Tag Archives: New Zealand

A Sheep Dog, A Sheared Sheep

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available (signed copies) here on my home page and also (unsigned) at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Ross Millar, a New Zealand sheep farmer, for fifty years has lived the song “Whistle While You Work.”

“I am the Elton John of whistling,” he told me not long ago, with a wink, for he is as humbly down-to-earth as his dirty work boots.

Watching Sir Ross in concert is both sight and sound to behold as he guides his working dogs with a sundry of whistled notes that carry a country mile, even piercing through wind, and create a lovely melody.

Racing up a mountainside, Scottie, a star border collie, looked like a black-and-white-drone-with-a-tail skimming just above the grass and shrub. Instead of a handheld radio controller, Ross steered Scottie with short and long whistle blasts, and combinations, the tone and inflection varying in a precise musical language.

Ross Millar and a newly shorn sheep and a pile of wool.

“The dog’s job is to do what I tell him to do,” Ross the boss noted frankly. “And I will keep telling him all day long if I need to until he does it.”

Scottie only needed about seven minutes to silently herd a lone sheep from half a mile away up in the foothills back down down to Ross’s side.

“The sheep thinks ‘this is a wolf and I’m breakfast, lunch, or dinner,’ ” Ross explained as to why Scottie need not bark to do his job.

During the demonstration, Ross did his job like a pool shark calling shots. He would tell a dozen spectators precisely what he wanted Scottie to do: “Turn left – right – stop – come – go above – go around – go down – that’ll do.”

And then: Tweet! – Tooooooot! – TWEETtweeeetTOOT! – or some other shrill melody and Scottie would “muster” the sheep into the side pocket via a bank shot, so to speak. It was nothing shy of amazing.

Here is something else amazing: a working dog on a sheep farm routinely runs ten miles, sometimes as far as a half-marathon, in a single day.

With Scottie’s short work for the moment done, Ross bent to task in the shearing barn. He began by pinning a sheep as a wrestler does an opponent, a feat accomplished with ease for at age sixty-something and standing six-foot-something, topped by thinning grey hair, Ross appears fit enough for competitive rugby.

Next, quick as an Army barber giving a recruit a buzz cut, he sheared the cloud-fluffy-animal as bare-skinned as the day it was born without a single nick and drop of blood or even a patch of razor rash.

Ross said an “expert” can shear a sheep in one and a half minutes – about half the time he had just taken – and tally more than 300 in a working day. Prodded slightly, Ross said that while he was a bit rusty now, he had indeed once been an expert.

Prodded further, privately, Ross told me in his heyday he could shear a sheep in a few ticks under a minute-flat – the equivalent, I guessed, to New Zealander Peter Snell setting the mile world record of 3:54.4 in 1962.

“I love all animals,” Ross said, smiling, as he reassuringly caressed the freshly sheared sheep. “And some humans, too.”

Speaking of humans, I playfully asked if he trained his two children when they were young with whistle commands – to which Ross answered seriously and succinctly, “No.”

When I in turn asked his wife Mary if she did so with her husband, she wryly said with a twinkle, “Oh, yes, but it didn’t take!”

And did he ever try to train her by similar whistling fashion?

Mary, after a short laugh loud as a shepherd’s whistle: “He’s a little smarter than that.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.

Comforting In-Flight Entertainment

by Woody

Woody’s award-winning novel “The Butterfly Tree” is available at Amazon (click here), other online retailers, and orderable at all bookshops.

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The in-flight movie screen for Seat 19-B was out of order.

This would have been less bothersome had the passenger in 19-B not brought along a book that he realized, about two chapters in, he had already read.

This, in turn, would have been less bothersome had this recent flight not been from Southern California to New Zealand, a flight of more than 13 hours, a flight so long it took off Wednesday night and landed Friday morning with Thursday disappearing into thin air at 35,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.

This would have been less bothersome if the passenger in 19-B was able to sleep on planes and thus had napped through the airborne boredom, and through stretches of rollercoaster-like hair-raising turbulence, until waking up Down Under.

All of this would have been less bothersome if the passenger in 19-B was not me.

And all of this changed for the better when the person in Seat 18-C, one row ahead of me and directly across the aisle to the right, opened a generously sized canvas book bag and, as if it were Mary Poppins’ magical bottomless carpet bag, from it started pulling out an arts and crafts store shelf worth of skeins of yarn – green, gold, red, and two shades of blue – and wooden knitting needles.

Suddenly I was in a time machine transported back half a century, while simultaneously in a flying machine heading forward 6,000 miles, thinking of my mom who was an accomplished knitter. One of the last gifts she gave me before passing away three decades ago was a gorgeous afghan the color of hot chocolate, made lighter by melted marshmallows, with a seashell pattern and tassel fringe.

This knitter, however, reminded me nothing of my mom. For starters, he looked more like a stereotypical motorcycle club member than someone in a knitting club. In his forties, I guessed, unshaven for two days I also guessed, toe to top he wore black boots, blue jeans, faded brown T-shirt with a slightly torn seam on the left shoulder with the short sleeves stretched taut over large biceps, plus tattoo sleeves – a dog’s face, a rabbit wearing a dress, and a butterfly among the images I could make out – on both arms, and a battered baseball cap.

“It distracts me from my fear of flying,” Jason, as I later learned his name to be, shared when I leaned forward to compliment his handiwork/artwork.

Watching him knit was a pleasant distraction for me as well, as calming and entertaining as watching fish in an aquarium.

Jason began by rolling the five skeins into a single ball that speedily grew from a marble into a baseball into a grapefruit into a good-sized cantaloupe that looked like a miniature globe of Earth. More than once, he had to pause his spinning hands in order to untangle a skein that had become as snagged as a back-lashed fishing line in a reel.

Once the knitting began, the two needles flicked and clicked like flashing swords in a Robin Hood fight, all whilst Jason’s fingers danced and his wedding band glinted, and row by row the scarf or sweater or afghan grew, its colors changing at random with some sections wide and others narrow, a yarn sunset unfurling on his lap.

“What are you making?” I asked after we landed.

“A sweater,” Jason answered. “For me.”

He paused and smiled and his round wire-rimmed glasses made him look like a poet or professor, or a knitter certainly, and added: “But my wife will probably steal it.”

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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn

Woody’s new novel “The Butterfly Tree” is now available in paperback and eBook at Amazon (click here), other online bookstores, and is orderable at all bookshops.

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Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn.