Chapter 5. Noodle and Friends

Becoming self sufficient - except we never learned how to make gin!

It was time for the serious side of farming to be approached and this we undertook with the purchase of some twenty head of young newly weaned heifer calves. John had travelled back to France to tie up the final loose ends and I was the one elected to go to the famous Green Weaner Sale over at New England in the Barkly East district.

Cattle breeding, especially of the Hereford strain, was first rate in this area, and with friends in the farming world to turn to for advice, I thought it a good place to find the youngsters that would form our breeding herd, Once again, it was the kindness and freely given knowledge of the farmers present that decided my selection, and in time our chosen weaners were duly delivered to the farm and I spent what seemed to be hours leaning on the gate gazing at them. The following morning found me leaning on the gate straining my eyes in the hopes of catching a glimpse of just one of our newly acquired cattle. Not a sign of a single animal was to be seen and I knew that stock theft had struck and our as yet unpaid for cattle were all gone. A frantic phone call to my long-suffering neighbour had him in fits of laughter.

‘Not gone’ he chuckled, ‘merely grazing on the hillside above my farm’.

With great relief I and two assistants rounded them up and bought them home and then spent the next few days strengthening fences and gates. John re-appeared from France with a marvellous pair of binoculars to help me in my search for missing stock and in time, these diminutive calves were to grow into beautiful adult cows, each one presenting us with healthy offspring every Spring.

We soon learned that if we were going to run a herd of cattle, there were a certain number of precautions that must be taken if we were to avoid such horrendous things as Contagious Abortion and the dreaded Black Quarter Disease. John was incredible when it came to fixing the windmill and keeping the generator running, but when it came to needles, he would turn a grey/green colour and sweat profusely. It soon fell to me to learn how to inoculate cattle and with the welcome addition of a head clamp to hold them steady while I aimed and fired, we could get through the whole herd in pretty quick time.

However, feeling ones way in the dark is not always the easiest thing, and we lost one cow through our own complete stupidity. "Learner fees" the Vet told us and tried to offer consolation by informing us that a distant neighbour had lost no less than ten cows that week. September we discovered is known as the killing month. The new shoots of green growth are up after the brown dry grass of winter, and the cattle rush headlong from outcrop to outcrop, using up valuable energy and not gaining enough in food to maintain their already somewhat weakened winter condition. If not checked and fed extra nutritives, the cow will sicken and die very quickly unless one is aware of what is happening. John and I paid our dues very sadly and went on to become wiser and more observant farmers.

We then decided to spread our wings and embarked on sheep farming on a very small scale. A friend had been getting rid of a group of elderly rams that had finished work and four of them found their way to the farm. One by one they continued their journey into the deep freeze, but one likely looking character was given a stay of execution and allowed to run with the eight ewes that had also been bought for slaughter. Possibly in the interests of avoiding the drive down to the town abattoir, he would insist on taking his newly acquired harem and disappearing for days at a time giving us much cause for concern in case the jackals that roamed the area had attacked them.

Having held off for nearly eight months and having seen no sign of lambs and very little of the ram and his ewes, we decided to send him on his way to join his brothers. The deed being done, we released the ewes back into the veldt where, two weeks later, they all began to give birth to a series of fine strong lambs, several of whom appeared as twins. The ram was firmly in the deep freeze and his progeny were leaping about the farm, a sharp lesson to us to invest in pregnancy testing!

His off-spring lived on Bulklip for many years and his successor was a fine ram called Nelson, having been purchased at the time of the first Elections. Nelson proved to be every bit as fertile as his predecessor and almost all of the ewes produced twins. In fact on his famous namesake's birthday, our only black ewe named Winnie, produced one black and one white lamb. A truly democratic birth!

It was during the early stages of our sheep experiences that we found an orphan lamb who had got itself tangled up in a wire fence while its mother lay dead a few metres away. Instead of wisely consigning him to the shed outside, I sat in the warm kitchen picking the scraps of dried after birth from the little woolly coat of this pathetic scrawny baby who curled up on my lap and bleated pitifully as I tried to get it to suck on a milk moistened rag. Once you have let a hansie (orphan) lamb into your home and your heart, you are doomed. The floor is continually covered in puddles or chocolate drops, milk purchases increase drastically, waking hours are filled with cries of "merm, merm" and all this time, the lamb no longer knows that it is supposed to be a sheep but has joined forces with the dogs and begins to behave just like one.

The first thing to do was to fix him up with some form of nappy. This problem was solved with a plastic shopping bag with the bottom two corners cut off for his back legs. Under his tum would go a thickly padded towel and the bag handles would be tied neatly around his neck with a piece of baling string. This meant that he could spend more time inside the house on my lap and less time out in the cold night air.

We soon discovered that he loved watching television, and although he would fall asleep during party political broadcasts, he was on the edge of his chair during any sort of “skop, skeet and donner” (a shouting, shooting and hitting) movie . “Noodle” as he became know, would race down to the gate along with our ferocious guard dogs and stand sentinel while they barked at any interloper, and would jump onto the back of the truck and let the wind blow his ears around with Klippie the sheep dog on one side of him and Mr. Dumpy on the other.

As he grew into a teenager, he became particularly enamoured of Klippie and one farming neighbour who watched him in amazement as he repeatedly mounted the sheep dog was heard to say "I think you’d better put me down for one of the pups".

On one occasion, we had trouble with a young calf and it was necessary to rush it down to our local Vet for an injection. Whilst loading the calf, the two dogs and Noodle also jumped into the back of the truck, and not having time to spend arguing the toss, we left the entire bunch of them on the back and headed for town. Once the vet had done his job, we proceeded to the Post Office where we parked and went in to collect the mail, and on returning to the truck, we found a bemused friend standing staring at the vehicle.

‘Now folks’ she said ‘we all know you have started farming and we appreciate that it must be great fun, but the basic idea is that when you come to town, you leave the animals on the farm’. There, leaning out of the back windows of the canopy, was the calf, two dogs and a sheep all eyeing the passing population. I chuckled and wondered what she would say when she saw us going for a walk on the farm, accompanied by four dogs, two horses, one sheep and a buck and, in time, the addition of a couple of ducks and a turkey.