Sheepish Read online

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  Our farm has had its ups and downs, but I believe that it’s lasted fifteen years because of the thread of joy that runs through those farms where the animals are happy, calm, and contented. You can’t be around such animals without absorbing a bit of their zen.

  Despite my current confusion over what I want to be when I grow up, without sheep in my life I would greatly miss the joy. Two of the most blatant animal joy indicators on a farm are sproings and worfls.

  Animals jump, leap, and spring, but they also sproing. If you’ve ever watched cartoons, you’ve likely seen an animal sproing, but few nonfarmers have been lucky enough to see an actual sproinging. When an animal sproings, all four legs leave the ground at the same time and the animal bounces way up into the air. An animal will often sproing when it’s excited—wheee! Or if it’s the last one through the gate, it might sproing to confuse me in case I’m a wolf.

  Four legs up, four legs down, four legs up. It’s one of the most surprising things you’ll ever see an animal do. Talk about defying gravity. Many marketing campaigns use the tired, worn out “Think Spring!” A truly innovative marketer would switch to “Think Sproing!”

  Our llamas have a job to do—protecting the sheep from predators—but Melissa also expects them to cooperate when we’re moving sheep. She will often explain to the llamas where she wants the sheep to go and ask the llamas to help. Sometimes the llamas lead the sheep right up to the correct gate. Other times the llamas turn their backs on her and become the French guy up in the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail—“I fart in your general direction.”

  Although we can’t physically touch the llamas very often because they don’t like that, they do allow us to admire them. One spring afternoon when Melissa and I are working in the West Pasture, she grabs my arm. “Look!” I whirl around to see Chachi not walking, not running, but sproinging across the grass. Sproinging lambs are adorable, but when a 450-pound llama sproings, his legs tuck up under his body, his fleece lifts like a curtain, and it seems like a scientific miracle.

  The second thing that happens on a sheep farm is worfling. A worfl is a sound I’ve heard for fifteen years but didn’t know there was a word for it until I found it on a farmer’s Web site. It may not be a widely accepted term—perhaps this shepherd merely adopted it on her own—but worfl deserves to be more widely used. It’s a great word.

  When a ewe is in labor, she’ll bleat loudly because it hurts, damn it, but she’ll also, now and then, nicker softly in her throat. When the lamb is born and only seconds old, as the ewe is licking off the lamb she makes the same throaty, deeply contented sound. It’s a sound that’s unique to her, a sound that the lamb will recognize among a chorus of other ewes. That sound is worfling.

  I’ve only found a few other uses for “worfl.” Someone tweeted that her dog was happily worfling in his sleep. Another spoke of people worfling over the toffee-flavored coffee at the office.

  People also sproing and worfl. I used to run through the pasture in pursuit of a wayward lamb. I’d throw myself on the ground to catch a sheep, albeit not as enthusiastically as Melissa, but I took my share of spills. Yet one recent day when Melissa lunges for a sheep and snags its back leg but can’t reel the kicking animal in close enough to examine a cyst on its freshly shorn back, I just stand there.

  Do I fling myself across the sheep to control its struggling?

  No.

  Do I drop to my knees and press the ewe up against the barn wall?

  Sadly, no.

  “A little help here?” Melissa asks as she wrestles in the straw with the ewe.

  I just stand there. This is not one of my prouder farming moments.

  When did this hesitation to throw myself on the ground start? I don’t like it. I begin hesitating at every turn. Will I hurt tomorrow if I do this? Could some part of me be bruised, broken, or dismembered if I proceed with this activity?

  Melissa conquers the ewe herself out of sheer determination, then deals with the abscess (details of this procedure aren’t really necessary as they will interfere with digestion). But she needs help getting up after she’s let the ewe go. She winces as she stretches out her hip and rolls the tension from her shoulders. The next day a colorful bruise appears across her thigh.

  It’s hard for me to imagine, but could it be that I no longer sproing? Could it be that Melissa doesn’t sproing as often, or as high, as she used to? We still worfl, but that’s not hard on the knees.

  They say memory is the first thing to go, but really, it might be the sproing. Luckily, our animals still sproing, so this joy might be the strongest thread running through the warp.

  The First Pasture Goddess

  We experience moments absolutely free from worry. These brief respites are called panic.

  —CULLEN HIGHTOWER

  A lamb is born in a large pasture, a tiny speck of white in an ocean of green. Melissa and I hop on the four-wheeler and approach the new life. Amelia will be here in a few days, not soon enough for either me or Melissa.

  Me: “What if the mother leaves? What if she abandons the lamb?”

  Melissa: “Just relax. The mom isn’t going anywhere.” Even after years of doing this, I am doubtful, but the ewe does remain in the same place, only drifting ten feet away to graze.

  Another day we find a confusing situation in the pasture. Three lambs stand together, with two ewes beside them crying for their babies. The newborn lambs stagger around in confusion.

  Me: “What’s going on? The ewes don’t know which babies are theirs. This is a disaster. We’re going to have to bottle feed all three.”

  Melissa: “Just relax. We’ll find the placentas and figure it out.” We walk the area until we find all three placentas in the grass. Like a detective, Melissa pieces together the truth, based on the number, location, and freshness of the placentas. We sort the families out for a happy ending.

  After a lamb is born, we must steal it from its mother for about ten minutes to do things to it. Call it processing, or call it welcoming. We sneak up on a pair of sleeping twins and each pick one up. The ewe no longer sees her babies on the ground and panics.

  Me: “The ewe is leaving! She’s running back to the flock. She’s abandoning her babies!” These statements are based not on fear but on the fact that the bleating ewe has run back to the flock, thus abandoning her babies.

  Melissa: “Just relax. She’ll come back.”

  Melissa holds her lamb up, looks it in the eye and says, “Hey, you’re new here, aren’t you? I haven’t seen you before.” She might stop there, or she might try a few more, including her favorite, “So, you work? Go to school?” while the lamb gazes back, a trifle confused at the rapid-fire pick-up lines. I’m snickering in the background even though I’ve heard all the lines before. I am easily entertained.

  Melissa’s right. The lamb’s mother comes back. She stands right beside me and bellows into my ear while Melissa works. Introductions out of the way, Melissa gives the lamb a vitamin shot. She dips its navel in iodine to protect against disease. Then she gives it a numbered ear tag, since we need to know who belongs to whom.

  The ear tag number is fine when the animal’s in your arms, but as a lamb is streaking by at 100 mph, reading the two-inch tag can be a bit of a challenge. So Melissa developed a lamb decorating system, using waxy sticks made for marking a sheep.

  If the lamb is a single, it gets a single stripe across its back, from side to side. If they’re twins, each gets two stripes, and the color scheme varies for each set: red-yellow, red-black, and so forth. These color combinations are coded to the ewes, so we can keep track of families. Thank goodness we have few quadruplets born, since those little backs don’t have room for four wide stripes.

  So if Melissa sees a sick lamb fifty feet away, she knows by the green-black-yellow stripes that it’s a triplet belonging to Ewe No. 101. One year we had nearly 150 lambs born so Melissa ran out of color combinations and got so creative with crossh
atching that the lambs looked like football fans wearing their favorite team colors.

  Next, Melissa slips a tight green rubber band over the tail, which will cut off the blood supply. The tail will atrophy and drop off after two weeks or so. As beginning farmers, we castrated the males with a nasty tool called an emasculator. It wasn’t Melissa’s favorite procedure, so we switched to banding, sliding the green bands onto the base of the scrotum. It worked the same way as with the tail.

  After a few years of this, however, Melissa reads that lambs grow faster if you leave their testicles intact. So we start leaving off the bands. All we have to do is make sure that we separate these ram lambs in the fall, when each sheep’s thoughts turn to sex. This decision, unfortunately, will return to haunt us in the future.

  By the time Melissa finishes “welcoming” the lambs, I’ve gone deaf, thanks to the ewe yelling in my ear. We kiss each lamb on the head, then return them to the ewe and the yelling stops.

  Although I might worry a bit more than necessary, there are real reasons to worry. You just never know what’s going to happen out on that pasture. We’re plagued with what’s called a thirteenstriped ground squirrel, basically a skinny gopher that loves to make tunnels in our vineyard and leave little holes everywhere. The best way to get rid of gophers is to have a badger come visit. And about once a year a badger moves into the vineyard. We’ve never seen him, but in his enthusiasm for gettin’ a gopher lunch, he leaves massive holes, holes the riding lawn mower can disappear into if I’m not careful.

  The badger doesn’t limit himself to the vineyard. He occasionally follows the gophers into the pasture, leaving gaping holes that Melissa must fill so the animals don’t break their legs. In one pasture there’s a hole so deep that when she moves the sheep there, she rolls the mineral feeder directly over the hole to protect the sheep. (The mineral feeder is a bin mounted on sort of a metal hula hoop so it can be easily rolled from place to place.) The next morning when she rolls the mineral feeder away, two little faces look up at her. Two baby lambs have somehow gotten themselves stuck in the hole. Their wide ears are a bit soiled, but otherwise the lambs are fine. Melissa gently pulls each lamb from the hole and they scamper off.

  See? What if Melissa hadn’t found those lambs until a few days later? It’s hard not to worry. Thankfully, Amelia finally arrives. The worry wart stays in the house, and Amelia does her thing. Her competence grows every year. Her sheep senses sharpen. One day Amelia and Melissa move the entire flock from the Tree Pasture near the noisy highway into the first section of the North Pasture. Later, as they’re preparing to leave, Amelia thinks she hears something back in the trees. She searches the large grove, stepping over logs and avoiding low-hanging branches until she comes face-to-face with a little lamb, all alone. He was probably sound asleep when the sheep left, woke up and had no idea where his mom had gone.

  Amelia snags the little guy and carries him back to his mother, who hasn’t realized he was missing but is very glad to see him. Without Amelia’s sharp ears, the lamb’s cries might have gone unheard in the traffic noise. Melissa calls it “the lamb Amelia saved.”

  It doesn’t take long for Amelia’s natural independence to appear. She’s fearless. If Melissa’s energy is flagging midafternoon when it’s time to once again check on the flock, Amelia puts down her knitting, an activity I just do not understand, and leaps up from her chair. “I’ll do it.” She kicks the four-wheeler into first gear and cautiously putters toward the nearest gate. Amelia can recognize if a ewe is in labor and will radio back for Melissa.

  Melissa and Amelia fall back into the rhythms established the first year, but their teamwork bumps up to a new level. Melissa knows the sorts of things that upset me, so a common refrain to Amelia becomes, “Don’t tell Cath, but we’re going to change this gate” or “Don’t tell Cath, but we’re going to put the sheep into the Creek Pasture.” Later I ask Amelia what they’ve done that morning, and never understand why the poor thing hems and haws, unsure which activities have been on the “Don’t tell Cath” list.

  Melissa read that the placentas might attract predators, so to keep our sheep as safe as possible, she carries two long sticks and a paper bag on the four-wheeler. After all the day’s crises have been resolved, and all the new lambs welcomed, Melissa and Amelia each take a stick and walk in a grid, searching for placentas. In my mind, doing such a job without complaint moves Amelia from Pasture Assistant to Pasture Goddess.

  Amelia’s a great sport. When Melissa discovers that those skinny gophers are once again digging an extensive subway system underneath our vineyard, she loads up her pellet gun. “Don’t tell Cath, but we’re going to shoot those SOBs.”

  For many of the hours I think those two are working in the pasture with sheep, they are really in the vineyard sprawled on the grass eating Oreos watching for gophers. It’s a futile vigil, of course, but when the sun warms your skin, your belly is full of cookies, and you have the chance to fire a pellet gun, who cares?

  One of Melissa’s typical requests, made in all earnestness, is to ask other people to pretend to be sheep. She once practiced her sheep-shearing technique on me, minus the actual clippers. Another day she made me drop down onto all fours so she could figure out the straps on a harness for one of the rams.

  Poor Amelia isn’t immune. When they move the flock from the Tree Pasture to another run, the same place Amelia had found the lamb all alone, some lambs lag behind. Lambs don’t understand gates, so if they don’t follow right on the ewes’ heels, they miss the gate.

  Melissa and Amelia try herding the lambs toward the gate, but they all scatter in panic. “Moving lambs is like a fire drill in kindergarten,” Melissa likes to say. We can often entice a ewe to come back and lead the lambs through the gate, but this time the ewes are too busy gobbling fresh grass to care about Melissa’s problems. The lambs are all old enough that the moms aren’t worried about keeping track of them every single minute.

  “I need you to pretend to be a sheep,” Melissa tells Amelia.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. You’re wearing a white T-shirt. Get down on your hands and knees and sort of baa. It’ll work.”

  “You want me to baa.”

  “Kind of low and quiet. I’ll go round the lambs up again, and try to drive them toward you.”

  Amelia good-naturedly shakes her head, then drops to all fours and begins bleating, truly a Pasture Goddess. Melissa circles back around the frantic lambs and begins encouraging them to move in Amelia’s direction. They do. They see something sort of sheep height and sheep colored, emitting a fairly realistic sheep sound. Bleating encouragingly, Amelia crawls through the grass toward the gate. The lambs follow. More crawling, more bleating and the lambs are through the gate. They see the flock in the distance and launch themselves toward safety and fresh milk.

  Amelia comes to help every year she’s in college. However, it takes her a few years to understand that we don’t ask for help merely to give her something to do, but because we really need her. She finally realizes this when, right in the middle of lambing, she must return to the Twin Cities to coach a girls’ soccer game. The next day Melissa calls her, and in her most plaintive voice, demands to know, “When are you coming home?”

  I would never have made it this deep into the farm’s middle if Amelia hadn’t replaced me in the pasture. Over the years she appears and disappears and reappears on the farm numerous times. We weren’t able to adopt her, of course, but I remain deeply grateful that she adopted us, the Farmer and the Worry Wart.

  My Nursery

  Chaos is a friend of mine.

  —BOB DYLAN

  Although spinning and birthing babies aren’t my skills, I’m great at dealing with bottle lambs in the spring. I love the need to shift my focus away from everything else in my life—writing, speaking, friends, family, volunteering, cleaning the house—and focus on one thing: keeping the babies in my nursery safe, healthy, and well fed. I don’t know this a
t the time, of course, but in a few years there will come a spring without lambs, without babies in the barn that depend on me for survival. Only then will I realize that I need them as much as they need me.

  After a few years of lambing, we think we have the whole process figured out, but then one day we stand in the pasture admiring our first set of triplets. Two are round and plump, and hop around like healthy lambs. When they stand up, they stretch luxuriously, a sign of good health. But the third triplet is skinny and a little hunched over. He doesn’t hop or stretch. We wait until the lambs are looking the other way, then we drop low and creep closer. Melissa’s reflexes are quicker than mine, so she grabs the back leg of the skinny lamb. Got him!

  The lamb’s belly isn’t full and tight with milk as it should be, so we conclude that the mother doesn’t have enough milk to feed three babies. We do some research and learn that when a ewe is grazing on grass without any grain supplement, even though she can feed all three lambs for a couple of weeks, she’ll reach a point where she doesn’t have enough milk and one lamb will start falling behind.

  So we begin automatically bringing in the smallest of triplets a few days after its birth and feeding it ourselves. The lamb grows faster and is happier. These types of lambs are called bottle lambs or bonus lambs. My mom, raised on that sheep ranch in southeastern Montana, calls them bum lambs. That’s because in huge range flocks with 1,500 sheep, a lamb’s pretty much on his own. If his mom doesn’t have enough milk to feed him, the only way he’ll survive is by sneaking up to other ewes and “bumming” a little milk before they realize the wrong lamb’s taking a drink. Sheep are very fussy about that.

  So my spring lambing ritual involves empty pop bottles and a bag of powdered milk so fine that opening the bag sends powder floating through the air to eventually settle onto my kitchen counter and floor. Add a bit of water, say on the dogs’ feet, and you have a nice slurry of milk on everything.