Sheep: As usual I am typing these words thirty minutes before sunrise. Which means the coming day is already visible if not yet actually arrived. In true fashion, and I knew this was going to happen, the ewes and lambs are lined up, fifty yards away, patiently staring at the farmhouse waiting to see me before erupting into impatient noise.

Later, turning them out onto the pasture that rises behind the main orchard, they will, all day, keep a keen eye out for my presence. As a flock or an individual, sheep are surely the dumbest creatures raised on the farm. The merest sound of a bucket, the rattle of a gate, will send our small flock of thirty sprinting hundreds of yards back to the hay-yard. They will mill around, bleating in their annoying way, before moseying back out the gates and up the hill. Then an hour later, one ewe will come down by herself to see if there is anything going on at the evening domicile. She will see me over in the south garden weeding among the beans. The brainless twit will start her call and the damn sheep, standing deep in good clover, will charge down, again. And again…all day, over and over, until at the final charge they get locked up for the night.

Pigs: It never fails, some non-farmer visiting eventually will get around to telling me that “pigs are very smart”. Where does this nonsense come from? I always reply that they are smart in the same way your overweight third cousin twice removed is smart, they can find their way to the dinner table and find their way to bed. That my friend is about the sum of it. As long as you have a bucket of feed (and the patience of a Job) you can match wits with a hog. Which, depending on the day, is all this farmer can muster, sadly.

Chickens: Meanwhile, that underappreciated genius of the farm, the chicken, never forgets and always is watching. This may surprise you as the epithet “bird brain” floats around your head. Well, my dear reader, next time someone calls you bird brain, wear it with pride. Some of our chickens, it is true, cannot figure out how to walk through a gate they have walked through a hundred times. But just for grins go scatter a bit of grass seed, around the corner and out of sight. Before you have even reentered the house a scraggly hen, who had lurked behind the well house, spying you out, is busily scratching and eating. Even more remarkable, here she is, some distance from any other feathered kin, not making a sound, yet still able to telepathically signal her location. And before you can say “Bob’s your uncle”, they are all dining on a buffet of that expensive seed you bought. Remarkable.

Or, plant corn, out of sight, in a field the chickens never deign to grace, within minutes they are scratching the furrows out for the conveniently spaced morsels you decided to feed them. Bird brain, indeed.

And all the rest: We will have to leave an examination of geese (kin of sheep), cattle (distant relatives of chickens), and horses and mules for a later date. Although, as for the later it would be well to remember Faulkner’s line, He will work for you patiently for 10 years for the chance to kick you once.

Ah, the sun is now up, and the sheep have begun their call. I am sure the fat cousins in the hog lot are waiting. And, out at the barn, the chickens, since I left the gate open last night, are already out in the corn plot looking for the October beans left hidden for them in yesterday’s planting. All, that is, except the one who scurries back and forth on the edge of the chicken-coop fence, unable to find the exit.

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Reading this weekend: String too short to be saved (Hall). A nice little memoir of spending summers on his grandparents farm.