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).

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