An offer of cash

One day we had some small parcels of sheep to kill.

Two lots were on either side of a fairly busy road into South Molton.  There was a large lay by on one side of the road, and sheep hurdles had been left ready for us by the army.

Hurdles were essential when you were doing jobs like this.  They allowed you to build pens in which to herd the animals and then kill them.  Once the stock was dead, we would spray them with disinfectant, and the hurdles would be pressure washed off and taken to the next job by an army team.

It was a small thing that the army got right.  The only hitch was that sometimes, despite the fact that we were told that the hurdles were on the job waiting for us, we would arrive and find nothing.  Some clever thieves had bought themselves army fatigues from a surplus store, and were following the soldiers around picking up the hurdles for re-sale or scrap.  If challenged by a farmer, or anyone else, they just claimed to be from the army, and got away with it.  They had hundreds of sheep hurdles, and quite a few pressure washers using this method.

Anyway, to our relief, we found our hurdles waiting for us.

The sheep were penned up by the drovers, and while we killed the first lot on one side of the road, the drovers organised the next lot on the opposite side.

As we had to move from one batch of stock to another, and cross a road, Tony and I disinfected and changed outer overalls in the lay by.  Rarely for us, we were wearing white suits that day; our precious blue suits were in short supply, and the sheep didn't seem to 'spook' like cattle when they saw someone in white.

We stripped off our white suits, and were just putting them into a black sack to be left with the dead sheep when a car skidded past us and then reversed alongside us and the passenger window was lowered.

"What are you doing with them?" the driver asked.

"What do you mean?" I replied.

"Those white suits, what happens to them now?"

Thinking that this was someone who was anxious about Bio Security, I started to explain the procedure to the driver.

"I'll have them" the driver said, as he produced a wedge of banknotes.

"No you f*cking won't!" Tony said.  "Unless you want to end up under that lot, you'd better do one!"

The driver took the hint, and sped off.  Tony and I exchanged disapproving glances, put our clean suits on, and walked across the road.

"What did he want?" Mac asked.

"Don't ask."

To this day, I don't know who the man was.  He could have been a farmer wanting to get rid of his stock; he could have been a journalist testing us out; or it could have just been a chancer.  Whoever he was, it changed the way we did things.  From then on, we hid our bag of dirty suits amongst the dead animals, just in case.

Weeks later, I drove past that same spot, and those sheep were still stacked up on the side of the road.  They became a macabre local landmark for passing traffic.