After our two old trusty maremmas, Ben and Jenna, died, we purchased two more but they were more interested in guarding the house area and our chickens than bothering about the sheep so we bought two alpacas, Max and Moses, (they came with those names) to act as fox police, and our sheep followed trustingly into whichever field the leggy alpacas led them.
We tried numbering the various paddocks but this wasn’t successful so Jan, who was born in the Middle East, decided to name the paddocks after Middle Eastern countries. Jordan, Egypt and Israel were our sheep fields, while the bigger fields for the cattle were simply, upper field and lower field.
Jan had just begun telling me that the sheep needed to be shifted into another ‘country’ because it was going to rain and the dam might overflow. As he was talking, we heard a knock on the door. It was the taciturn Catholic priest from a local parish who had ideas about enticing my husband and me back to the flock. He tried to appeal to our bucolic life-style with quotations from the Bible about the return of the lost sheep to the fold. I could tell that Jan was more concerned about getting our sheep into a higher field before the encroaching storm, but the priest continued with yet another sheepy quotation.
Jan got to his feet, gestured to the dark sky, and said, ‘Sorry Father, but Moses needs to lead his sheep out of Egypt and into Israel before the dam flows over and drowns the lot of them.’
I don’t remember the priest saying ‘Goodbye.’ I only glanced at him closing the front door quietly behind him as Jan and I were pulling on our gumboots to open the gates for Moses and the sheep.
Some people just don’t understand what it takes to protect their flock.
