. It’s loud and brisk, and the animals are easily cut by the rush. But there’s no way to get modern shears to these pens, and now we do this job by hand each year. For all that it can be a slow and backsore task, I actually prefer the grate of knives which glide above the skin. It’s a more methodical task, and easier to hear the jungle-drum of hearts which pound between your knees.
The mules have heavy wool which bursts in the clipping – each cut explodes in mounds of greasy floss to make your fingers shine. Even the dirtiest mule is cleaned by the removal of last year’s growth, and the whiteness of the new emergent fleece then glows in the twilight. But I have blackface ewes as well; their wool is tough and dry and the new fleeces are revealed in a swirl of peppered kemp. The effect is less impressive, but they are so much easier to clip that I like to keep them in the mix as I work through this task. If I clipped them all at once, I would have nothing left to cheer myself up – so I ration myself to create a pattern of hard and easy work; two mules and then three blackies, coaxing myself through the job, just as a child confronted with broccoli can be calmed by the promise of pudding.
By this stage in the year, the blackies’ wool has risen proud of the new growth below. It’s gratifying to swing my arm with each cut like a pendulum, and inch-by-inch, the felty dregs are rolled away into the grass. I saved myself a final sheep like this for the end of the night’s work. I sloughed her fleece away in less than half the time it took to fight and burst the coats of bigger, younger mules. And it came away from her back like a mat, snarled with prickles of whinn and the purple bells of newly risen heather.
The job was done and the gate was opened by eleven o’clock. Dark silhouettes ran panting uphill towards an afterglow of sunset that was barred by thickets of thistles. Escaping at last, the sheep drove a stir of moths before them as they went; moths and seedheads like dust from a distant caravan, and bats which rushed to tell the two apart.