Tales of the Ridings | Page 7

the sheep and lambs which belonged to the farmers in the dale below. Each farmer was allowed by immemorial custom to pasture so many sheep on the moors the number being determined by the acreage of his farm. During the lambing season, in April and May, all the sheep were below in the crofts behind the farmsteads, where the herbage was rich and the weakly ewes could receive special attention; but by the twentieth of May the flocks were ready for the mountain grass, and then it was that Peregrine's year would properly begin. The farmers, with their dogs in attendance, would drive their sheep and lambs up the steep, zigzagging path that led to Peregrine's steading, and there the old shepherd would receive his charges. Dressed in his white linen smock, his crook in his hand, and his white beard lifted by the wind, he would take his place at the mouth of the rocky defile below his house. At a distance he might easily have been mistaken for a bishop standing at the altar of his cathedral church and giving his benediction to the kneeling multitudes. There was dignity in every movement and gesture, and the act of receiving the farmers' flocks was invested by him with ritual solemnity. He gave to each farmer in turn a formal greeting, and then proceeded to count the sheep and lambs that the dogs had been trained to drive slowly past him in single file. He knew every farmer's "stint" or allowance, and stern were his words to the man who tried to exceed his proper number.
"Thou's gotten ower mony yowes to thy stint, Thomas Moon," he would say to a farmer who was trying to get the better of his neighbours.
"Nay, Peregrine, I reckon I've nobbut eighty, and they're lile 'uns at that."
"Eighty's thy stint, but thou's gotten eighty-twee; thou can tak heam wi' thee twee o' yon three-yeer-owds, an' mind thou counts straight next yeer."
Further argument was useless; Peregrine had the reputation of never making a mistake in his reckoning, and, amid the jeers of his fellows, Thomas Moon would drive his two rejected ewes with their lambs back to his farm.
When all the sheep had been counted and driven into the pens which they were to occupy for the night the shepherd would invite the farmers to his house and entertain them with oatcakes, Wensleydale cheese and home-brewed beer; meanwhile, the conversation turned upon the past lambing season and the prospects for the next hay harvest. When the farmers had taken their leave Peregrine would pay a visit to the pens to see that all the sheep were properly marked and in a fit condition for a moorland life. Next morning he opened the pens and took the ewes and lambs on to the moors.
For the next ten months they were under his sole charge, except during the short periods of time when they had to be brought down to the farms. The first occasion was "clipping-time," at the end of June, before the hay harvest began. Then, on the first of September, they returned to the dale in order that the ram lambs might be taken from the flocks and sold at the September fairs. Once again, before winter set in, the farmers demanded their sheep of Peregrine in order to anoint them with a salve of tar, butter and grease, which would keep out the wet. For the rest the flocks remained with Peregrine on the moors, and it was his duty to drive them from one part to another when change of herbage required it.
The moors seemed woven into the fabric of Peregrine's life, and he belonged to them as exclusively as the grouse or mountain linnet. He knew every rock upon their crests and every runnel of water that fretted its channel through the peat; he could mark down the merlin's nest among the heather and the falcon's eyrie in the cleft of the scar. If he started a brooding grouse and the young birds scattered themselves in all directions, he could gather them all around him by imitating the mother's call-note. The moor had for him few secrets and no terrors. He could find his way through driving mist or snowstorm, knowing exactly where the sheep would take shelter from the blast, and rescuing them from the danger of falling over rocks or becoming buried in snowdrifts. The sun by day and the stars by night were for him both clock and compass, and if these failed him he directed his homeward course by observing how the cotton-grass or withered sedge swayed in the wind.
Except when wrapped in snow, the high moors of the Pennine range present for eight months of the year a harmony of sober colours, in which the grey of