Roustabout Friends by Eugene Wyatt

March 5, 2006

Good shearers are hard to schedule; a reservation must be made months in advance. Tom has been shearing my sheep for the past 10 years; having shorn Rambouillets in Wyoming and Merinos in Australia, he knows how to shear fine wools.  Superfine Merinos are the most difficult to shear; they have soft skin, body wrinkles and can be easily cut if a shearer is careless with his hand piece.

Tom has taught his son to shear and Mike will be shearing beside his father.  With two shearers, a good crew of roustabouts is necessary to handle the sheep and the wool coming off them.  Alex, Eustacia and Mark will be here, as they have been in years past; Eoin will be here for the first time and he "really needs a haircut," as I will tell him, if the others don't, and somebody will  laugh.

The weather is with us; today will be sunny and in the 40's with 50's and 60's expected later in the week; the sheep will be comfortable in the barn without their wool at these temperatures.

Soon all we'll hear is the drone of the electric motors that twist the rattling flexible shaft shearing machines, the chatter of the cutters on the combs of the hand pieces as they peel off the wool next to the skin, the plaintive calls of the lambs separated from their mothers being shorn, the scraping of hooves on the plywood shearing board when the shearer releases the shorn sheep as someone yells over the din, "heads up, sheep coming at you!"  This is the music of shearing day.

The shearing of a sheep is a dance that takes several minutes; the shearer leads and the sheep follows.  The sheep begins on its bum; held between the shearer's legs, it can not move thus freeing the shearer's hands.  Stepping into the sheep or away from it will change the sheep's position and expose the wool to be shorn to the hand with the cutter in it.  Every sheep is shorn the same way: first the belly, then the left rear leg, then the neck when the shearer drops to one knee and bends the head back across the other knee, and so the steps of the sheep dance continue until the sheep is shorn.

Tom releases the sheep and slaps it on the rump to direct it to a pen. The fleece is always in a pile on the shearing board, crumpled up the same way; Eustacia picks it up and flings it onto the skirting table, while Eoin quickly sweeps the tags from shearing board before Mark brings up the next sheep to be shorn.  As Tom begins to shear it, Eustacia and Alex skirt the fleece by removing the remaining tags, then Alex will stuff it into a wool bag.  Tom tells me my sheep are the most uniform he shears (only your shearer knows for sure) and I thank him for telling me. Today, my job is being grateful—somebody's got to do it—for the weather, the wool, the sheep and for my roustabout friends.

Eugene Wyatt