The meal was served in the formal, but homey, dining room across from the kitchen and consisted of broiled lamb rib chops, mashed potatoes, and vegetables. The entire meal was not only home cooked, but home grown at their ranch with the exception of the bottle of wine that Gary opened for the adults.
After eating most of the meat with a knife and fork, I wanted to pick up the convenient handle of the rib bone to clean off the rest so as to not waste a succulent morsel. When the boys led the way, Gary and I ignored what Miss Manners would say and joined in leaving no sign of meat. Dessert was ice cream with canned fruits, home canned, that is.
We continued the pre-dinner conversation throughout dinner and even the boys shyly joined in at times. While dinner settled in our stomachs, the youngest two dutifully cleared the table and washed the dishes. We retired to our room to unpack our clothes, and then read a bit more from 'A Maverick's Guide to New Zealand' before falling fast asleep.
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Chapter 7, April 17: The First Day on the Ranch
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We woke by the sounds of Gary and the boys getting ready for the day. We were in no particular hurry, so by the time we were ready for our first day on the ranch, only Wendy remained to say 'Good Morning' to us. We sat at the kitchen table and decided to have a lighter breakfast as the calories were beginning to catch up with us. The toast, grapefruit juice, cereal, and tea was just enough for breakfast. While we ate, Wendy engaged us in conversation and was busy preparing something for later.
The activity for the day was to gather the sheep from the various fields, bring them to the main corral, and sort the lambs from the herd for a special medical treatment.
First, Wendy exchanged her inside shoes for outside shoes in a small shed just outside the kitchen door, then we proceeded though a gate to the area where the sheep dogs were kept. Les and Jess were happy to be unleashed and immediately ran around at top speed darting around a small stand of trees, playfully chasing each other and some stray sheep. More serene was Tina, the house dog, who decided to come along not to work but for some exercise. Tina was mostly white with a few brown patches, but the sheep dogs were completely black except for a tan face and white around their eyes. This coloring magnified the apparent size of their eyes so the sheep could be controlled by the dogs 'staring them down'.
Starting in a field not too far from the house, a few sheep were effortlessly swept through the gate and into the next paddock. With the swelled numbers, the next paddock took a little more effort from the dogs and Wendy, who had to call out commands to get the dogs to do the job correctly. Wendy's plaintiff voice calling to the dogs, 'Get behind, Les' will be forever etched in our memories.
The next few paddocks, each ten to twenty acres, became even more difficult. The increase in the number of sheep was exacerbated by the fact that some sheep were suffering from the staggers. Because it had not rained for several months, the once green pastures had stopped growing and turned brown. The sheep were still hungry, and when they nibbled down to the roots of the existing grass, also ate a fungus which grows there. This fungus affects their nervous system so the sheep have difficulty keeping their balance and cannot walk. This disease is not fatal unless the staggering sheep falls down in the path of the herd and gets trampled. We took careful precautions to make sure this did not happen.
The last two paddocks required Les to make several sweeps of the field, but he finally got all the sheep where they needed to be: the main corral. Custom built by Gary and their oldest son, Andrew, who was currently away at the University, the corrals were fashioned such that the sheep could be moved through a holding area, into a single file chute, to a gate which could be operated to allow the sheep to go into one of three corrals. Although the sheep were hesitant, Janet and I, with the help of Les and Jess, got hundreds sheep to each take their turn down the chute to the gate being operated by Wendy. The sheep were sorted into three categories: lambs, sheep who needed shearing, and all others. The lambs were almost fully grown and were hard to tell apart from the other sheep. Sometimes one would run towards the gate with a herdmate making the sorting job even more difficult. Some of the lambs got in the wrong corral. The truth was told by their ears being notched to indicate their age: one notch for lambs, two for all others. By grabbing the fleece on their back, I was able to hoist the few incorrectly sorted lambs over the fence and into the proper pen.
The process of rounding up the sheep and corralling them took most of the morning, and once the sheep were safely behind bars, we returned to the house for lunch. It now dawned on us what Wendy had been doing while we were eating our breakfast. The cooled homemade quiche was waiting for us in the kitchen. After we washed up, our work-amplified appetites got the better of us, and we finished most of it. Even though the advanced preparations got us through lunch quickly, we had to rest for a while at the kitchen table. Wendy, however, didn't stop for a minute. Amidst the cleaning up of lunch, she started a few chores for dinner. We both offered to help, but she would not hear of it.
After lunch, Wendy showed us why we had separated the lambs from the flock. They needed to receive a treatment for parasites through a process called 'drenching'. The medicine, stored in a collapsible plastic reservoir on Wendy's back, was fed through a tube to a pistol-like device which measures the proper dosage and deposits it into the lamb's mouth on demand. As you have probably already figured out, this is not a popular activity for the lambs. Since she had their mouths open, Wendy also showed us another way to judge a lambs age by the number of their teeth. The ones with two teeth on the bottom were simply 'two teeth' old.
We had brought a copy of the 'Beach Reporter' newspaper with us in the hopes of taking a picture holding it with the sheep in the background and having it published in their 'Around the World with the Beach Reporter' section. We tried several shots among the sheep, but they tended to shy away and be mostly out of the shot.
Two goats, Fergie and Amie, came to our rescue. Bribed with some bread that we brought with us, the two goats were happy to pose for the pictures. The best shot had Fergie behind the fence with his two front hoofs on the first rung looking over my shoulder in a pose that made him look like he was reading the paper along with us. Amie was on our side of the fence and had her 'wrong' end facing the camera.
After we finished taking pictures, we fed the balance of the bread to some of the other goats who were not as friendly as the hand raised Fergie and Amie, and then went back into the house. Janet asked and was allowed to practice spinning on Wendy's spinning wheel, and I, not wanting to waste a minute, opted to take a walk up the hill on the west side of the ranch to get a bird's eye view of the spread and to see if I could spot the wild turkeys that were there the previous night.
Tina was not nearly as tired as the sheep dogs, and just followed me for some additional exercise and attention. Through a couple of gates, I found my way along a disconnected electric fence going upwards. The hill was fairly steep in some places, and I stopped every once in awhile to take a picture and to rest. At the top, I got the best possible view of the ranch and the house we were staying in. Only far off in the distance could any other structures be seen. This, I later found out, was the ranch of Gary's brother that had been split from the MacKenzie ranch. Directly across from me, at the top of a ridge a mile away was the east boundary of the ranch. I could see the entire square mile of the ranch at one glance in front of me. Like a Monopoly board, I could pick out the various paddocks and structures along with the routes that we had used to go between them. I continued down the back of the hill towards the river. Even though the drought had lowered the water level, the Tuki Tuki river was still flowing between the sand bars and islands that had formed. Sweeping along the fence that marked the west boundary of the ranch, I visited with some of the neighbor's sheep and came to a watering hole. One sheep, who had probably had the staggers, had fallen in and drowned. It was a sad sight, but sheep ranching is a numbers game, so the loss of one sheep is not very disastrous.
While heading back towards the ranch, I spotted one black turkey poking its head through the underbrush looking for something to eat. I readied the camera and approached carefully. My stealth was rewarded when I came upon a flock of about twenty gobblers. My presence did not go unnoticed for long. The turkeys scurried up to the top of the ridge, spread their wings and glided down towards the river only to make a sweeping left hand turn and disappear from sight.
Now I had to pick my way carefully back to the house, and Tina was no help at all. In fact, she was always snooping around the area covering twice as much ground as I did. In a secluded ravine, she finally found what her nose had indicated was there. She started barking excitedly and digging frantically. In a few minutes, the prey realized that Tina was getting close and emerged from the rear exit of the burrow at the top speed that its jack rabbit feet would carry him. The rabbit sped off in the direction that we had just come and Tina gave up the chase after a few seconds as we both watched his cotton tail disappear into the bush. I called to Tina and by the time she had caught up to me I had the ranch house back in view. I returned to find Janet beside the hearth in the kitchen still busily spinning wool into yarn. I had some juice and relaxed for a minute before I was volunteered to help wind the yarn into a skein. In a few minutes, Gary and the boys returned from the day's activities, and we began the ritual of the before dinner snack of mussels, potato chips, and beer. We tactfully asked if he would demonstrate how sheep were sheared. Even after a hard day's work, Gary cheerfully agreed. The four adults went out to the shearing shed where Gary fleeced two sheep quicker than you can say 'Little Bo Peep'. After they are done, the sheep are slid down a ramp like a child going down a slide at the park. You can tell from the complaining bleats that the sheep do not enjoy it as much as children. The naked sheep are fenced in and stay under the shed until they are let back out into the fields. Wendy was kept busy sorting out the clean wool from the dirty with a broom-like device. The wool was just left in a small pile on the floor, but during the shearing season, it is packed into ninety kilogram bales before it is picked up by truck.
We had many questions that Gary answered, which in turn started that evening's conversation. Gary checked the rugby and soccer scores and told us of how he was quite an athlete himself. A few years earlier when Andrew was taking up running, he got on a training program and, at his peak, was able to run a marathon in just over two-and-one-half hours! We settled down for a chicken dinner feast with many of the same side dishes as the night before. For some reason, chicken is not as plentiful as it is in the United States, and is considered a treat whenever it is served. Before going to sleep we read for a while. I finally finished 'A Maverick's Guide to New Zealand'. It was not really ironic that it took me all that time to finish, since the last chapters were about the South Island. I was reading those for our next trip. By now we knew there had to be another trip to New Zealand. |
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