Herd on an Island

TRAFFICKING IN SHEEP: A Memoir—From Off-Broadway, New York, to Blue Island, Nova Scotia.

By Anne Barclay Priest. Countryman. 253 pp. $19.95

I don’t have to tell you that Anne Barclay Priest is an eccentric. All I have to tell you is that for many years she managed a flock of sheep on an island off Nova Scotia while acting in plays in New York City.

In 1971, she buys a Nova Scotia waterfront lot overlooking the hauntingly lovely Blue Island. For shelter, she brings an old house from Massachusetts (paying $800 to buy it and $6,000 to move it). When she hears that developers are nosing around the 138-acre Blue Island, she buys it to protect her view. (Modest inheritances, she says, pay for all this.) And once she owns the island, she decides to put sheep on it. This isn’t uncommon; many local islands support livestock. I once saw bison grazing quietly on an island in Blue Hill Bay, Maine, beyond the seals and porpoises.

Priest loves the region, the people, and the adventure. She becomes close friends with some of her neighbors, but not all. When she puts range cattle on the island, to clear brush before bringing in the sheep, a fisherman plants himself on her mainland property one afternoon and informs her, “Sheep are okay. Lots of people keep sheep on islands. But not critters.”

Priest pays no attention. Later, she asks another neighbor, “Do you think people would criticize me if I put pigs out on Blue Island?”

“Anne. People would criticize you if you put angels out there!”

Priest gives up on pigs and goes straight to sheep, buying her first flock of hardy Scottish blackfaces from a transplanted English sheep breeder who once worked for James Herriot. She gets a Border collie to help control her herd, and learns the immensely sophisticated, demanding, and rewarding pleasures offered by one of the world’s great dog breeds.

Priest also learns that you don’t just drop sheep on an island and leave them. Shearing, vaccinating, breeding, and culling all require trips in small craft and uncertain weather to deal with stubborn and uncooperative creatures. The tasks also require help from the community: the fishermen, carpenters, contractors, and others who own the boats, block and tackle, trucks, telephones, and everything else she finds that she needs. Despite some initial doubts, most everyone lends a hand.

In the years that follow, Priest buys another sheep farm in upstate New York, where she and the lambs spend winters. She increases her flock and watches it prosper—a favorite sheep, Mischa, races about the pasture, making beautiful balletic leaps. She buys a guard donkey to protect the sheep in New York from dogs, puts goats on the island in Nova Scotia, branches out into another sheep breed, and attends a sheep-herders’ peace mission in Israel.

A foreign correspondent before becoming an actress, Priest has a voice that’s energetic and opinionated, funny and beguiling. “Despite my being an oddity, I had the silent support of the men at the wharf,” she writes at one point. “They were always ready to help whenever I needed a hand, . . . but no one ever made me feel that I didn’t belong there. I also know that I gave considerable pleasure all around when I fell into the water, which I did about once a year.” She is firmly connected to the natural world and takes a great deal of joy in inhabiting it. And she makes us wonder why we’re eccentrically here, instead of running sheep on an island—which is clearly so much fun.

—Roxana Robinson