This is not what I expected when first I took up farming. Even today it is hard to conjure the farmer I envisioned two decades ago. No doubt he was tweed-clad, leaning on a walking stick as he surveyed a vast fat and sassy flock of sheep. And, in truth, I have been that man, played that role, an East Tennessee member of the minor gentry. But, more often than not I have played the fool in service to the foolish. And so it was to be on this day I describe.

Lambing season brings a level of noise that is hard to convey and even harder to endure. A bucket gets rattled 50 yards away, and a mob of ewes begins bawling in hopes that the farmer has gotten the feeding time wrong. The lambs pick up the chorus. And when the lambs begin bawling, the ewes turn their attention from the din of the feed bucket and begin calling their babies, all at once, who all respond, all at once. The only sane way to handle the chaos, which restarts every half-hour, is to try desperately to shut it out.

All of which is to point out that it was hardly my fault that I ignored a bleating lamb for more than four hours. I was working in my study that morning, tuning out the periodic bleat-in-unison and along with it the small, plaintive call of a lamb. Using the skills of not listening I’ve honed over 35 years of domestic bliss, I focused instead on the tasks at hand, all the while meaning at some point to check on the annoying background noise. At lunchtime I ran some errands before returning home and taking a short nap. The bleat still continued, I noted, and filed my good intentions away to the back of my brain.

The back of the brain is an interesting place. It is where we store hard-to-retrieve items like “Don’t forget to pick up some toilet paper in town” and “Wash that grease off your hands before using the yellow towels.” And “I should probably be a good farmer and check on my livestock before doing anything else.” But, as they say, the road to hell leads to the back of the brain, or something like that.

So another half-hour went by, and I awoke refreshed and lay listening to the endless rain (six inches in 24 hours, to be precise) falling on the tin roof for a few minutes more, when, finally, I recalled the lamb’s incessant bawl. Heading downstairs, I pulled on my rain slicker, my battered fedora, and my wellingtons and sloshed out to the barnyard. The flock peered out from the hay barn, where having knocked over the carefully erected fence panels, they were busily making a mess of my neatly stacked hay bales.

Over the ever-present din I could hear one tiny voice coming from somewhere else. Sure enough, looking for yet another way to die, wedged halfway across the dam of the pond and standing in water up to its belly, was a lamb. Apparently, it had taken a wrong turn in the hill pasture and gotten separated from the flock. Doing what all good little lambs do, it had panicked, tried to take a shortcut to the barn, and gotten trapped between a thorny wild rose in front and briars behind, the steep wall of the dam above and the three-foot-deep water below. A woven wire fence across the dam prevented the simple solution of my reaching down and pulling it to safety. My attempt to wade into the pond ended when the water level reached the top of my wellingtons mere feet from shore.

Slosh, slosh, slosh back to the hay barn I went, ignoring the greedy sheep who were ignoring their distressed comrade while stuffing their faces on ill-gotten hay. I took down one of the kayaks from where they hung barnside. I grabbed the smallest because it was lighter and easier to haul back to the pond. Only when I had squeezed my 6-foot-2 frame into the six-foot craft did I wish I’d chosen the larger.

Kayaks are nifty vessels. They are light, maneuverable, and oh, so prone to tipping their contents into cold water. I kicked off from the bank and sat perched atop the boat, the overladen barge ready to offload its cargo at any second. A few strokes of the paddle brought me across the pond to within two arms’ lengths of the lamb — who about that time decided to move farther under the protection of the wild rose bush.

Finally, though, I managed amid plenty of scraping and scratching and more than a few unrepeatable oaths to get close enough to grab the damn sodden beastie and swing it into the boat. The lamb bucking and twisting, myself clinging to it with one hand and paddling with the other, the kayak lurching this way and that — it was only with much mutual surprise that we successfully crossed the pond and drifted onto the far bank.

Exiting the kayak, we both, man and lamb, stood and shook ourselves for a moment. Then the wayward babe ran to its mom, unscathed from the ordeal, and the two rejoined the general mayhem in the barn. I left them to it, as another carefully stacked round bale was being demolished, and once in the house, went directly to the freezer and took out four lamb chops to thaw.

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