11 A job for the tractor

It kept being wet, bits of rain and mists and dews. One morning in the mist I went out to check the sheep. One didn’t run away, it just lay on the ground looking miserable. It struggled up only when I got very close. It didn’t smell that clinical lanolin fragrance of clean damp wool that gets to the back of the nose, or of sheep droppings, but of rotting meat. I caught it easily and laid it down. The smell was coming from a dark wet patch of wool along its breach. I poked in with my fingers and out wriggled white maggots, some tumbling onto the grass.

I went over the river jumping between rocks to the neighbour’s place. He had had 100 or so sheep for around 20 years. He said it was fly strike. With hand shears and a shaker of white powder he came back to check. After cutting away all the wet wool he powdered the exposed flesh. It was raw and bleeding. Maggots wriggled out of the meat escaping the powder. They were eating the sheep alive. Davo didn’t give this sheep much hope. It was too far gone. He said he jetted his sheep in such damp weather to prevent the flies laying their eggs and to kill any maggots that hatched. It is worse when the sheep had a lot of wool on like mine. Thick damp warm wool is perfect for hatching the eggs.

Jetting was hosing the sheep to dripping point with a high pressure spray of insecticide. He would lend me his Ferroni pump to do the job. You need Vetrazin insecticide, he said. This was exciting because it meant that I could put the sheep in the yards again, drive the tractor down, attach the pump to the PTO, and do my first real sheep thing. It had to be tomorrow because sourcing the insecticide was difficult as all farmers in the area were having flystrike problems. They had some in Dalgety that I could buy today.

Late afternoon we moved the sheep down to the yards where they would spend the night. It was easy now we knew what to do and the sheep were familiar with the paddock. Early next morning the red monster was started up, belched its dense blue smoke and we manoeuvred noisily down to the yards. The sheep huddled into a corner furthest from the tractor making a bunch so small they were hardly there.

The Ferroni and PTO converted the frothing Vetrazin solution in a 44 gallon drum into a high pressure jet that the sheep had to face, five at a time, in the race. Their wool became a straggly dripping dish cloth. They were miserably but I was happy. Life was good.