Monday mourning.

This fragile life - for the gentle hearted - should come with a warning.

Dearest friends,

You are welcome as always, despite that I am here today minus my smile. My joie de vivre wiped from Monday to be replaced, even now, by vivid, unwanted memories of very real horror and heartbreak, a deep sadness and sense of loss not felt since I found our beautiful deerhound lurcher cold and still, with no breathe inside him, under the walnut trees to the back of the barn. All life sucked from his soft, lanky, too young body. Taken by a cancer far less gentle than he…it happens, I know. The whole family affected by his parting, shed tears for many days.

Yesterday morning a horror story, still overwhelmingly real, unravelled, vividly before the sun had even left its stained horizon. Yesterday morning I cried again, great heaving sobs of despair at a scene I didn’t expect.

Hence my letter today is one of grief, pure and complete. A horror story, laid out, in abstract, one I couldn’t possibly have accounted for.

Monday mornings are well known for being the trickiest, the most fraught and filled with moaning and sighs and bad temper and tardiness… many feelings, many problems but, without even the merest shadow of dark doubt, yesterday was my very worst Monday morning ever. As such, I write this reluctantly in hope that words will, nevertheless, help in some small way to ease away pain.

In advance, my apologies to sensitive hearts.

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Silence - not for the gentle of heart…

In sleep an alarm—why wasn’t that enough—muffled through the silence of slumber, it fades. Dawn is not visible, no light seeps through the shutters.

Silence again.

Again, that sound, a hound barking, distant, not my own—why did I not think this was a warning—barking fades, silence returns. Own and it.

Sleep hovers, then leaps into wakefulness, all senses functioning. Rising, dressing, morning formalities, light stove, the hound barks again, closer, menacing.

Kitchen shutters flung open, it stops.

Silence.

A kettle on the hob, put on to boil, bubbling, fire stoked to warm freezing hands while through the window, dawn is bleeding into night, indigo, blood red seeping—I should have known—the day, Monday, begins.

Outside, silence.

Bucket rattling grain, barley. A voice, my own, calling, LiLouLiLouLiLou, steps hurrying, crunchy on frosted leaves, winter scattered on a woodland path.

But silence…

Barking heard again. And again, a deep threatening sound closer to snarling. Footsteps running, mine, faster through the woods—why didn’t I run faster—the narrow track deceptive in the gloaming.

And, then, breathlessness standing at the fence, empty of five faces, of bleated good mornings. Fear prickling skin, heart beating faster—why didn’t I run faster—and listening, listening so hard, ears ringing the crescendo of terror, of knowing.

Silence.

Then, from a corner, a menacing sight, a bloody hound running, white fur stained, crimson dripping from jaws and paws.

Shouting, loudly, vas-t’en, dégage… louder, screaming from a constricted throat—why didn’t I come sooner—dégage!

Heart pounding, barley scattered.

Turning, outside a cacophony of heartbeats, unnatural humps, bumps on flat land, unmoving, certainty exploding; unwanted—how did I not know—unbelieving.

And silence… deathly.

Limbs, tiny foetus ripped from warm, safe wombs, blood and wool… hound barking still but distant, more blood, more wool scattered, discarded rubbish, caught, torn in a meadow stricken by futile combat.

Battle lost. Life over.

Carnage - silence.

But for hot tears of rage, the horror—how did I not know—of falling on mutilated woollen forms, crumpled adored bodies, three ewes, two rams, four fœtus, limbs formed, silence.

Silence absolute.

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As I ran from one bloodied corpse to the another it was almost impossible to ascertain who was who. Rambeau, my beautiful ram, breathed his last breath in my arms, bloodied but still recognisable. All others, so mutilated I could no longer tell which limb belonged to which animal but as the light of day flooded over the scene it became finally clear that in fact one, sadly only one, had fled. He is missing still though I have searched and will continue to do so.

When you’ve done everything possible to keep the beast out but he still finds a way in, you wake in the morning knowing something is wrong but don’t ever imagine the massacre awaiting you in a field that has never seen violence, it is an horrific vision that stays, unwanted, with no expiry date. All shepherds will have known this at some point during their farming lives, they know, every time, it tares a heart in two. This is my second, it is enough for a ten lifetimes.

Goodbye my sweet friends…

With sadness but love always

The clothes on our backs.