Sheepish

by Catherine Friend

  Something’s up, but it’s clearly not the ram.

  Adventures of the Backup Farmer

  ’Tis but a flesh wound.

  —MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL

  I tell Melissa that if she doesn’t stop sneaking out of the house to work in the shed, all the internal organs still left inside her will come undone and head for the nearest exit. This finally convinces her to stay put, so I can go about winter chores without worrying.

  Luckily everything is closer during the winter. As E. B. White wrote,I forgot that sheep come up in late fall and join the family circle. At first they visit the barn rather cautiously, eat some hay, and depart. But after one or two driving storms they abandon the pasture altogether, draw up chairs around the fire, and settle down for the winter. They become as much a part of your group as your dog, or your Aunt Maudie.

  We, too, move our sheep in closer for winter. They have lots of hay, and access to the barn in an ice storm or heavy snowstorm. Everyone hunkers down. But the animals still require water and checking every day. Doing chores involves suiting up in my insulated Carhartt overalls, insulated Carhartt barn coat, ugly red hat with the ear flaps, and big chopper mittens. I head for the big barn where forty ram lambs are eating lots of hay and small amounts of corn until they reach market weight. If I were to show you a photo of some of these ram lambs, you’d think two things: one, that they were larger than you expected, and two, that they looked sweet and innocent. Hardly. Ram lambs can be naughty boys.

  As usual, we put those green feeder panels around the hay bales—one bale at a time, not four. Once the animals have eaten all the hay they can reach, Melissa or I “stir” the hay, moving it from the center so the lambs can more easily reach it. Although we’re tough enough not to name our sheep, coddling them is apparently acceptable.

  Most shepherds castrate their young ram lambs, but we don’t. Male lambs grow faster with all their boy parts intact. As a result, our ram lambs are feisty. They like to slam their rock-hard heads together for fun.

  “Stirring” hay requires that I turn my back on the lambs and lean over the panel with a pitchfork. I’m wearing my thick insulated bib overalls, which, alarmingly, have shrunk just as much as my jeans. When I bend over the feeder panel to stir the hay, I present a tempting target. After a few weeks of this, there comes the day when one joker in the bunch can’t resist. While my back is turned, the ram—possibly egged on by the rest of the lambs—lowers his head and rams me.

  Whoa! My hips slam against the feeder panel, the rest of me pitches forward into the hay. I struggle up, sputtering, spitting out hay, and whirl to face the culprit. He’s gone. He’s melted back into the group, and every single one of them looks at me in total innocence. “It wasn’t me,” say forty pairs of eyes.

  Grumbling, I turn back and resume working. That damn lamb does it again. I right myself faster this time, then whirl around. By now some of the lambs can’t repress their snickers, and a few others look worried, knowing they’ll all be punished for the hijinks of one rowdy guy.

  They’re right. I deliver a scathing lecture on the wisdom of ramming the person who’s making sure they have plenty to eat, and soon even the toughest of the lambs is shuffling his hooves, unable to look me in the eye.

  I move to the other side of the hay bale and finish my job. But when I leave the pen, I pass a small group of snickering lambs, and I can smell trouble. Sure enough, one of them actually has the nerve to say, directly to my face, “Nice target.”

  I report back to Melissa. We agree that male lambs are all hoodlums, the lot of them.

  Hanging out in another section of the winter pasture are the ewes. Winter doesn’t bother the ladies, but they do have one bad habit. As they eat hay from the feeders, they pull it out and drop it. They walk around with it in their mouths and drop it. Soon there’s an island of hay in the snow. The hay is totally wasted; once they’ve peed on it, they don’t want to eat it. Then it snows on top of this dropped hay. Then more hay goes down. Then more snow.

  Some people think that sheep need access to a barn all year long, that it’s cruel to keep them outside. Please. These girls are carrying their own barns on their backs, about eight pounds of the stuff. The sheep use the barn during ice storms, since these can be nasty, and after they’ve been sheared late March, but that’s it.

  Our girls are content to hang out in the snow. And when they lie down at night to sleep, an amazing sight appears the next morning. The snowy pasture is dotted with small ovals of hay, which totally mystifies the Backup Farmer until she works it through. The sheep are so warm that the heat from their body melts through the snow, revealing hay from the layer below.

  Melissa feels guilty that I must do chores. She begins feeling better now that she’s figured out what “rest and recuperation” actually means, but I don’t want her to take over the chores too soon. However, I am getting tired, since negotiating the farm in winter can be hard with all the ice and snow. Then comes the day I step back too quickly and slip on a chunk of frozen soil. Like in a cartoon, both my legs fly straight out, my body hovers in the air until my left buttock is centered directly over the frozen mound, then I slam to the ground.

  Fairly positive I’ve broken my bumfitt, I lie there quietly, thinking about Elvis.

  And thinking about how, in my life as Backup Farmer, one part of my anatomy seems to be getting more than its share of bruises. And thinking about how being rammed in the butt certainly distinguishes my life from most other lives.

  After ten minutes I collect myself, walk back to the house, and find Melissa. “Okay, you can start doing chores now,” I say.

  Holy Hanky Panky, Batman

  The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.

  —ALAN PATRICK HERBERT

  Melissa takes over chores midwinter and I dive back into my writing. The lambs are now market weight, so we hire our friend Paul to trailer them to the processing plant. Customers begin visiting the farm to pick up their meat orders. Farm tours in January are short. I stand by the house and point up toward the sheep barn: “The ewes are up there. The steers are over there. Let’s go inside for hot chocolate and cookies.”

  All is as it should be. Then one early February morning Melissa notices a ewe with a round, tight udder, full of milk. What? The udder only fills up when the sheep is days away from giving birth, not months away as these sheep should be.

  According to our schedule, Erik did his thing in December, so lambs will be born in mid-May. Yet if this ewe is about to give birth in February, she’d done the deed three months too early, sometime in September, when we were busy figuring out Melissa’s anemia.

  The next day we put the flock into the handling facility, moving each ewe into the chute so Melissa can reach between the ewe’s back legs, through the long wool, and feel the udder. The first one has a full udder. The second one has a full udder. So does the third. This isn’t an isolated incident of one ewe getting pregnant. One of those rambunctious ram lambs, back in September, had hopped a few fences and been very, very busy. Our only consolation, of course, is that the ram lamb was now in someone’s freezer.

  It turns out that over two-thirds of the flock, or twenty-five sheep, have udders that are either very full, or on their way to being so. Now we understand. Back in December, Erik wasn’t breeding the ewes because most of them were All. Ready. Pregnant.

  Let’s say that phrase together, and make sure you grit your teeth to get the full emotional experience: The sheep were All. Ready. Pregnant.

  Why should we be surprised? After all, ten years earlier we’d had a similar problem with a randy ram lamb. Yet we never waver in our belief that we, the shepherds, are in control. But in our previous bout with unauthorized sheep sex, the lambs had come in mid-March. In Minnesota, early February is an entirely different climate than mid-March.

  Exhausted, we resolve to get through yet another c
risis. We are Super Shepherds: strong, independent women who can do anything. We’ll find some way to enclose our open-sided barn. We’ll buy two dozen heat lamps. Melissa will get up twice a night to warm any lambs born in the cold. But because she still hasn’t recovered her spark since surgery, buckling down and pushing through feels wrong to me.

  Sometimes the best path is also the hardest. The next morning, while Melissa is showering, I call Paul and Lela, leaving a message on their machine. Do they know anyone interested in buying twenty-five ewes on the verge of giving birth? Then I call Drew with the same question. He comes up with a few people and says he’ll ask them. I call Joe and Bonnie with the same plea. They, too, put their heads together and come up with a few names. I’m touched at how quickly our friends “get” what I’m trying to do.

  Paul calls me back, and I tell him the whole story. When we’re done complaining about sheep and their lawless ways, Paul chuckles and gets down to business. “Say, Cath, I know you won’t believe this, but last week Lela and I were talking about finding some sheep to lamb out this winter.”

  My heart leaps. “You’re kidding.”

  I can hear the smile in his voice, and see him shaking his head, as amazed as I am. “Nope, I’m not. How ’bout if we come over this weekend and look ’em over?”

  “Excellent.”

  When Melissa joins me in the living room, squeaky clean and ready to face the day’s battles, I tell her what I’ve done. “We need to sell the pregnant sheep, and Paul and Lela would take good care of them.”

  “No, we’re not selling them,” Melissa says.

  “Yes, we are,” I say.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  Melissa hesitates. “Because this is a farm. It’s what I do. Selling them would.... What would I do then?”

  I think about my idea to stop farming. This isn’t how I’d imagined it happening. This isn’t what I wanted. Our decision involves complicated concepts like self-definition and self-worth and life’s purpose. We know these twenty-five sheep personally. But I live with Melissa. I know her energy level. I know about all the stresses pressing down on her that have nothing to do with the farm. Her mother’s health, never good, is declining rapidly and the end may be near. “We need to sell the sheep.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  Even though we aren’t amused (yet) by this disaster, I have to appreciate the sneakiness of the adolescent ram. A teenage boy knows if he sneaks into his girlfriend’s bedroom, he’d better not be there in the morning when Mom comes in. It turns out teenage sheep have the same instincts. He hops a few fences, bangs many ladies, then knows enough to hop back where he belongs so he doesn’t get caught.

  See what I mean? Sheep are smart.

  We’ve always found it amusing, or at least interesting, that all the men sheep producers we know castrate their rams, but we don’t.

  Ha. Those things are coming off from now on.

  No more Ms. Nice Lesbians.

  Dividing Up the Cake

  A compromise is the art of dividing the cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

  —LUDVIG ERHARD

  Melissa and I wrangle for two days. She accuses me of always taking shortcuts to make my life easier. (Will I never live down that recycling debacle?) I accuse her of being unrealistic about our ability to ensure newborn lambs will survive in February.

  Melissa’s solution is to make a list, so she writes down the tag numbers of the twenty-five ewes and begins examining their records to see what sort of mothers they are and how many lambs they’ve had. I suppose this is one way to deal with stress, but it isn’t nearly as productive as standing in front of the open refrigerator door and eating anything not stuck to the cold shelves.

  We can put off our final discussion no longer, since Paul and Lela are coming soon. It’s a warm enough day, so we bundle up and walk out to the shed. Going to a neutral spot seems a smart thing to do. We sit down in the garage on hard logs waiting to be split, and despite the sun spilling through the open door, we hunch over against the cold.

  Melissa shows me her list. Of the twenty-five pregnant ewes, there are five she absolutely will not give up. Their lambing records are too good. Or they’re the offspring of some of our best ewes. She isn’t willing to let these genetics walk off the farm. And there are four ewes with physical problems, like udders that don’t work well any more, and we’d planned to cull them from the flock. Neither of us wants to sell a cull animal to friends.

  I do the math. Out of twenty-five sheep, there are nine she won’t sell. “So we could sell the other sixteen?”

  The open garage door is horizontal above our heads. The three pigeons living in our shed scrabble overhead, their tiny claws scratching harshly on the metal door. In the mood I’m in, it feels just like nails on a chalkboard. I jam my hands deeper into my recycled wool sweater mittens. “I know this is really hard for you. I get that. But I’m really worried about your health. I’m worried we won’t be able to keep newborn lambs alive. May we sell those sixteen?” Other farmers lamb without heat in their barns, so I know it’s possible, but I’d never met anyone who lambed in the dead of winter in a three-sided barn open to the elements.

  Melissa looks me in the eye, checks her list again, then leaps across the abyss. She nods, her cheeks red from the cold. We can sell sixteen of the sheep.

  I breathe easier. We might just work this out. Yet while I appreciate the sacrifice she’s making, we still have nine sheep giving birth in an open, unheated barn. Melissa’s health and stress issues aren’t going away whether we lamb twenty-five or nine.

  My blood turns to molten iron, then hardens into steel. “We have to sell them all.”

  If Melissa and I tighten our jaws any harder, we’ll crack teeth.

  “I won’t sell culls to a friend,” she says, and I agree. Culls these sheep might be, but they’re still our responsibility and we aren’t going to close our eyes and ship off the problem.

  But then inspiration bends down and whispers the solution in my ear. It seems so obvious. “We’ll explain to Paul and Lela that these are cull sheep. We’ll charge less for those four ewes. They’ll get lambs from them, then they can sell the ewes.” Melissa and I look at each other with sudden hope. Excellent idea. We’ve solved what to do with twenty of the sheep. White Girl is in the batch of pregnant ewes to be culled. We will sell her to Paul, then he’ll decide what to do with her.

  We have five pregnant sheep left on the list. One of them is Black Girl. Melissa bends over her clipboard, as if protecting the five animals.

  “That leaves the five you think are too good too sell,” I say. “How can they be so special?”

  More jaw tightening. “They are.” For five minutes she passionately outlines the history and personality of each one. Then she suddenly straightens. “What if we don’t sell the ewes, but instead loan them to Paul and Lela? They get the lambs and we get the five ewes back when the lambs are old enough to be weaned.”

  The tension blows away like a puff of smoke and we actually grin at each other. Even though creativity often shows up late for my parties, it does eventually arrive. I resolve to remember this the next time I’m sitting in front of a blank computer screen, cursing J. K. Rowling because she’s stolen my muse.

  Paul and Lela love the look of our sheep, so we negotiate a price, then Paul picks up the ewes on a Monday afternoon, five days after Melissa saw the first udder. That night both Melissa and I are very quiet.

  The first lamb is born the next morning on Paul and Lela’s farm. Over the next two weeks, fifty-four lambs are born, including many sets of twins, and a few sets of triplets. White Girl has quadruplets. Melissa is proud of our “girls,” but heartbroken at the same time.

  She knows these sheep. She knows their faces, their personalities. These animals aren’t just beasts with ear tag numbers. We’ve bred them for years, striving to keep the best traits and eliminate bad
ones. She knows that No. 703 is No. 66’s daughter. She knows this one had been born a triplet. She remembers delivering that ewe under the trees on a rainy May day.

  A small piece of Melissa’s soul follows our sheep to Paul and Lela’s. A piece of mine does as well.

  More Babies

  Like sheep that get lost nibbling away at the grass because they never look up, we often focus so much on ourselves and our problems that we get lost.

  —ALLEN KLEIN

  The twenty-five very pregnant sheep are gone. We have seventeen sheep remaining that won’t give birth for another three months because they were all bred—hopefully—at the right time, by Erik in December. In addition, we have a few other sheep. We know No. 66 isn’t pregnant because she’s getting old and has earned her retirement. Our pet sheep, No. 75/101, has had mastitis too many times, the illness that had killed her mother, so we’ve decided she’ll remain on the farm as a pet. Yikes. How did it come to pass that the tough muffins are keeping both pet sheep and retired sheep?

  After we sell the ewes to Paul and Lela, we follow through on plans to visit friends in California. Unfortunately, when Melissa felt each ewe’s udder to determine which sheep were pregnant, she missed four. We learn this a few days after we fly to California, when the teenager doing chores is thrust into the world of winter lambing without notice. Alex does an amazing job. When she finds a set of twins in the snow, one dead, the other alive, she moves both the live lamb and the mom into the barn. She does the same with the next ewe a day later. In moving a third ewe, the ewe injures its leg. We try to help Alex as much as we can, but we’re 1,000 miles away. Those times she can’t reach our cells, she calls Amelia, the original Pasture Goddess. It fills Amelia with pride, and a bit of awe, to find herself dispensing advice.