In the north of Iceland a farmer once walked out to his sheep house on a clear evening, found that one ewe had come in off the hill on her own and would not be moved, and went back inside and told his family to prepare for a storm. Her name was Kraga. She was a leader ewe, one of the strain of Icelandic sheep bred for a thousand years to walk at the front and read the sky, and the farmer's account of her survives in the book of leader-sheep stories a sheep breeder collected in the 1950s because the old men who remembered them were dying. The flock was out on the winter grazing, as flocks were then, and the evening gave no sign of anything. Kraga had left them and come home. She stood in the sheep house and refused the open door. The farmer had learned what that meant and did not argue. The next morning he woke to the roar of the sea and a blizzard that had come in off the Arctic in the night, the kind that killed sheep by the hundred on the open hill and men with them. His flock was in the barn, because he had gone out and fetched them in on the word of a ewe. The pattern turns up in story after story. The leader that will not go out on a fine morning. The leader that comes in from the hill at noon with no apparent reason and stands by the door. The farmers did not understand how the animal knew, and did not need to. They wrote down the date, the weather that came, and the name of the sheep, and bred from her. A few years ago Norwegian scientists ran a proper test. Flocks with a leader sheep in them, faced with a mock predator, behaved differently from flocks without one: calmer, more cohesive, less likely to scatter and die. The animal the farmers had been describing for ten centuries turned out to exist on a spreadsheet. A ewe knew the weather before the barometer did, and a hungry country bet its winter on her and won. The sheep is the animal this country uses as a byword for stupidity. In Iceland they let one decide when the flock went out.

A Melton Mowbray pork pie is pork, wrapped in pork fat, sealed with pork jelly. It was built to survive a day in the coat pocket of a man on a galloping horse. The pastry is like no other. You boil water with a block of lard until it melts, pour it hot into the flour, and work it while it is still warm. The result can be raised by hand into a tall case that will stand up on its own. It bakes as hard as a tin. The filling is fresh pork, chopped with a knife, with nothing added but salt and pepper. It cooks grey, the colour of a roast, and a real one is never pink. Then comes the clever part. As the meat cooks it shrinks away from the crust and leaves a gap. So when the pie comes out of the oven, hot stock made from boiled trotters is poured in through a hole in the lid. It sets into a jelly that fills every space and shuts out the air. That is what makes the pie keep. It was the food of the hunting field. The grooms and riders of Leicestershire needed something that would not fall apart at a fence, and from the 1830s Melton was sending them to London by stagecoach. And the pork was there for a reason. The same countryside makes Stilton. Cheesemaking leaves gallons of whey, and whey fattens pigs. The cheese fed the pig, and the pig became the pie. The recipe has been protected by law since 2009. Every part of it breaks a modern rule. It is also a complete meal you can eat with one hand, that needs no fridge and no packaging, and they solved it 200 years ago with a pig.

The lamb got its head through the stock fence on Sunday night and could not get it back, and Eduardo stood over it in the rain from dusk until the farmer found them at six. It happens. A sheep sees grass on the far side of square mesh and puts her head through, and the head goes through fine, and then she lifts it, and the ears catch, and she is held. She cannot reason backwards. She pulls, and pulls harder, and the more she pulls the more she is held, and a sheep caught in a fence overnight on a Welsh hill is a sheep the fox finds. Every farmer has found one in the morning. Not all of them were alive. The lamb is six months old, it thinks it is an alpaca, and it had gone to the fence at the top of the field at dusk and done the one thing an alpaca never would. The farmer did not see. The ewes do not care. The lamb pulled, and bleated, and pulled, and the rain came on at eight. Eduardo came up the field. He is a Huacaya alpaca whose whole living is to stand at the centre of a flock and do arithmetic on the edges of it, and the centre of the flock is where he was built to be, and he left it. He walked to the top fence and found the lamb hanging in the wire by its neck in the dark, and he stood next to it, and he did not leave. The farmer's daughter's sound box was on the post twenty yards along. She has the night. The lamb bleats, and the alpaca hums, and the lamb bleats, and the alpaca hums, every few minutes, for ten hours, in the rain, and twice in the recording there is a sound she had not heard him make before, a hard high alarm, and the second time it is followed by something going away fast through the hedge. The lamb stopped bleating at about three. The hum did not stop. The farmer found them at six. An alpaca standing square over a lamb that was lying flat with its head still in the wire, soaked through, cold, with its eyes open, and a cream animal above it with the rain running off him who had not eaten or sat or moved since the light went. He cut the wire. The lamb came out and lay there, and then got up, and shook, and went to stand under the alpaca's chin, and Eduardo put his nose down into the wet wool on the top of its head and hummed, once, low, the one from the glossary that the farmer has always said means all present and correct, and the farmer, who is not a man given to any of this, had to go and look at the hedge for a minute. He has told his wife the alpaca is not for sale. His wife said nobody had suggested it. He said he knew. He said he was just saying.

In the early 1980s doctors in Cambridge laid premature babies on lambswool, and the babies grew faster. They were the smallest patients in the hospital. 34 infants, born weighing about two and a half pounds, lying in incubators. The standard bedding was a cotton sheet. A psychologist and a paediatrician had heard that mothers in Australia and New Zealand put newborns to sleep on lambskins, and that the babies seemed more settled. So they ran a proper trial. Half the babies were nursed on cotton. Half were nursed on a pad of lambswool. Nothing else was changed. The result went into the Lancet in 1983. The babies on wool put on 22.7 grams a day. The babies on cotton put on 18.6. That is nearly a quarter more growth, in children for whom every gram is a step away from danger, from changing what they lay on. Nobody was entirely sure why. Wool holds a layer of still, warm air against the skin. It takes up moisture without feeling damp. It gives under a body where a sheet does not. Hospitals had known a version of this for a long time. For decades a patient who was bedbound was put on a sheepskin to stop the skin breaking down, and trials in Australia later confirmed that real sheepskin prevents bedsores. Then came the synthetic version. A sheet of polyester pile that could be boiled and cost a fraction as much. It looked the part. It does not do the job. A ewe grows the best thing ever found for a newborn to lie on, and a lamb is born onto it. The hospital tested that against the alternative and wool won. The alternative was cheaper, so that is what most babies get.

Hector put his head on the ground on Sunday so that a donkey could groom his neck, and he has done it every afternoon since. Horses scratch each other. Two that are bonded stand nose to tail and work their teeth along the other's withers, the ridge at the base of the neck where a horse cannot reach himself, and it is not a small thing. A horse being groomed there drops his heart rate the way a man does when somebody he trusts puts a hand on his shoulder. It is how a herd says the thing it has no other way of saying. Hector had nobody to do it with for seventeen years. A horse on State and Ceremonial is groomed by a man with a brush, which is clean and thorough and nothing whatsoever like being groomed. So in Denbighshire he turned, one afternoon, and offered his withers to the only other animal in the field, the way a horse does, and the donkey's teeth landed on the middle of his back, because Nelson's head comes up to about the horse's chest and no amount of goodwill will change that. Nelson chewed at a patch of flank for a while, politely, and then went back to his hay. Hector stood there with his neck itching. On Sunday the farmer looked out at about three and the horse was lying down. Not asleep. Down on his chest in the grass with his legs folded under him, the way he has only lately learned to do, with his head stretched out along the ground, and the donkey was standing over him with his teeth in the horse's mane, working along the top of the neck from the ears to the withers, slowly, with great concentration, like a man trimming a hedge. Hector's eye was half shut. His lip was hanging. Seventeen hands of Cavalry Black lay in a Welsh field like a dropped coat and was groomed by an animal a third his size, and the donkey, who has never asked anybody for anything, moved a few inches along and carried on. Then Nelson stopped and turned, and stood, and presented his own withers, which are at about the height of a kitchen table. The horse lifted his head off the ground, took the donkey's mane in his teeth, and groomed it without getting up. They were at it for twenty minutes. The farmer's wife came out to see what he was looking at and the two of them stood at the window and did not speak, because there was nothing to add, and because in thirty years of horses neither of them had seen one go to the ground to be scratched. He lies down now at about three every day. The donkey walks over. The farmer has stopped looking out at three, because he says it feels like reading somebody's letters.

Things the stupidest animal on the farm can do. - Recognise 50 different faces and remember them for 2 years - Pick a photo of a person it knows out of a line-up, including, in one Cambridge experiment, Barack Obama - See 320 degrees without turning its head - Rotate its eyeballs in their sockets so the pupils stay level while it grazes - Diagnose itself with worms and go and eat the plant that treats them - Teach that medicine to its lamb - Memorise a mountain, pass the map to its daughters, and never need a fence - Grow a fireproof coat, a waterproof coat and a winter coat, and have them be the same coat - Turn rock and rain into milk, meat, leather and 8 lambs - Survive 5 years on a hill that would kill a human in a night Follow one through a gate and we call it a sheep, as an insult. The gate was ours. It was going somewhere.

Hector went down with colic on Thursday night, and Nelson, who has never hurried in his life, walked the yard with him for an hour and a half. The farmer found him at ten, pawing, looking round at his own flank, dropping down and getting up again, which in a horse means his gut has stopped and you ring the vet and you walk him. You walk him so he does not roll, because a horse that rolls with a twisted gut can finish himself, and you walk him because walking sometimes shifts it, and you walk him because it is the only thing you can do and standing there is worse. The vet was forty minutes away. So the farmer put a headcollar on seventeen hands of trembling Cavalry Black and led him out of the shelter, round the yard, under the light, and the horse, who has walked in step beside a man for seventeen years, walked in step beside a man, with sweat coming through the thick new coat and his eye white at the corner. Nelson came out of the shelter behind them. A donkey walks when there is a reason to walk, and the reason is usually grass. He had been in his dry corner, in the straw, with the night exactly as he likes it, and he came out into the yard without being called, fell in on the horse's off side, and walked. The farmer did one lap. The donkey did one lap. The farmer did twenty laps and the donkey did twenty laps, at the horse's pace, two feet from his shoulder, and did not stop, and did not graze, and did not once look at the gate. When Hector tried to go down, the donkey was in the way. Not pushing. Standing where the horse wanted to drop, so the horse had to stay up. The vet came at twenty to eleven. He put a needle in the neck and the thing eased inside half an hour, which it usually does when it is going to, and Hector passed a load in the corner of the yard that the farmer said was the finest thing he had ever seen a horse do. The vet asked how long the donkey had been walking. The farmer said since ten. The vet said in twenty years he had seen a lot of people walk a colic and had never once seen anything else do it. By midnight Hector was eating hay, carefully, with Nelson next to him. The donkey had walked further in ninety minutes than he walks in a week, and he went back into the straw and lay down without looking at anybody. The farmer went in and sat at the kitchen table in his coat for a while. He is not a man who sits at the kitchen table in his coat. A horse has never asked that donkey for anything. The donkey has never been given an order. Somewhere in there they have come to an arrangement, and on Thursday night it was walking.

Keith went to Harvest Festival on Sunday, which the whole parish had privately assumed he would, and the only thing he took was the one thing in the building nobody was ever going to eat. The Reverend leaves the churchyard gate open for him now on the standing arrangement, so the Anglo-Nubian had done the east section by nine and was working the north side when the produce began arriving. Harvest is the one Sunday the south porch is propped open from eight, because a church cannot be decorated through a closed door, and a procession of women with trugs went in and out of it for an hour under his direct observation. He did not go in. He watched the door the way he watches a latch, which is to say he was not watching the door at all, he was watching the people who open it, and by half past nine he had the pattern. Inside, the display had gone up the way it goes up every year. Marrows down the chancel step, the biggest at the end. A pyramid of Bramleys on the font cover. Tins for the food bank along the back pew, which is what Harvest mostly is now, and which everybody agrees is more use than a pumpkin. Jars of chutney with gingham lids. And on the altar rail, as there has been every year since anybody can remember, a sheaf of wheat, tied with a ribbon, standing up in a jug, grown on the one arable farm in the parish and brought down by the family in the same Volvo they have brought it down in since 1998. He came in during the second hymn, which is when he came in last time. There is, Dave thinks, something about a congregation on its feet with its eyes on a book that a goat finds procedurally convenient. He walked the length of the nave with the unhurried air of a surveyor returning to a site he has already reported on. He passed the marrows without a glance, including the one at the end, which was Steve's, and which Steve had entered at the show in August and been beaten by a woman from the next village, and which Steve had brought to Harvest anyway in the spirit, he said, of the season. Keith passed it. Steve, in the fourth pew, watched him pass it. It is not clear which of them found that harder. He passed the Bramleys, having a view on Bramleys, which is that they are for pigs. He passed the tins entirely. A tin is not food and never has been, and whatever the parish was expecting from a goat in a church at Harvest, it was not that degree of discrimination. He reached the altar rail. He looked at the sheaf. Mrs Pelham, in the second pew, said afterwards that he considered it for about as long as she considers a cake stall, and came to the same decision. He ate it. All of it, ears down the stalk, the heads first and then the straw, the ribbon left in the jug like a receipt, while the congregation sang about ploughing and scattering and the Reverend, who has now had this animal in his church twice and has stopped pretending it is an emergency, carried on to the end of the verse and gave him the last line. The Volvo family were, by all accounts, delighted. The sheaf is decoration. Nobody eats a sheaf. It stands on the altar rail for a fortnight, goes brown, and gets put on the compost, and this year it went into an Anglo-Nubian rumen in front of the whole village and came out, in due course, as cheese. He left during the notices, as before. He was found in the lane eating cow parsley, as before. Dave, who had not been in church because somebody has to be at home checking gates on a Sunday, got the phone call, as before. The tins went to the food bank on Monday, every one of them, untouched, because he knew what they were. Dave's log: "Harvest. He took the sheaf and nothing else. Steve's marrow was six feet away and he left it. I am not going to tell Steve that I think that was deliberate. Ecclesiastical column now on a second page." The Reverend has asked whether he could come to Christmas. Dave has not said no.