17. Tension was growing

Tension was growing between Jim and Elle. Liyan had noticed it and had mentioned it to Elle in the evening in the green room.

- "Even the girls have noticed it," Liyan said commenting on the incident when they had leagued, refusing to bring a basin to Elle at the door which would have spared her from taking her rubber boots off. She was going to put the washing on the line. "Lazy bastard!" they had thrown at her, giggling. Elle had taken her boots off, had fetched the basin inside the house, had put her boots back on and had gone to hang the laundry on the line. Jim had punished the girls into their room for lack of cooperation.

- "But that wasn't the reason, was it?" Liyan said.

- "No, it's not the reason," Elle commented lucid, "either they are jealous that I spend so much time with their father, or their mother tells them I am the bad French woman who is going to steal their father from her."

- "What do we do?" Liyan asked who contemplated going back to Auckland with glee.

- "We will leave as soon as most of the job is done..."

- "Yipee!" Liyan exclaimed.

There were still the ewes in lamb to scan to know how many lambs were to be expected and when.

On the Sunday morning Jim and Elle were waiting at the shed. The scanning man was not a vet. He had the needed equipment and the know-how. He could be called on Sundays. The ewes couldn't have held out any longer withoug eating. They were parked in pens and yards since the beginning of the shearing. Some were sick. Jim had already cut the throat of two of them which he left lying on a trailer. Hard to know why they were sick. The vet was too expensive.

The scanning man arrived. He set up his equipment and work started. Elle, a counting meter in hand, was to stand on the other side of the machine where ewes were held still a few secons, long enough for the scanning man to stick his arm up their passage with a soundreader.

Sticky jokes about the two or three rams that had got them in lamb were running high, somewhat tempered, Elle thought, by her being there. The tone was squarely male chauvinist, praising the all powerful male sheep with which the men in the shed seemed to identify.

A neighbour had arrived to give a hand. Jim was pushing the ewes from the pens into a narrow corridor, the neighbour was pushing them into the scanning machine. The shorn and scanned ewes were piling up in the pen at the end, now very mucky and covered in stagnant pee. Elle, from time to time, would walk across this pen to open the gate. The ewes would engulf in the way and hurl onto a grassy bank opposite.

After a number of hours, the work was done. The percentage of sterile ewes was passable and the number of lambs to be born before spring sufficient to make the boss happy.

The 1500 animals, spread out on the bank around the shed, were going to rejoin their paddock some kilometers away. Two bikes, three dogs, three people and a number of hours later, they were left to graze on a few hectares of bad pasture.

Jim and Elle had come back to the house worn out.

- "Six per cent failure," he had said to his wife who could count, "it could have been worse."