A Croft in the Hills by Katharine Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

final horror, we felt. To devote all one’s energy to working for the banning of the use
of nuclear power as a weapon, was that the only reasonable thing to do with one’s life, we sometimes wondered. But negative purposes have never a deep appeal. Surely the only appropriate
gesture to make in the face of enormity is a positive one, however small. We could cultivate our portion of earth. It was little more than wilderness, lying exposed to every kind of blasting
weather, but it was earth, and earth responds. Learn to understand it a little, work along the rhythm of it and it will repay you in ways beyond your reckoning.
    Soon we saw a thick green sheen come over the cornfields and the potatoes began to push through in crowded rows. The garden plot, which had been so well limed and manured, was producing lettuces
of real succulence and flavour.
    The stirks were coming on amazingly well on the natural grazing and were scarcely recognisable as the lean, shivering creatures we had bought only two or three months before. Our aim was to sell
them profitably in the autumn and buy in a couple of good calving heifers, from which we would build up a small herd of four or five breeding cows. There were two licensed Aberdeen-Angus bulls in
the district, for service. The sheep also we meant to sell at a profitable time and with the proceeds buy a score or so of well-bred, black-faced ewes or gimmers, to form the nucleus of a breeding
flock which we could increase to about a hundred.
    We meant to keep a hundred and possibly, later on, two hundred pullets in deep litter and to rear a few pigs if feeding permitted. Our plan was to slough off all the rag-tail stock by the autumn
and start afresh then. And so it worked out.
    The first item in the new stock we had to acquire almost at once—a hundred five-week-old pullets, which were to come into lay about the end of September. We put them into two rearing
houses in a field near the house and let them run on good clean grass. All went well until the weather broke but then the trouble started. Almost every morning we would bring in two or three sodden
chicks and dry them out in boxes by the stove. As they grew bigger they began to crush each other on cold nights and we would retrieve one or two small suffocated bodies from the pile in each
corner of the hen-house. We tried every device to keep them from crowding, but to no purpose. They were obstinate little devils and seemingly had entered into a vast, grisly suicide pact. By the
time they developed some sort of sense we had lost at least twenty of them, and even then our patience nearly gave out, as we dodged each other round the henhouses each evening at dusk, chasing the
elusive little rascals in to bed. The two or three ex-broody hens, who were complacently rearing ducklings in the next field, looked on at these manoeuvres with a faintly derisive twinkle in their
elderly eyes. Don’t you know there is no substitute for mother, even foster-mother, love, they seemed to say!
    We had no hay crop to worry about that first summer, and once the turnips were hoed and the potatoes ridged we turned the attack once more to the ever-recurring problem of fencing. Our southern
flank was now very adequately protected by a first-class Forestry Commission fence. To the north and east we were moderately well defended but our western approaches were badly in need of
safeguard. We had a frontage here of three or four hundred yards along the roadside and the fence was practically non-existent. So, one Saturday, we loaded the trailer with posts and wire, packed a
picnic basket and set off for what we called ‘the west end’.
    We had had a spell of very dry weather and the water was coming into the storage tank in the house in only the smallest of trickles so we had to use it very sparingly indeed. At the ‘west
end’ there is a burn which never dries up. It has its source in the hill and its water is clear amber and lies in pools, where