22
I have lived with DNA and evolution for most of my professional life as a scientist and so felt adequately knowledgeable to write this book. But I soon realised, as I began to write, that there was a risk that the book would be missing the central character – the dog itself. Fortunately help was at hand. My spirited wife Ulla grew up in the Danish countryside surrounded by dogs and carries none of the prejudices instilled in me ever since my childhood experience with the Hell Hound down the road. Ulla loves dogs and she shows it. To augment the scientific element that makes up the bulk of this book, Ulla interviewed a selection of owners and their dogs, and we will come to the interviews in the next chapter.
Meanwhile, during a spell in New Zealand, I had arranged to visit a man who worked with dogs for a living. I imagined he viewed his dogs not as pets but as working companions, very much as they had been for thousands of years.
Ewan lives and works in Mackenzie country, the high plateau on South Island in the shadow of the Southern Alps. There are few sights in the world to compare with the snowcapped peak of Aorangi, the highest in the country, viewed across the turquoise blue of Lake Pukaki. Some mountains are terrifying to behold, some peaks are disappointing when you see them, some summits are hidden behind the folds of surrounding hills, but Aorangi, the Cloud Piercer, is simply beautiful. It stands alone, a glistening meringue of snow and ice floating between azure lake and cobalt sky.
This is where Ewan works his dogs. Like most New Zealanders he is not at all sentimental. He knows he lives and works in stunning surroundings but, after ten years of mustering (rounding up sheep) in the high country, he takes it all in his stride.
The New Zealand economy relies heavily on selling its agricultural products all around the world and, since the first cargo of frozen lamb reached England as far back as 1882, there has been a flourishing export trade in meat as well as in wool. Official government statistics show that sheep still outnumber resident humans in New Zealand, but the proportion has been declining since it peaked in 1982. Then, there were 70 million sheep and 3.18 million people – that’s twenty-two sheep per person. Since then, a combination of factors – including lower international wool prices and a switch to dairy cattle to satisfy the Chinese demand for powdered milk – has reduced the sheep population to just under 30 million by 2015. At the same time, the human population has grown to 4.6 million, lowering the sheep/human ratio to just over six sheep per person.
To gather in these vast flocks, there are about 200,000 working dogs in New Zealand. Without them, it would be quite impossible to muster the extensive areas of high country. Needless to say, these working dogs are a world away from the pampered pooches that some of their cousins have become. No professional dog walkers for them when their owner is too busy to take them out for their exercise in the park. I was keen to find out about the relationship of these working dogs with their owners, the sheep station managers and the professional musterers.
I had arranged to meet Ewan and his dogs at his home near Omarama. A few days later, he phoned to say he had a contract in the nearby Upper Ahuriri valley and offered to take me along. I jumped at the chance. This was the autumn muster, when ewes and their lambs are brought down from the hills. Once down, some lambs are kept for fattening on the rich valley paddocks, others are sent directly for slaughter, and the ewes are made ready to be tupped to begin the lambing cycle all over again.
The muster began early, just after dawn, on a chilly February morning. Like many valleys that radiate from the backbone of the Southern Alps, the Upper Ahuriri is steep-sided but with a wide flat bottom, the result of millennia of erosion and accumulation of thick layers of glacial gravels. It is flat enough for an unsealed road to reach 35 kilometres into the mountains until it reaches the wall of peaks, still covered in glaciers, that separate the Ahuriri from the Hunter valley to the south. There are three sheep stations in the Ahuriri valley. Two are active, the third was purchased by the Department of Conservation in 2004, cleared of livestock and is now a sanctuary for one of New Zealand’s rarest birds, the kaki or black stilt. Today we are mustering a run at the lower end of the valley belonging to the Ben Avon station.
As dawn was breaking, we met up at the old wooden bridge over the river. The bridge was just strong enough to take Ewan’s pick-up. While I waited for him I glanced over the white-painted rails into the clear blue water below, its unreal colour the result of light scattering by suspended particles of fine glacial flour ground from the mountains. There beneath the bridge, close to the bank decorated by dancing patches of viper’s bugloss, the same big trout that I had tried and failed to catch a dozen times on earlier visits lay suspended in the current. This time I wasn’t even going to try to catch him.
Soon a cloud of dust billowing up from the main track announced the arrival of Ewan and his dogs. A few minutes later we were joined by two other musterers and their dogs. I unlocked the gate at the far side of the bridge, then jumped into the passenger seat of Ewan’s truck and we were away. Up and up the snaking zigzags of the rough drive track we went as we pushed towards the ridge. A rare New Zealand falcon, beautifully marked in streaked dark brown and cream plumage, dashed across our path as we passed beneath a rocky outcrop. We drove higher and higher past erect spikes of grey and yellow woolly mullein lining the track, and as we did so new peaks appeared on the horizon. At the head of the valley was Mount Barth, its permanent snows dazzlingly white in the strong sunlight. As we reached the ridge 600 metres above the valley floor, the giants of the Southern Alps lined the far horizon. Mount Sefton, Mount Tasman and in between them Aorangi, its perfect summit reaching beyond 3,600 metres above sea level. What a place to work!
Ewan took out a pair of binoculars and scoured the slope above us, looking for the sheep. These were merinos, the hardiest of all New Zealand breeds. They needed to be tough to survive the wind, rain and snow that batter the high country for a large part of the year. The warmth of merino wool is legendary, but the sheep also make a lot of lanolin to waterproof their coats against the elements. This means they easily pick up dust, which makes their coats look a dirty grey. It also makes them very hard to see – hence the binoculars. I had a lot of trouble picking them out, even with binoculars, but Ewan quickly assessed their distribution on the slopes.
The station manager had told Ewan that there were 1,200 ewes with their lambs. With a lambing ratio of 1.25 this year, that meant the muster was bringing in almost 3,000 sheep. They were spread around a vast bowl of mountainside rising, maybe a kilometre or so away, to a skyline of jagged tors like the backbone of a half-buried stegosaurus. These rock formations are typical of the schist high country where rain, wind and frost have worn down the softer rocks to leave the vertebral plates exposed.
The ground alongside the track was now a jumble of matagauri shrub bristling with lethal spikes, evolved as protection against browsing moa. The moa is long gone, but the spikes remain. Above the matagauri, clumps of snow tussock gave way to steep and broken scree below the tops. Ewan and his friends plotted the muster. Brian and his dogs would take the southern side of the run, Iain would take the centre, leaving Ewan to cover the northern flank. We travelled half a kilometre further up the track and Ewan released the dogs from their cage in the back of the pick-up. They were excited and, so it seemed, looking forward to getting the sheep rounded up just as much as Ewan. Among the pack, for that is what it was, were two black-and-tan Huntaways, a powerful thick-set New Zealand breed raised for just this type of country. Though no one was completely sure of their origin, there was reputed to be a mixture of Labrador, Rottweiler and Dobermann Pinscher somewhere in the ancestry. Owners of working dogs take pride in never entering them for shows and do not concern themselves with pedigrees. All that matters to a musterer is that his dogs are keen workers, which Ewan’s clearly are.
Huntaways control sheep from a distance with their deep bark and intimidating presence. With a single piercing whistle from Ewan the two Huntaways ran fast left and right up towards the skyline, covering the ground in a series of long bounds. Their job was to prevent the sheep from scattering and disappearing over the ridge. Once positioned above the flock, another whistle from Ewan and the dogs began to bark, deep and loud. The sheep looked up as the dogs trotted along the ridge over the rocky tors, barking as they went and forcing the sheep down the slope. Then Ewan released the four Border Collies and, on his whistled command, they dashed uphill to surround the flock and cut off the retreat. Keeping low and worrying the outliers with short barks, the Collies slowly concentrated the flock towards the central gully of the mountain bowl. As they came lower and lower, the density forced them into a tighter and tighter group that, it seemed to me, began to move as one, swirling like a shoal of herring harried by dolphins. The two Huntaways rounded up the few stragglers into the main flock which was by then moving slowly towards Ewan’s truck, kept in tight formation by his energetic Collies.
A group on the right tried to break away and, immediately, Ewan whistled to the dogs to cut them off. Ewan and I got back in the truck and retreated part way down the track. The sheep, hemmed in by the dogs, followed like a great grey river down towards the valley floor. Wheeling overhead, a kea, the indigenous New Zealand mountain parrot, let out a raucous shriek as if to say ‘good riddance’ to our unwelcome intrusion into the peace and quiet of the high country.
The pens were 3 kilometres upstream of the old bridge so we prepared to ford the river. The Ahuriri, like so many South Island rivers, is braided. They do not follow discreet and permanent courses, but are constantly changing their route through the gravel beds in the valley bottom. Floods from the spring snowmelt shift the stones and force the river to move sideways, creating new channels and closing off old ones. Only where there is solid bedrock and the river is forced through into a narrow channel can a regular bridge be constructed. Elsewhere, bridges are sometimes a kilometre or so long, straddling the gravel channelled by the river, though there are none across the remote Ahuriri. In time, these bridges will all have to be moved when the rivers change course beyond their present limits.
Had there been a lot of rain in the hills, fording the river would have been too dangerous and the muster would have had to be postponed. Fortunately for us, it had been dry for a week and the river was running low enough for us to use the traditional crossing point. Sheep are sure-footed but timid, and the river crossing could not be hurried. While the Huntaways guarded the rear of the flock, cutting off their retreat, the Collies patrolled the margins. The sheep hesitated at the water’s edge, nervous of taking the plunge into the icy current. It was vital not to panic the flock, and the dogs remained quiet.
After what seemed like several minutes, pressure from the back of the flock nudged the first sheep into the water, and once that had happened the whole flock trooped across the river. It was shallow here and they did not have to swim. Two of the Collies ran across a little way upstream and made sure the emerging animals kept to the track. Such was the size of the flock, it was a full twenty minutes before the last sheep was across. A little later they reached the paddock and Ewan closed the gate behind them. They soon settled and were eating the fresh green grass. A little later first Brian’s then John’s flocks were in the paddock. The whole muster had taken nine hours. Even though I had done very little other than watch Ewan and the dogs, I was exhausted.
Once we had secured the paddock gate and handed over to Bruce, the station manager, we loaded up the dogs and set off on the drive home. Ewan’s house was a comfortable bungalow surrounded by 20 acres of paddock with a few cattle, a chicken shed and a couple of dozen sheep which he used to train his dogs. Ewan was a professional and took on all sorts of work. One day he might be helping with a high country sheep muster, as today. On another he might be rounding up cattle or deer on the flats. When he was not out working the dogs on the land, he was judging sheepdog trials. The active outdoor life clearly suited him. At 70, he was as fit and lean as a 30-year-old.
In a shed round the back of the house Ewan showed me two young Border Collie pups, two months old, part of litter of six that he had decided to keep and train himself, selling the others on. In another pen were two slightly older Huntaway pups that he had also raised. He was going to keep one and had already sold the other to a farmer in Wales. When it was a little older the pup would be flown halfway round the world to his new home. Ewan’s dogs were highly valued and valuable, going for anything between NZ$5,000 and NZ$10,000 each.
Ewan had twelve other mature working dogs, Collies and Huntaways, and they were kept outside, each in its own plastic barrel, laid flat and with the lid cut off. At first sight, these might have looked unnecessarily spartan and they certainly contrasted with the upholstered dog beds I had seen at Crufts. However, they were entirely waterproof and, with a lining of straw, snug and warm.
Ewan’s dogs were his livelihood and not his pets. In order for them to work as a team he had to maintain a position of dominance. If he did not, the dogs would be useless on the muster and would run off after the first rabbit they saw, never to be seen again. It was essential that they obeyed his instructions. He was their leader and they were his pack.
What interested me most about Ewan and his dogs was how he felt about them. Did he love them? Before I met Ewan I had supposed the answer would be ‘No’ and that he would just view them as tools of his trade. But when I asked him this question directly he said ‘Yes’ immediately. I asked him if he could say why, a question that flummoxes most pet dog owners who, though quick to declare their love for their dog, cannot put their reasons into words.
Ewan’s feelings for his dogs had nothing to do with transference and he had no difficulty reeling off a string of reasons for his affection. They had given him great pleasure, to say nothing of providing a comfortable livelihood for him and his family. They had given him a life in the open air, his days in the high country with just him and his dogs among some of the most beautiful scenery on earth. He was very proud of them and, he told me, his greatest satisfaction was to bring a dog on from a puppy, watch it grow and improve through training and finally see it take its place with the others on the muster. Not all dogs made the grade and he sold them on, often as pets. That’s also what happened when a dog grew old and was no longer physically capable of the gruelling workload. Ewan always found them homes in which to spend their retirement. He has never had a dog put down just because it was unfit through age or illness. He respected his dogs and, yes, he certainly loved them. Whether this was reciprocated is of course impossible to know for sure, and is in many ways irrelevant. They made a good team.
I said goodbye to Ewan and set off for home over the Lindis Pass. It was early evening as the car climbed to the summit, and the low sun spread a gentle drape of bronze velvet over the hillsides, picking out the grassy tussocks like ciselé tufts on a Tudor doublet.