The Shearing Shed – Part 1: Shearing Season

"You'll want better boots," said Ben.

"These are good boots."

"They are city boots." Ben looked at them, then at Callum, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "We'll see how they do."

The sheep station lay at the end of a long gravel road in the South Island high country, a sprawl of green hills under a huge pale sky, with the Southern Alps white and sharp along the horizon. Callum, thirty, a vet from Auckland on a three-month locum, had arrived at dawn into the smell of lanolin, dust and diesel. The shearing shed rang with clippers and the shouts of men. Hundreds of sheep waited in pens.

Ben, thirty-five, was the foreman. He was broad, sunburnt and quiet, with forearms like fence posts and a soft way with animals. He handed Callum a drench gun and a clipboard and said little else.

Callum worked. He checked hooves, treated cuts, sorted lambs from ewes. By the third day his city boots were thick with mud and he had a sunburn across the back of his neck. Ben showed him how to hold a ewe so she stayed calm. He showed him the creek, the best swimming hole, the radio station that came in clearest on the ridge.

By the second week, at the end of each long day, they sat on the verandah of the cookhouse with cold beers watching the hills go gold.

"I thought you'd leave," Ben said one evening.

"I thought I would too."

"Why didn't you?"

Callum looked at his hands. "Because of the verandah. And the company on it."

Ben didn't answer for a long moment. Then he said, very quietly, "Can I kiss you?"

Continue the story: Part 2 – Lanolin.

Continue the story: Part 2 – Lanolin.