Tag Archives: sheep

Delores Visits the Country

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It is both a joy and a curse to have a tin roof on the farmhouse. The slightest patter of rain, easily ignored on the now-conventional shingled roof, is instantly audible on the metal. There is usefulness in lying in bed and listening as the rain begins; you don’t need to tune in to the radio for the forecast, much less peer out the window, to know which way the wind blows.

The curse is that it serves as an unwanted alarm clock in the pre-dawn hours: a reminder that the barn jacket is still hanging on the fence post, that a favorite hand tool is in the back of the pickup, that you have a dozen things to complete, rain or shine, the next day. Once awake, you hear the dogs bark … and you start wondering if Delores has escaped her paddock, again. And so the day begins. The brain shifts into gear, and you roll out of bed, unwillingly, and get dressed. And as you make coffee and step out into the early morning, whatever rain you may have heard on that tin roof has moved on to other pastures. The day, when it dawns, will be with clear skies.

LambDelores 1-19-15 005

Twin sisters.

As I went about my chores this morning, I found that no new lambs had been born and the new hog, Delores, was still contained. The previous morning during feeding had revealed another ewe with brand-new healthy and active twins. The score for lambing season to date is 6 ewes:11 lambs; 9 ewe lambs:2 ram lambs; 14 more ewes to go. As with all new births, yesterday morning’s mom and babies were separated into a lambing pen, where they will stay for a day or two. The maternity ward gives us a chance to observe and a chance for the mother to adequately bond with her new offspring. Today or tomorrow, she will be turned out with the other new moms and their charges.

Delores considers dinner.

Delores considers dinner.

Yesterday, we spent the bulk of the morning reinforcing one of the pig paddocks near the gardens to receive an incoming pregnant gilt. We had not intended to get back into breeding stock, but a number of our local sources for feeder pigs have had troubles this winter and have nothing to show for their labors. That, rightfully, should be a warning to us as well. But we plunged ahead and made a bargain to purchase Delores instead. She should farrow for the first time around the beginning of March.

Delores, a yearling black pig of about 200 pounds, had heretofore been a pet. The woman selling her said she hadn’t realized how fast and large pigs grew. Cindy headed out late morning to pick up the hog. I, meanwhile, spent the time butchering and cleaning roosters. I was just finishing scrubbing down the equipment after packaging and freezing the birds when she returned, Delores in tow.

We had a quick late lunch and easily introduced Delores into her new, spacious digs. We secured her with the final bit of fencing, gave her fresh water and retired for our afternoon nap.

Awaking refreshed, we had our coffee before heading out to do our late-afternoon chores. Dinner guests would arrive within a couple of hours, and dinner would need to be prepared. We stopped by the pig paddock first. Spotting the hog panel thrown up at an odd angle, we knew immediately that “Houston, we have a problem.”

Delores, in the space of an hour and half, had escaped from her paddock through an unsecured hog panel, trundled down a ravine, been discovered in a neighbor’s front yard, enticed into a goat pen, escaped from that pen, and walked back up the hill into the ravine. And that is where we found her, 200 yards down a steep hill from where she had begun to explore the countryside. It should have ended in a catastrophe. But within five minutes she had followed Cindy, and a bucket of feed, back home. We spent the next 30 minutes reinforcing the fencing, then completing chores, before heading in to cook for our evening guests.

Which is undoubtedly why, this morning at 4 a.m., I awoke to the feather-light rain on the roof and wondered, “Where is Delores?”

Life and death in a rearview mirror

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St. Patrick’s Day 2012 and our guests were arriving in the next hour for an annual dinner of corned pork. We corn a pork shoulder and cook it with cabbage and potatoes from the garden and larder. Invited friends come out, less for any shared heritage and more for a convivial evening of good food, drink, and conversation.

While final preparation moved forward, one of the yearling Katahdin ewes had been trying to lamb. She had been walking around in the pasture showing all the usual signs, and those signs eventually included a very large head protruding from her back end. We left her alone hoping she would get on with the job. Half an hour later, with no signs of progress, we moved her into a lambing pen in the barn.

We were both dressed for the get-together, not fancy duds, but nevertheless cleaned up with fresh clothes. Another half-hour went by and the ewe had made no further progress. We decided it was time to intervene. As I held the ewe, Cindy put her hand in the birth canal and extracted the forelegs. The head protruding showed no sign of life, and it looked grotesquely swollen. Applying pressure in sync with the ewe’s contractions, Cindy gradually pulled the lifeless lamb out. She then began swinging it by all four legs, then handed it to me to continue the exercise.

I grasped the slippery legs and swung, without any conviction that there would be any life in the limp body. But after a few minutes I saw the lamb begin to breathe. Cindy had meanwhile cleaned up the mother and filled up a fresh water pail. The lamb was a striking golden red and huge, at least 10 pounds. She looked exactly like a Hereford calf.

We emerged from the barn spattered with gore to find our guests beginning to pull up in their cars and trucks. We welcomed them, went back out to show them the mother and baby. The lamb was already on its feet nursing and seemed no worse for the long afternoon.

The vivid memory came back in detail this week as I drove my truck to the slaughterhouse. That golden red lamb, now grown with two lambings of her own, had reached the end of her time on our farm. We had decided to cull her. Her mother, as a Katahdin, is a hair breed, but her father was a woolly red Tunis. The cross resulted in a lamb with a thick red wool coat. We do not have any interest in wool or the time or equipment to shear those with wool coats. So, as this past season progressed, we culled all of the crosses.

It struck me how unusual the experience: to be both the giver of life and the deliverer to the executioner. This young ewe was a beautiful creature, noble even, as I viewed her standing in the truck bed in the rearview mirror.

A rearview mirror seemed an appropriate method for considering my role in her life and death: It conveys a vanishing landscape that with a few more turns of the road or an averted gaze recedes and disappears. It is an act of removal.

I pulled up at Morgan’s, turned over the ewe to the care of the man who would kill and butcher her. After concluding my business in the front office, I pulled back onto the highway. A last look in the mirror and nothing remained but the memory and a new view.

 

The Gods and the Sheep Mock Me

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Childhood readings of my grandmother’s Bullfinch’s Mythology have colored my sense of how the world is ordered more so than childhood attendance at my family’s church. I tend to expect divine intervention, if there is any, to be shaped by petty, meddlesome beings acting for their own benefit.

Last week I headed outdoors to feed before driving into town for a work-related visit. Chickens fed, pigs fed, ducks fed, chicks fed and all watered without drama. The sheep are kept up in the barn for protection from predators at night. Each morning the 10-by-12-foot door is slid open to allow them into an outer corral with access to one of three small pastures. Cindy recently built a service door into the larger sliding door to make the job easier.

Opening the smaller door, I was trampled as usual by the flood of our flock surging around me to get outside and enjoy the spring weather.

Walking back to the house to get dressed I paused for a while to herd one of the lambs back into the pasture. This lamb, the smallest of the newborns, searches for freedom each day by crawling under gates. It has spent most of its short life escaping and then wandering along the fence line bleating to its mom for instructions on how to get back in with the flock. A short ten minutes of chasing it back and forth and I was back in the house.

Heading back out to my truck to leave I saw half the flock in the intended field grazing. The other half was exiting the back gate in the corral into a larger unsecured pasture. Cindy’s calming affect absent, I hurtled into action. Yelling helpful things like “Shit!” repeatedly while asking Becky, our English Shepherd, to go get them back constituted my principle plan of action.

Becky seemed a bit cowed by yelling. A great and effective dog at all farm tasks when asked politely. But when confronted with a man swinging his arms madly in all directions and shouting contradictory instructions, as the sheep scattered to the four winds, Becky did the sensible thing and retired to the barn with her dignity intact.

My default setting in a crisis is food, either for myself or for the livestock. So I sprinted back up to the barn and got a bucket of feed as the flock disappeared across a ravine and headed to the woods. Returning with the feed I ran after them shaking the bucket and yelling “baah” rather stupidly and interspersed with more expletives directed at their lineage. They ignored me. Meanwhile the horses were merrily charging in among the sheep accelerating their pace away from me.

After a few minutes of running up and down a hill my brain finally began working. Opening the gate to the upper field I called the horses.

Shaking the bucket of grain got their attention and they trotted to me in record time. Perversely, so did the sheep. It was a sprint by both to get to me and get the grain. Two of the three horses thundered through the gate before the main body of sheep–it was that close. I slammed the gate closed and was easily able to move the sheep into an adjacent pasture. I ran back to the house, changed out of my sweat soaked clothes and headed off to town.

As I drove into Knoxville, no one could have convinced me otherwise that the whole affair was not the work of that group on Olympus playing with a wicked sense of humor.

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Reading this week: Immoderate Greatness: why civilizations fail by William Ophuls.