Jim went off to see them and a few days later, on a Friday, they turned up for work. They went hard at it all day, carting out lime, while Jim was harrowing with the tractor. On the
Saturday they worked with us till evening and we began to feel we were really getting ahead. On Sunday we went for a walk down to Loch Ness-side, in celebration, and found the trees showing a flush
of green and the first primroses in flower.
We bought fifty day-old cockerels for fattening and ordered a hundred growing pullets to be delivered in June; these were to be our winter layers.
We now found that the routine work of milking, attending to the poultry and feeding the stirks took up a lot of time, but we managed to keep abreast of the field work and at last, towards the
third week in April, we were ready to make our first sowing of corn. The weather had been blustery and uncertain for several days but we felt we couldn’t delay any longer. We sowed in the
time-honoured way, from a canvas tray slung round the neck. It was satisfying to see Jim pacing up and down, his arms moving rhythmically, the yellow seed-corn falling in a fine arc on to the brown
earth. Helen and I were standing, hand-in-hand, at the edge of the field watching him when, over the hill to the east, a great black cloud came sailing. The wind rose suddenly and a moment later
snow began to fall. Helen and I had to run for shelter but Jim went calmly on with the sowing. We stood at the kitchen window watching him till he was almost lost to view among the whirling flakes.
It seemed to me that there was something symbolic about making one’s first sowing in a snow-storm. There must be a riddle in it somewhere, I thought, but I couldn’t find the answer.
The black cloud soon passed over and the sky to the west cleared to a limpid green. As I opened the door to Jim we heard the cuckoo call quite distinctly, three times, from the birches on the
edge of the woodland. We looked at each other and smiled, A moment later Billy came in, knocking the snow from his boots. ‘It’s the cuckoo-snow’, he said, in his most
matter-of-fact voice, and he began calmly washing his hands. We knew then what it was to be bred in these hills. It meant that you took in your stride whatever came, without panic or jubilation:
that you foresaw the worst and so were quietly thankful for the best. The cuckoo sang in the snow-storm; the seed was sown. We sat down hungrily to our hot supper.
That was indeed a topsy-turvy spring. No sooner was the sowing of the corn completed than the rain came down in torrents. We stood at the kitchen window in the grey evening light and watched it
carving wide runnels in the sloping fields. It looked as though every scrap of seed would be washed clean out of the ground.
The garden plot was now securely fenced and I limed it and put in two dozen cabbage plants. I surveyed the neat rows with some satisfaction, but I had forgotten about the agility of goats. One
evening, one of them sailed blithely over the fence and in ten minutes demolished every scrap of young cabbage plant!
We lost almost half the cockerels when a gale blew out the brooder lamp one night. The robber goat died, not from a surfeit of young cabbage, but as a result of the lean winter she had had. We
had hoped to use her as a supplementary milk supply, to tide us over the cow’s dry period, before calving. But she was a trial, anyway, and as full of tricks as a box of monkeys. It took two
to milk her, one to hold her steady and the other to coax the milk into the pail. Daisy the cow, on the other hand, was so quiet and placid that you could milk her in mid-field, without even
tethering her.
‘April is the cruellest month’, I would murmur sometimes, as I watched the sleet lashing the bare ground and saw the thin, dispirited cattle-beasts stand shivering in the lee of the
steading walls. But I knew it was only a question of biding our time, of getting used to disappointments and