Two Hundred Sheep Before Smoko and Nothing Left in My Arms

The Fourth Week of January

There is a moment, about the fortieth sheep of the second run, when the handpiece starts to feel like it weighs as much as the ewe. Everybody who shears knows it. You push through it. That is the job.

Last January, in a woolshed outside Waikari in North Canterbury, I could not push through it. I was thirty-one, eight seasons in, and I had a number in my head: two hundred before smoko, the way I had done the year before. I got to a hundred and twelve. My right forearm had gone hard and hot, like a length of fence wire under the skin, and every time I bent into the drag for a new sheep, something low in my back sent a sharp little telegram up to my neck.

I sat down on the board. You do not sit down on the board. The rousie, a teenager called Kayla who was working her first summer, looked at me like I had collapsed.

"You right, Jess?"

"Yeah," I said. "Just catching my breath."

I was not right. I had not been right for about three weeks.

Uncle Hemi

There was an older shearer on that gang called Hemi Tautahi. He was fifty-eight and had shorn in Australia, Scotland, Norway, and every shed between Kaikōura and the Waitaki. Everybody called him Uncle, including people older than him. He did not talk much on the board. He just shore, beautifully, with no wasted movement, like he was folding laundry.

At smoko he came and sat beside me on the woolshed step with his thermos. He looked at what I was eating. It was a can of energy drink and a muesli bar that had melted in the ute and set again into a strange shape.

"That your breakfast too?" he asked.

I had had a coffee at half four. That was breakfast.

He did not lecture me. He just unscrewed his thermos lid, poured out some kind of thick milky drink, and set it on the step between us. Then he unwrapped a sandwich that looked like it had a whole leftover roast in it, cut it in half with his pocket knife, and handed me the bigger side.

"Thirty years ago I was you," he said. "Strong as. Ate like a sparrow. By thirty-five my shoulders were finished and I spent two years driving a milk tanker. Kai is part of the gear, girl. Same as your combs and cutters."

How Much I Was Actually Eating

That night in the shearers' quarters, an old cottage with a fridge that hummed like a wasp, I did something I had never done. I wrote down everything I ate in a day. It took about four lines.

I had always thought of myself as someone who ate plenty. I ate big dinners. Mince and potatoes, sausages, whatever the cook put on. But I was working from five in the morning until five at night, dragging out sheep that weigh as much as I do, bent double for hours, and I was running on a bowl of food at dinner and whatever sugar I could grab in between.

Hemi had told me to book in with a sports physio in Christchurch on our next day off, a woman he had seen for his rotator cuff years before. Her name was Rachel and her clinic was above a bike shop in Sydenham. She had treated rugby players, cyclists, and, she said, more shearers than you would think, because we are basically endurance athletes who happen to be holding a sheep.

What Rachel Said

Rachel spent a long time on my back first. She pressed her thumbs along my spine and asked me to bend and twist, and she watched the way I stood up out of the bend. Then she sat me down and asked the same question Hemi had, only with a clipboard.

"What are you eating on a shearing day?"

I told her. She did not laugh, which I appreciated.

She explained it plainly. When you work muscles as hard as I was, day after day, they need fuel to work and material to repair. If they get neither, they stay sore, they get tight, they pull on your joints, and eventually something gives. My back, she thought, was mostly overloaded muscles trying to cover for tired ones. She gave me exercises, mostly boring stretches for my hips and a few for my forearms. And she told me to eat more, properly, at proper times.

Protein was the part I had been missing most. She wanted me getting a decent amount at every meal, not just at dinner. Eggs at four in the morning, which I had to train myself to cook half asleep. Leftover meat in the smoko box. Yoghurt. She said plenty of people in heavy physical jobs who struggle to eat early add a shake, and that some kind of Whey Protein mixed with milk was an easy way to get something into you when you cannot face chewing at dawn. That was what Hemi had in his thermos, it turned out. He had been drinking it for fifteen years.

The Shaker in the Smoko Box

I felt a bit silly at first. The other shearers on the gang were mostly blokes who thought anything in a tub belonged to gym people in Auckland. The first morning I shook up a scoop of Protein Powder in the dark quarters, our presser, a big laconic guy called Dougie, said, "Getting ready for a bodybuilding comp, Jess?"

Hemi said, without looking up from his boots, "She's getting ready to still have a job at forty, bro."

Nobody said anything after that.

It was not a miracle. Nothing is. But I noticed things over the next weeks. I was hungry at proper times instead of starving at strange ones. The afternoon run, the one that used to feel like wading through mud, felt like work instead of punishment. I slept harder. My forearm softened back into something that felt like an arm.

Rachel had also mentioned, on my second visit, that some people doing heavy repeated efforts look into Creatine, and she told me to read up properly and talk to my GP before deciding anything, because she did not want me grabbing every tub off a shelf like it was a fix. I did talk to my GP. I read for a while. I am still thinking about it. That was the real change, I think. I had started treating my body like it was worth thinking about.

Smoko Means Sitting Down

The biggest thing Hemi taught me had nothing to do with what was in a tub. It was smoko itself.

I had always treated breaks as a nuisance. I would stand at the pens and eat with one hand, counting my sheep on the board, working out how many I needed to make my tally. Hemi made me sit. Actually sit, on the step, with my back against the wall, for the full half hour. He said the old shearers called smoko holy for a reason.

"The sheep aren't going anywhere," he said. "You might."

So I sat. I ate. I watched the nor'wester push dust up off the hills toward the Southern Alps. I listened to Kayla tell Dougie about her nan's dog. Some days I even shut my eyes for ten minutes, which I would have been ashamed of a year earlier.

The End of the Season

I did not get my two hundred before smoko that summer. I got a hundred and eighty-one on the last day of the season, in a shed near Hawarden, with nothing hurting. It was the best number I had ever been proud of.

On the drive home, Hemi rang me, which he never does.

"You still in one piece?" he asked.

"Yeah, Uncle," I said. "Still in one piece."

"Good," he said. "Eat something." And he hung up.

I am heading back out in November. I have new combs, a better pair of moccasins, and a smoko box with three compartments, which Dougie will certainly have something to say about. I also have Rachel's number on the fridge, and a page of hip stretches stuck inside the ute's sun visor.

Mostly, though, I have the thing Hemi gave me on that step in Waikari, the half sandwich and the idea behind it. That looking after yourself is not weakness. It is just part of the gear.