I was never much of a gymnast. Early schoolboy experiences of shivering in cold Dunedin school gyms, with dozens of skinny teenage boys being made to vault the wooden horse; it all put me off the whole gymnastic thing.
Give me a rugby ball, a cricket ball, plenty of running around and competition — that always turned my wheels, but I could never perform a cartwheel or even a decent handstand, let alone an aerial somersault, forwards or backwards.
But I am proud to say that before I became too bodily inflexible, I once, and once only, did the best backward somersault you’ve ever seen. The fact that it was involuntary, had outside assistance and left me bruised and furious is of no moment. The fact is, I did it.
It was a fine Marlborough January day as I turned into Kit and Margie Sandall’s property, Upton Fells in the Medway, a tributary of the Awatere River. It’s a winding, dusty road, and it was always nice to reach my destination and get on with the job.
The job today was checking the rams. Every year, most commercial farmers and all stud ram breeders have their rams’ testicles checked. We looked for variation in size and tone, and especially for lumps, which could mean brucellosis or actinobacillosus, two bacterial diseases which can lead to infertility, or at least sub-fertility. It’s an important task. One ram can serve up to 200 ewes in a season, although in Marlborough’s extensive hill and high country runs, ratios of one to 100 or even less are more common. An infertile ram can have a big effect on the lambing percentage, and if there are several, as can happen if brucellosis is in the flock, it can be disastrous.
The job of checking them entails approaching a race full of rams from behind, squatting behind each ram, and palpating each ball, one hand on left and right.
It’s a simple but important task. Because rams are strong and sometimes aggressive, and merino rams have spectacular and very hard, curved horns, it’s usual to have the farmer in the race as well, keeping the rams tight together so they can’t move around. Many is the time I have waddled after a moving ram on my knees, both hands firmly clasped on his crown jewels, but this wasn’t what we needed. We needed them standing still.
Kit Sandall had spent some years on a farm in Western Australia in his youth. He’d met his lovely wife Margie there, and he’d picked up a few Aussie tricks as well. The big sheep studs in Australia have narrow ‘ram races’ where those who do the checking and selecting of rams can walk along from outside the race, looking at the wool, the head and so on. These races are strictly one ram wide, very different from the wider races New Zealand farmers have in their sheep yards, where they can walk their way up a race three or four sheep wide, drenching or whatever the task of the day is.
So picture a narrow race, one ram wide, about 20 metres long, packed with 25 or 30 horned merino rams.
Picture also the vet, the writer, yours truly, crouched at the back of the pen, palpating the cojones of the first ram. After checking the first, I have to squeeze past that ram and push him back to give myself some space to work on the next one. Checking that the first one, now finished with, won’t charge my vulnerable and unprotected back, is Marty.
Marty, Alan Martin to his mother, is in his forties at the time of my visit. He is a bachelor, a red-haired, friendly man. He has worked on farms all his life, and has been Kit’s right-hand man at Upton Fells for many years. Marty has a small block of land at Okaramio, 60 or 70 kilometres away from Upton Fells, to the north of Blenheim, but he spends most of his nights during the week at Upton Fells. He is part of the property, part of the furniture if you like. He is a good man but no farm manager, and is not as acutely aware of his responsibilities as, say, Kit is. Or any owner-operator.
I’d known Marty for some years and we got on well. When I arrived that day, he was there alone as I slipped into my boots and overalls for the job.
‘Where’s Kit, Marty?’ I enquire.
‘He’s taken Margie for a holiday down the Sounds,’ says Marty. ‘A rare occurrence.’ And he grins broadly.
Like many high country farmers, Kit is a farmer first and second, and holidays aren’t all that frequent. Marty is enjoying seeing his boss having a break.
As I begin the job on the rams, I am acutely aware of the vulnerable position I am in.
‘It’s your job to watch my back, Marty. Keep those buggers from charging when I’m not looking.’
‘No problem, Pete,’ he chuckles.
I’ve done about eight or 10 rams, no problems, nice tight testes, no lumps. Each time, I squeeze past the one I’ve done, past the big curved horns, and Marty pushes them back down the race from outside. The race is about a metre high, so he can reach over easily.
As I move on to the next one, Marty is telling me a story about dog trialling, something he dabbles with in his spare time.
And then instinct, a sixth sense, makes me look up. Marty is gazing into the distance to the east. The rams behind me are to the west. I glance behind me. The last ram, the one I’ve just checked has his head up, five or six metres away. He wants to be with his mates, who are ahead of me. He is on the point of charging. It is a fearsome sight.
As he charges at me, I turn towards him, put both hands on the rails, and rapidly lever myself up with my arms, lifting my feet up and towards my horny adversary so he can pass underneath me, as he tries to reach the safety of his colleagues in front. For a split second I think I’ve made it but as he reaches me, he leaps in the manner that escaping sheep will, as they cross an open gateway. His terminal velocity must be 20 kilometres per hour, about five and a half metres per second. He weighs about 80 kilograms. Never good at Newtonian physics, I can still tell you that is a lot of applied force when it hits your unsupported feet.
The effect was terrific, turning me into an immediate backward somersault and cracking my unprotected head on the steel angle iron lining the right-hand rail, as I collapsed into the race. The ram thundered over my torso and face as I lay supine and stupefied in the bottom of the race.
There was a mighty roar from Marty.
‘Jeez, I wish I’d had a video camera!’ he shrieked, delighted with the effect. It’s always nice to see the vet humiliated.
I was furious.
‘You stupid ginger-headed bastard,’ I shouted. ‘Your job is to protect me, not to take photos of me.’
I pulled myself to my feet, dusted myself off and finished the job in fuming silence.
Marty knew he’d cocked up, and nothing much was said for the next half hour, or even as I packed up and left.
Afterwards, I could see the humour, and Marty and I remained on good terms until his sudden, untimely death some years later.
In fact, neither of us mentioned it ever again. I’m glad there was no one else there. The story might have grown into something really spectacular.
