The Mysteries of Life

Farming sure keeps you in touch with the mysteries of life. Newborn calves and lambs are at one end of the scale, trucks take livestock away at the other, and there are illnesses and mishaps in between.

As a novice chook farmer, I berated myself when a young brown shaver died. It had become fly blown and I hadn't noticed - the damage was under her feathers. Now I regularly peer at the bottoms of my chooks.

Then one morning there was ruckus in the hall - thumps, bangs, the sound of running feet. I thought it was the cats playing chasey until I found a huge dead rat and big fat Tara the cat purring nearby.

After praising Tara, I picked up her prize in paper towels and showed it to the farmer.

"Lovely," he said, and it was. There wasn't a mark on this rat. Perhaps it died of fright.

These grim tales were offset a story of determination and survival.

I was soaking in the bath when a daddy longlegs near the taps decided to climb the wall. The first half metre above the bath is slippery Formica so it was tricky. But he found a rough edge and set off. Partway up he got overconfident - I could see it coming - and fell onto Patch, a mesh bathwasher with a dog face on it.

Undefeated, he tried again. After another crash landing on Patch, he made it to the next level where he found himself in another pickle simply because our bathroom needs a revamp. We never could get the Formica to fit after the plumbing was redone so it juts out rather than fits snugly against the wall.

The spider's legs were too short to reach the wall and so long he couldn’t balance on the Formica’s thin edge. What a dilemma! But this was one smart spider; he hooked a few feet over the edge of the Formica and took off. Once again overconfidence almost did him in but he saved himself with a web he quickly cobbled together as he fell.

I watched entranced as he swung over the hot tap, then clambered to the top of the web where he stood for perhaps a minute. He may have been catching his breath but I can’t verify this.

When the determined fighter made it to the safety of the curtain the show was over. And what a show it had been. After I got out of the bath I reported the spider’s hair-raising adventure to the farmer who lay on the couch engrossed in some telly programme you can watch any old night of the week.

"Lovely," he said.