The Crowstarver Read Online Free

rams.
    Tom had the collie drive the flock slowly away as he looked intently for any signs of lameness or foot trouble. Then he gave the command ‘Away to me, Molly’, and she ran right-handed around the flock, working them back towards him as he stood, leaning on his crook, and looking again, this time at their forelegs. At the rear one ewe, he saw, was hobbling and, calling the dog round to hold them up, he pushed in amongst the mass and, as the lame animal turned away, slipped the head of his crook around one hindleg and made her prisoner.
    While the rest stood watching, all staring wide-eyed at the man amid a loud chorus of bleats, Tom threw the ewe on her back and knelt across her.
    A shepherd on wet land would have beenconfident of finding foot-rot, but it was rare up here on the well-drained chalk, and sure enough what Tom found was a small sharp stone embedded between the clicks of one forefoot. As he prised it out with his knife, he saw a figure appear over the edge of the hill, a figure which, as the ewe had been, was limping.
    Percy Pound liked to oversee the farm each day, and to this end he kept a powerful old motorcycle which he rode along the drove. This ran, like a spine, up the centre of the farm, from the water-meadows that fringed the chalk stream at the bottom, past the lower flattish fields, and then up the steep escarpment to the downs above. Leaving his machine at an appropriate point, the foreman had then less walking to do in order to reach whichever men or whatever field he wished to visit.
    â€˜Morning, Tom,’ he said. ‘All right?’
    â€˜Yes thanks, Percy,’ said Tom. He stood up to let the ewe free, and she ran back to join the flock, haltingly at first and then, feeling her discomfort gone, more easily. ‘Picked up a stone,’ said Tom.
    â€˜Lambs look well,’ said Percy.
    â€˜Shoulda liked a few more twins,’ said Tom. ‘But it was a good lambing this year. I didn’t lose many, nor ewes neither.’
    His thoughts jumped back to that other lambing time, when a newborn baby of a different sort had come into his life. Curiously, the same thoughts were going through the foreman’s mind, for only a couple of hours ago the subject had been raised in the stables.
    Percy was about to speak, when they heard a drumming of hooves and saw a rider in the distance, cantering towards them.
    â€˜Mister,’ said Percy. ‘I was just going to tell you he was on his way.’
    Major Yorke was a heavy man and it was a heavyweight hunter that he rode, a big bay gelding that he reined to a halt beside foreman and shepherd.
    â€˜Morning, sir,’ they said.
    â€˜Morning, Mr Pound, morning, Tom,’ he replied. ‘Lovely day.’ And then, even more curiously, he said to the shepherd, ‘By the way, Tom, I’ve been meaning to ask you. How’s that little boy of yours getting along? I don’t think I’ve set eyes on him since he was a baby. Running around now, I suppose?’
    â€˜He gets about,’ said Tom.
    â€˜And chattering away nineteen to the dozen, I dare say!’
    To save a lie, Tom nodded. He caught Percy’seye, and saw a half-wink.
    Mister noticed nothing. ‘Good, good!’ he said. ‘I must call in and take a look at him one of these days. What d’you call him? I forget.’
    â€˜John Joseph, sir.’
    They talked sheep for a while, and then with a final word of farewell, Major Yorke clapped his heels against the bay horse’s sides and away they went at a hand canter, over the springy downland turf.
    Tom looked at Percy, mindful of that wink. The foreman looked back, remembering the conversation in the stables earlier that morning. He had given out his orders for the day, and one of the two Ogle boys, Red it was, had either not understood or perhaps purposely misunderstood what it was he had been told to do. Rhode took off his spectacles and wiped their lenses on a filthy