THREE LONG YEARS
it takes to train a sheepdog. Not all are candidates, the culling starts early. The ones you want are light on their feet, prone to fixate, and take no sheep sass, where
SASS is a hoof to the face. If the dog cowers, give it away. If the dog grins bring it, train her up. And it takes many hours to train a dog how to behave in a circle, even with only two ways to go. Bellow
COME BY and clockwise is how she’ll go round the flock. Bellow
AWAY TO ME and counter clockwise it will be. The direction of the running has maybe to do with the manner of your rogue sheep breaking free of the spiral, agents of
CHAOS I once tried to control on my own – gamboling strays outside the fence during holiday – and really very difficult to manage, avoidant and impulsive in equal measure. Scenting greener blades on that side over there, molars wide and flat and ready for the
GRAZE like all of their kind, though it turns out cousins alpaca have no upper front teeth in their soft and rolling mouths. When they smile through their
CLEFT it’s a gummy nub that greets, and lower incisors yellowed over a whiskery chin. They must be fed at ground level – avoid a raised trough – because this aligns their face for tooth grinding. Otherwise the teeth get out of hand,
OVERGROWN like those rams they find roaming the moors with wool so matted and heavy they can hardly walk, then wrestled into the back of a little truck to emerge nicked and patchy with a spring in their step. Alpaca teeth must be ground down by hand, if they’ve eaten wrong, which is
NO JOKE. When angry they let loose a reeking stream of stomach acid; do not cower. Also they get angry about their heads, which they will not allow to be shorn, so we cannot buy socks of alpaca head hair, only belly hair. Those are not long enough, though, for a
BAL-CHATRI, a hair-umbrella, the wide delicate cone basket bristling with loops of hair from a horse’s tail, upended over a tiny crouching bait creature. The loops tangle a falcon’s feet when she strikes at the captive, and then you’ve got them both. This unfree falcon will not fly in a circle, clock or counter, but once you loosen the bespoke
HOOD you’ve fashioned of leather, will find something to kill as quickly as she can. The hood calms her, and has a tall feather on top, and maybe some beads and long strings hanging down, which suggests to me that this is not all for the bird. And it’s an
ETERNITY it takes for another to be a way you’d like better, a brief moment it takes for them to be themselves, running a straight course, hungry on their own terms.
