WE OCCASIONALLY see an early-morning fox in our northside Dublin back garden, and have even seen badgers there in years past during spring and summer, wrties Anthony Gavin. But neither fox nor badger quickens our pulse anything like the sight of sheep in our south-west Donegal garden used to do some 20 years ago.
Unless you're keeping hens, a fox just passes through, and the badgers are far more of a threat to our dog than to our vegetables. Sheep in a garden, however, are another story altogether.
We kept the perimeter of our Donegal house well secured, but the sheep which hung out along the village street occasionally found our side gate open. Worse yet, a pair of large, thievish ewes were able to clear the wire fencing at the back with a single bound and help themselves to whatever we had planted for our own table. As a result, the battle cry "Sheep in the garden!" (or "Sheep-a-gardy!" if our two-old daughter was sounding the alarm) periodically rang through the house during the growing season.
The parish priest in the church directly across from our house also gave out from the altar that summer about the same cornerboy sheep, and the "dirt" they deposited around the church grounds, but to no avail. Out of patience, I finally decided to go on the offensive; so I fashioned myself a trusty lariat from a seven-metre length of half-inch blue nylon rope that I had salvaged along the nearby strand.
Sure enough, one sunny evening shortly after, excited cries of "Sheep-a-gardy!" filled the air, sending our 11-year-old son and myself out back, while our two-year-old sentinel took up a ringside seat beside her five-year old sister at the large picture window overlooking the garden.
The intruders turned out to be the same two large ewes again, who, being sheep, lacked the wit to escape by simply bounding back over the fence at the back of the garden, along which they now nervously paced. "Drive them down towards me, son," I instructed my trusty sidekick, only to hear his mother, who had now joined us, laughing aloud at the sight of me with lariat in hand. Laugh she might, but little did she know that I had roped cattle on horseback years before as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica; nor was there time to inform her of that now.
Instead, I simply let fly with my lasso as the sheep galloped down past me some 15 feet away, dispatching a perfect circle of rope that seemed to skim in slow motion across the garden, before dropping neatly over the neck of the lead ewe.
Bracing my heels in true wrangler fashion, I yanked back on the rope as the ewe somersaulted into the air, then plummeted head-first to an immediate halt, prompting our two-year-old daughter at the window to burst into peals of laughter, while her five-year old sister simultaneously burst into a flood of tears.
Lacking a Stetson that I might tip to the wife, I merely tied up the intruder, opened the front gate for its partner-in-crime to escape, and headed down the street myself to one of the three village shops. Waiting until it was empty, I told the proprietor, a friend and neighbour, that I had corralled a sheep in my garden, but its fleece wasn't marked with the various combinations of coloured dye, fore and aft, that indicated ownership.
"Look on the horns," he softly replied, after looking carefully around, "where the owner sometimes carves his initials." A few minutes later I was back in the shop, to inquire "Who's BPJ?" Knowing I was going to find out in any event, and that I'd also know he had known, my helpmate looked about him twice before whispering back: "The brother". The brother was duly notified to come and collect his errant beast, which he did immediately, though he chose to approach our house and garden from the back, much like his ewes, and thereby spared himself what I'd hoped might be a brief moment of main-street ignominy at having been summoned to deal with one of his renegade flock.
However, we did hear later that summer of another villager who managed to snare a ewe that had eaten part of a bag of spuds in his garage. Tethering it to a telephone pole outside his house, he sent word to its owner that he could reclaim his livestock once the spuds had been replaced.
When in Rome, do as the Romans do - which is to say that in Donegal we easily forgave those who had trespassed against our vegetable patch, and nobody fell out with anybody else. Whether "the brother" had gone home that afternoon, and taking a page from Luke (15:4-7), called together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, "Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost", we never actually heard. But we knew, as all who have ever lived in the country know, the very things that enliven a summer's evening also serve to pass the long winter nights, when they are recounted, relished, and rehashed. Sheep-a-gardy and a kay-yay-yippee-yippee-yay!