Bodacious: The Shepherd Cat
BODACIOUS: THE SHEPHERD CAT is a heart-warming and charming tale in which Bodacious tells us about life as The Shepherd Cat on Black Sheep Farm.‘I am Bodacious, The Shepherd Cat , and this is my story. I wasn't always called Bodacious. I must have been called something else in my kitten-hood in the nearby city of Kilkenny, but it's all a bit of a mystery to My Human. As far as she's concerned, I appeared one day and have never left. It's a secret I plan to keep.’Written from the perspective of Bodacious the cat, this is a beautifully written memoir of Bodacious’s life on the farm and everything that entails – early mornings, frosty starts, beautiful sunrises, adventurous rare-breed Zwartbles sheep, hard work, entertaining animals, mouth-watering food, kind people and idyllic country living with its highs and lows.The Shepherd often tells Bodacious her favourite story of how she went out to buy red ribbon to wrap a gift for her friend, but instead came home with a gift for herself: a daring, assertive, ambitious cat looking for a home. But soon The Shepherd realises she needs Bodacious as much as he needs her. As soon as he arrives, Bodacious saunters around the farm like he owns the place and immediately establishes himself as Top Cat. But Bodacious isn’t content to pad round the house and curl up by the Aga, and soon he befriends a farm cat called Oscar who trains him in the ways of the farm. As well as Oscar, Bodacious gets to know all the other animals on the farm – cats Miss Marley and Ovenmitt, the scruffy border collie/fox terrier-cross called Pepper, and The Big Fellow, to name a few.With wonderful characterisation, humour, sharp observation, and a plucky attitude, Bodacious shows us the ropes of Black Sheep Farm. As we soak in the atmosphere of the house, the orchards and the fields, we also learn how this Top Cat Shepherd got his name – by being 'Big, bold, beautiful, bolshie', as his Shepherd always says…
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HarperElement
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First published by HarperElement 2018
FIRST EDITION
Text © Suzanna Crampton 2018
Photographs © Suzanna Crampton, unless otherwise specified
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018
Suzanna Crampton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover photographs © Suzanna Crampton (cat, left sheep)/Shutterstock.com (background, right sheep)
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008275853
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008275860
Version: 2018-05-21
To my parents, Julia and Richard Crampton
‘We abuse land because we see it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.’
ALDO LEOPOLD
Contents
1. Egg-makers and Spring Flowers
3. Horses, Horses and More Horses
6. Lazy Days and Family Visits
I am Bodacious, The Shepherd Cat, and this is my story. I wasn’t always called Bodacious. I must have been called something else in my kittenhood in the nearby city of Kilkenny, but it’s all a bit of a mystery to my human. As far as she’s concerned, I appeared one day and have never left. It’s a secret I plan to keep.
The Shepherd told me the story of how she found me so many times and added so many embellishments that it’s almost become a fairy ‘tail’. She walked into a Kilkenny flower shop one day in search of red ribbon for a friend’s birthday present, a clear-glass handblown goblet with herbs planted in it. She described it in great detail: about the herbs being green, the soil brown, and the ribbon a deep red. (The Shepherd gets very excited about this kind of thing.) The florist goes by the romantic name of Lamber de Bie and the shop is tucked away on a narrow cobbled street near Kilkenny Castle. The lady who worked there, Jaszia, told The Shepherd that because it was just after Valentine’s Day, she was out of red ribbon but she did have a cat.
‘Maybe you might be interested in him,’ Jaszia said, knowing The Shepherd only too well. ‘You know the shop that sells the novelty toilet seats just down the hill towards the castle? Well, there’s a cat there that walked in off the streets. Sadly, the shop owner can’t keep him as she has three dogs at home.’
‘I’ll go down and have a look,’ said The Shepherd. Of course she said she’d have a look – she loves animals and has a whole menagerie of us on the family farm, but more of that later. She told me that when she came into the shop, she saw me wandering around in amidst all of these brightly coloured transparent plastic toilet seats. They were all full of strange things like barbed wire, straw, even coral reefs and tropical fish. She, of course, assumed I owned the place, but I had only been there for three days. Cheeky! As if a place that sold novelty toilet seats would in any way be suitable for a cat like me. She also told me that I was found wearing a pink collar with pictures of blue mice running around it – clearly somebody’s idea of a joke, but it showed that once, someone else loved me, too.
The shop owner had done everything possible to find my original owner, and there wasn’t a person in Kilkenny who hadn’t heard the radio appeal, but no one came forward. I could be sad about that, I suppose, but I’m not, because if I hadn’t walked into the toilet-seat shop a few days before, I would never have met The Shepherd. I would never have had the life I have now on Black Sheep Farm, in small green fields above the banks of the River Nore. The land has been in The Shepherd’s family for many generations, so every building and field has a name and a known unwritten history, like the Wind-Charger Field, where once a windmill stood and spun to generate electricity for the farm in the 1940s.
The Shepherd kept me inside at first, because she said she didn’t want me to disappear again, at least not until I knew the place as home. It was thoughtful of her, but what she didn’t know was that I thought of it as home from the moment I set foot in it. Still, for two weeks I curled up by the Aga, or looked out the window at the huge horse chestnut trees with mountains beyond, which were quite pleasant. I got to know others in my family, too, which was useful because I was able to establish myself firmly as almost Top Cat.
