I’m not sure the word has much meaning any more, based as it is in gender stereotyping. But in any case, Alice comes to mind.

With my father, hacking through the sheep carcasses with cleaver and club hammer. The smell of butchery in the kitchen on my return from school. Great piles of segmented body parts processed into plastic freezer bags and ultimately stowed away in the disguised chest freezer in the shed.

Once, thieves broke in and cleared it out. Ready-meal Reivers.

Curing deer and sheep skins, pinned out onto boards like impaled bat wings. Scraping off the remaining flesh and fat with a razor, then rubbing in salt – handfuls of crystalline, abrasive ooze. The boards stacked against the wall like work-in-progress masterpieces in an artist’s studio.

Soay sheep, uniquely, do not flock. Try to round them up, and you will fail. Essentially, you need to apply Rugby tactics. It’s all very tiring and undignified – wrestling wayward escapees to the ground, grasping the great ripple-textured horns, and the tup tugging his head, twisting, in efforts to escape.

Mostly it was to a new pasture – only rarely their impending final hour.