A Tale of Two Ewes

Two stories, each with a death but one ending in hope.

Both accounts concern our role as caretakers in the nurturing of life and the inevitable taking of it that is ever-present on a farm. The stories are twinned together in this work, born in the blood and hope of birth before one day vanishing into decay and dust. There is no hiding from the harsh light of reality any more than we can avoid the reaper. For the farmer, no bureaucrat, politician, or soldier is on hand to shield him from weakness, standing ready to do his dirty work. No amount of ritual washing of hands while passing off decisions to a mob will absolve the choices made in his name. It is in the final accounting of what happens between those two events that matters for all living things. When, on some occasions, the “green fire” fades from an animal’s eyes, the farmer will have been on hand and watched it fade, perhaps having even been the agent of execution. Yet having been a good husband and shepherd to his charges, he will find his sad peace in it. And on better days (hopefully more often than not), through his care and nursing the light will flare back into eyes that had dimmed. Then faith and promise are renewed.

 

Killing a Ewe

No words. We both look at each other and nod agreement. I walk back to the house in the rain. This inescapable part of farming life seems never to occur on sunny days. Sad duties always require sad days for their completion.

Upstairs, next to the bed, leaning against the wall in a corner is a single-shot 16 gauge kept on hand for just these days. I pick it up and also grab a couple of shells of buckshot from a box. If an old shotgun sticks around long enough it eventually will accumulate an untold history of the most wretched uses. Killing a ewe is certainly among the most cheerless occupations for this instrument—and for the one who pulls the trigger.

I slog through the cold rain and muck back to the barn and the warm, steaming, false comfort inside. Cindy has shooed the rest of the flock out into the outer corral. Given that privacy I approach the pen where the ewe, who has lost both lambs and has prolapsed twice, stands in pain and already dying. I raise the gun, and she obligingly nuzzles the end of the barrel. I say goodbye out loud as I fire one blast, and she mercifully falls dead.

I eject the smoking shell and place the gun on a feed barrel. We each grab a leg and pull the dead ewe from the pen and down the alley of the working chute, a smear of blood marking the path on the gravel. We load the still-warm carcass into the waiting tractor bucket. We return to the barn and pick up two healthy just-born lambs, then coax their mother into a lambing pen where we can keep an eye on all three. The late afternoon becomes evening. We finish our late-day rounds of feeding and watering the sheep, hogs, cattle, chickens, and even the greens in the hoop house before I find the time to dispose of the dead ewe.

Throughout the night and into the predawn we will take turns checking on the flock of pregnant ewes and nursing ewes and their lambs.

 

Saving a Ewe

“Breech,” Cindy said.

One of our favorite ewes, Bunny (you can always know a favorite if she has been named) is in labor. She had shown signs of lambing earlier in the day, but it wasn’t until evening that the contractions began. After another hour of watchful waiting without any lambs born, Cindy makes an internal examination and discovers a large lamb in the birth canal. It is breeched, butt-end first and back legs folded under the lamb’s body. Further complicating the delivery, a second lamb is crammed head-first alongside the first—like double plugs in a drain. It’s clear that nothing will pass through without intervention.

Bunny is a seven-year-old ewe with a slightly swayed back from many multi-lamb pregnancies and a Holstein udder that swings close to the ground. She still has good teeth, though, so she can still graze, and she delivers healthy lambs, mostly twins and occasionally triplets, year after year and mothers them expertly. She clearly has grit, but it is also obvious that she is now in serious distress.

Fortunately for both of us, even after twenty-four years of raising sheep, cattle, and hogs, our experiences with difficult births remain minimal. Most of our ewes have been able to lamb easily, a trait we have selected for in our breeding program. The downside of this good providence is that our skills in dealing with a breech or other malpresentation remains rusty from lack of practice. At risk of losing both mother and lambs, we agree: it’s time to call in the vet.

An hour and half later, at 9:30 p.m., we are on the ground in the barn with our large-animal vet. (Having pulled him from his daughter’s first birthday celebration, we find that the eventual bill reflects the inconvenience.) By this time, the second lamb has somehow receded from the vaginal opening and the breeched lamb has been partially expelled by painful exertions. The vet pulls out the now-dead lamb. Its back end is cold; the front end is still warm in the birth canal. He lays it on the hay floor. Taking the very large, well-formed lamb in hand, I carry it from the barn with a plan to dispose of it in the morning.

The birth canal now clear, the vet pulls two live lambs from Bunny in quick succession. Each is exhausted and the third lamb, the smallest, is barely moving after the long-delayed entry into this world. The usual practice with delayed or difficult lambing is to rub the lamb vigorously, stick a straw in its nose to stimulate breathing, and, if needed, grab it by the legs and swing it gently to clear the airways of mucous—all of which we do.

After another few minutes both lambs are breathing and already struggling to get on their feet and nurse. The smaller third-born, a ewe lamb (the other is a large ram lamb), is unable to stand. Her back legs are splayed out and almost appear to be disjointed. Triplets are packed in the womb tight, and this one must have had her legs back for much of her time in the birth canal. We work throughout the night, taking turns during barn visits, to massage the legs until, at last, the little lamb can stand on her own. (Bunny also experienced temporary paralysis in her back end from the difficult labor and was unable initially to stand. The vet and I each grabbed a side and held her up for a few minutes. She stood, wobbly, but remained on her feet and got to the immediate job of cleaning the newborns. The vet gave her both a steroid injection for the pain and a preemptive antibacterial shot in case there were tears in the uterus from the delivery.) The farm vet—an hour after arriving, makes a quick exit, shouting over his shoulder, “I’ll send you the bill in the morning.”

Neither lamb is yet nursing; neither is standing well on its own. We prepare a substitute colostrum (the high-nutrient first milk) replacer, insert a tube down the throat and into the stomach of each lamb, and feed them. Cindy repeats this procedure twice between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. I arise at 4:30 and find a note on the coffee pot alerting me that the ram lamb is now nursing on his own. I tube-feed the smaller, wobbly ewe lamb in those early hours and again around 7.

By the time we get back out to do our morning chores, both lambs are up and walking around and both are nursing on their own. Later in the day, as well as the next, we continue to give poor Bunny a steroid shot to ease her pain. A couple of days more and she is fully recovered, albeit with some continued bleeding from the traumatic delivery. Her lambs are also fully recovered: they come to their mother when called and nurse frequently and vigorously like healthy lambs do.

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Reading this weekend: Down and Out in Paris and London (G. Orwell); A Voice Crying in the Wilderness: Notes from a Secret Journal (E. Abbey); and Great American Fishing Stories (ed. L. Underwood).

 

The Readings Gone By

Like most, I pick up books to suit the mood and moment. Many times, when I just want some entertainment, a Lee Child, John Sandford, or Bernard Cornwell novel fits the bill. But, and this is not an indictment of those authors, the plots and writing soon fade from memory. Their works are the cheese dip and the cheesecake, not the entrée. They are not the books I recall while sitting on the porch before dawn. Nor are they the books I want to press into a nephew’s hand, saying, “Read this, it is important. It will take you places, make you want to upend your life.”

Here are 10 books from the past year (numbered by chronology, not preference) that meant the most to me. Books that took me out of my small world, connected me to the broader course of humanity, and made me glad to have had the experience. Works that were either artfully written, engrossing, or informative … or, in a few instances, all three at the same time.

  1. Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey, 1968). I was surprised one cold winter day to realize I had not read this oft-mentioned work. So, this time last year, I got myself to the Book Eddy in Knoxville and picked up a copy. This book is a beautiful, haunting, angry, and often funny work on the desert Southwest, a region Abbey feared was changing too fast, one I fear he would now find gone. Every sentence is a Wiki-quote.
  2. Southern Harvest (Clare Leighton, 1942). Based on the English illustrator’s time spent in North Carolina, it contains vignettes of rural Southern life. Most but not all pieces are sensitively written and wonderfully illustrated. I loved her woodcuts so much that Cindy located a numbered print for my Christmas present.
  3. Grey Seas Under (Farley Mowat, 1958). This book sat on my shelf for 20 years before I took it down to read. Sometimes you just know that if given time you will get around to a book, so why rush the experience? This is the story of an Atlantic salvage tug and the men who operated her off the coast of Canada from 1930 to 1948. It’s the absolutely riveting history of a ship masquerading as an edge-of-the-seat thriller. These sailors and their vessel had more of what it takes than any group of men you are ever likely to meet: daredevil rescues amid towering seas in icy waters day after day (and even more often, night after night), year after year — everyday heroics by uncommon people that make you proud to be of the same species.
  4. Cræft (Alexander Langlands, 2017). An antidote to the mass age, Cræft (not to be confused with “craft”) looks at the broad-based skills needed to survive in the old world. Putting up hay in medieval Europe, for example, required not only the knowledge to cut, cure, and store feed, but also to make and maintain a scythe, plant the forage, save the seed…. Today, we tend to learn, if we can be bothered, just a limited part of any craft. This book is a humbling reminder of how we have specialized ourselves into irrelevance yet still claim to be masters.
  5. Localism in the Mass Age (Mark Mitchell and Jason Peters, Eds., 2018). Styled as the Front Porch Republic Manifesto, it is a compendium of some of today’s more interesting writers on localism. This one has introduced me to a whole range of authors who suck away my spare time.
  6. The Last Grain Race (Eric Newby, 1956). Here’s another one picked up at the Book Eddy, a small, expertly curated out-of-print bookstore. I loved this book so much that I sought out a first edition (found cheap in Australia). But, first I read the Penguin orange-cover paperback. The plot: the author chucks advertising career at the tender age of 18 and signs on to sail on one of the last tall-masted ships, leaving out of Belfast for Australia to pick up grain, in 1938. A there-and-back-again tale about his stoic Finnish officers (who spoke little to no English), a polyglot crew, lice, rats, fights, clambers up rotten rigging in pitching seas and howling winds — all played out to the backbeat of approaching WW2, yet written with a touching and self-deprecating humor that makes you wish you had been on board. It now occupies a special place in my library.
  7. Round of a Country Year (David Kline, 2017). Kline is an Amish farmer who puts out a quarterly magazine, Farming (Remind me to resubscribe). This book is a simple diary of the farmer’s year. It’s the kind of work that has me dreaming of being a better steward and neighbor, of getting it right this year, or at least next.
  8. Fruitful Labors (Mike Madison, 2018). Ditto the Kline book. I knew the writing of Madison’s sister, Deborah, a creator of cookbooks, first. But this somewhat practical, often philosophical, work on farming in Northern California reeled me in with the author’s understanding, commitment, and struggle to manage a productive farm. Better written than I expected (and perhaps than I deserved, since the copy was given to me by the publisher), it sat on my to-read shelf for most of the year, the whiff of obligation wafting from its pages. Finally I read it, and for you farmers out there, I’d recommend it. You will be better for it. I know I am.
  9. Payne Hollow (Harlan Hubbard, 1974). I didn’t know much about Harlan Hubbard, other than that Wendell Berry wrote of him and he was mentioned by similar authors. I picked up this reprint at the Berry Center in New Castle, Kentucky. It is the autobiography of Harlan and his wife, Anna, as they settled down to live a life off the grid on the edge of the Ohio River in the 1950s. Simple, well-written, it kind of makes you regret every tie that binds you to this stinkin’ system.
  10. Conversations With Wendell Berry (Morris Grubbs, Ed., 2007). Goddamnit, Wendell Berry! Even the transcripts of his conversations are good and often great. This one was picked up just to say I owned it, for the bragging rights (Hear me loud and clear, Clem). So, I planned to read just one interview before placing it on the shelf. But then I read another, then another, until 213 pages later I ran out of reading. For Berry fans, pick it up. For those who don’t know Berry, pick it up.

I dream this January of a book yet to be found, at random, in a stack, discarded by a library for a sale. A forgotten and never-checked-out castoff that will make me fall in love with reading again and again, that will change me in ways I haven’t considered. A book that causes me, the next time I see you, to say, “Have you read…?”

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Reading this weekend: The Last Cowboys, a pioneer family in the new west (Branch). 

Chill Hours

There is no pretending that this is anything but a misery, walloping a completely frozen cistern in the vain hope of finding water in the depths. Nothing for it now but to head up to the house 300 yards a way and start lugging buckets of water. Two three-gallons at a time, filled at the hydrant. Stoop, stand, walk, repeat. Three times a day.

This might be a good time to call upon my reserve of latent Scandinavian DNA, that inner vast, untapped, frozen reservoir of stoic resolve. Or, perhaps I could mitigate the effects of the cold by cursing like my great-great-uncle, a merchant marine captain legendary for his facility at swearing within a word. I try my hand. “Miser-damn-able weather!” I say. It is the best I can muster, and it does nothing to thaw the cistern or warm my toes. It does, however, bring a smile to my frozen cheeks.

It’s a smile that quickly fades as I peer into the hoop-house. The collards and mustard greens — at a balmy 69 degrees, they benefit from the radiant warmth of Old Sol as all outside struggles to hit 18 — need water. Stoop, stand, walk, repeat, repeat, repeat. Miser-damn-able weather.

I walk the quarter-mile to the mailbox, in and of itself a feat of Shackleton proportions. It’s the wind that does me in. Zero, sunny, and calm I can handle. But any wind at 18 degrees is “in-goddamn-sufferable.” (Eureka! esteemed mariner, I think I have it!)

What I don’t have are the seed catalogs. And what I want more than anything, having now accrued enough chill hours for this gardener to go dormant and prepare to bud, is to while away my evenings dreaming of a better garden. One that this year will be free of flea beetles, squash borers, and potato bugs; one that will sport well and timely mulched rows and neatly trellised crops, receive just the right amount of rain at just the right moments, with temperatures not too hot, not too cold. Not too much to ask.

Even the inestimable SESE hippies have let me down. Still lost in 1969, they are late in delivering. I imagine the whole collective hard at work, turning the crank on the old mimeograph and hand-stapling the 2018 catalog, before all climb into their beflowered VW bus for the annual trip to the post office and the mailing of their excellent offerings.

Fat lot of good that does me right now. I could break dormancy at any moment.

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Reading this weekend: Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. and, Southern Harvest, by Clare Leighton.