The thermometer said zero, though it sometimes lied. It was eleven o’ clock at night, and I was gearing up to go outside. Long johns, muck boots, wool socks, wool sweater, wool vest. Hat, headlamp, and gloves. The kids were all asleep upstairs, and Ethan was on a work trip in Northern Idaho.
The firewood crackled and popped softly in the woodstove. At 7 months pregnant, there was nothing I wanted to do more than sleep. But outside, the lambs needed me.
Closing the front door quickly behind to keep the heat in, I stepped out into the frosty, silent night. As I turned my head, my headlamp flashed over 120 pairs of eyes. The finish lambs. Born in May of last year, they were plenty old enough to be away from their mothers. They were practically grown up sheep. Separated from the other flock by a wire-mesh fence, they were cleaning up the last of the hay I’d spread that evening.
Through this tiny pasture I passed, trying not to disturb them, and climbed over the fence into the lower paddock. Here, most of the flock was bedded down already. Lambs were tucked close to their mother’s bodies, for heat. I turned my headlamp to the red setting and walked through them, talking softly. I didn’t want them to get up, and most of the time, they didn’t. They’d gotten pretty used to these nightly checks.
A rookie mistake had resulted in our lambs being born in mid-January, instead the April-May window that we had hoped for. We’d wanted to avoid the winter-ish lambing of March that we had done last time. There’s just something brutal about sitting on the cold ground at 2:00 in the morning trying to get a stubborn ewe to take her baby.
Rookie mistake. That’s what we are, I thought, rookies. I thought of the stories Dad had told of Lloyd in the Lemhi Valley, with his lambing barn full in the middle of winter, a chaos of bleating and baa-ing and sheep-smelling warmth as soon as you stepped inside. I thought of the stamps on Dad’s coffee table. They looked like branding irons, but they were numbers for ink. Dip them in the ink, put them on the ewe, put them on the lamb, then you know who everybody goes with.
But how do you really know, I thought, looking around in the dark. Sometimes, a lamb will lay down with somebody who isn’t his mother, just to stay warm. Sometimes, a lamb will “steal” and survive off of other mom’s milk. One thing is for sure: you can tell the lambs who don’t have anybody.
I’d learned early on that lambing in a small area means that things get missed. A lamb is born before its twin and wanders away while Mom is still giving birth to the other. A mother rejects a lamb, for reasons unknown. She has a favorite child, and that one must not be hers. Two ewes give birth too close to each other, and the babies get mixed up. In a torrent of baa-ing and bleating lambs, only God knows who belongs to who.
The ideal, we thought, was to give them more space. A larger pasture might mean that a ewe can go off alone to lamb. She can bond with those lambs before introducing them to the flock. Even in our small paddock, I had watched this happen.
A particularly wise ewe had twins early in the day, and she kept them separate from everybody else all day. Even at feeding time, when the hay was brought, she still kept them away. She wanted to make sure they knew they belonged with her. As soon as that ewe thought her lambs were ready, she brought them over to join everybody else. That is the ideal.
Well, this wasn’t ideal. Lambing in January wasn’t ideal. Having those ewes constrained to small space while lambing wasn’t ideal, but we made the best of things. That’s why I was here, pacing through the flock, listening for any crying lamb that wouldn’t stop, looking for a lamb sleeping alone on the cold ground.
I found him. He didn’t move when I came right up to him, which could mean two things. Either he was very young, a day or less old (and hadn’t learned to be wary of humans), or he was in a very desperate state. I pulled him to his feet putting his spindly legs up to prop him, like a three-legged stool. He wobbled, and bleated weakly. He was still wet. Not wet, as in, wet, but he had never been licked clean. His coat was still matted with the dry slime of afterbirth. I thought I remembered seeing him earlier in the daylight.
Now, his head was low and ears drooping. He had the hunch to his back. The hunch meant that he was cold, and getting colder. I could tell he hadn’t had anything to eat, because the space behind his rib cage was completely empty. If lambs can’t get that first milk, the rich colostrum, they won’t live very long. Colostrum is not only rich and high in calories, it is the lamb’s immune system.
I walked again through the flock watching for any mother that might be missing her lamb. I brought the lamb in question to various ewes, and though they sniffed him, no one claimed him. Finally, with a sigh, I took the lamb and wrapped him in my coat, and I carried him back to the house.
That was the first lamb.
In the end, we had nine lambs running around our yard, bouncing on my raised beds, pooping on the porch, and coming into the house bleating whenever anyone opened the front door.
Almost every night, we would do a nightly check to look for neglected lambs. During the day, I would do one check of the flock, where I looked for anyone who’d been rejected. If he looked droopy, hungry, or unable to find his mom, I would take a green chalk and draw a line down the fur of his backbone. In the night hours, we could watch for anyone with a chalk mark that was still lying alone. I missed some, certainly. I can’t tell you how devastating it is, day after day, to find yet another dead lamb. To say to yourself, I should have known. I should have gotten him.
But how can you know? I didn’t want to take a lamb from a ewe who was mothering him well. She would do a far better job of raising a lamb than I could. He would be healthier on his mother than on a bottle.
Once we even brought a lamb to the house and tried to start him on the bottle, which he refused. Late that night Ethan heard a ewe calling frantically from the paddock, and the lamb, in our yard with the other bottle babies, was calling back to her. It was his mother, and she wanted him. Ethan took him back.
If we found a lamb, we brought them in, laid them by the propane heater to get warm (sometimes it felt like we always had a lamb by the heater), then try them on a little formula colostrum.
Sometimes I just had to be tenacious with them, and they would start sucking. I learned to stick the bottle in my armpit so it seemed to be located up and in somewhere like it would on real ewe. I talked to them in sweet, sheepy noises and nuzzled their soft heads and scratched above their tails and wiped off their dirty butts with paper towels. All so they would know that someone cared about them.
As they got bigger, I moved them out of the plastic crate in the kitchen, into a sort of kennel, and finally into metal panels in the yard. Ethan and I took turns doing the 11 o’clock and 3 o’clock feedings. The kids all took turns “feeding the lambs”. The children named them Brownie, Bunny, Snow, Spot, etc.
Ethan and I sucked in our cheeks and bought the expensive formula because the lambs seemed to do better on it.
There were still some that we tried to save, and lost. They wouldn’t try. They wouldn’t suck. The glass had come into their eyes, their teeth were bared against the bottle nipple, their backs were hunched. They laid down by the heater and wouldn’t stand up again. Those were the hardest for Ethan and I, the ones we couldn’t help.
And why? With the price of formula, it didn’t make any sense. The amount of hours invested into those nine little sheep didn’t pay a dime. It was because they were our sheep, and we were duty-bound to take care of them. In short, it was the right thing to do, and we both knew it. Sometimes the right thing to do doesn’t pay, doesn’t make sense, and isn’t easy or pleasant.
The right thing has its own reward, though. The reward is this: You pick up a rejected lamb off of the cold, stony ground. You tuck it in your coat, feel the soft limpness. The heart barely flutters against you. Death almost has its claws in this one.
You take that lamb into your warm, lighted home, and let your kids hold it and pet it. You feed him, and stroke him, and yes, love him. Then you see the lights turn on. He starts running after you, bleating, feet tapping on the hardwood floor. The life comes back into his eyes, and that little stubby tail starts wagging as he sucks out of a bottle.
Ultimately, it’s redemption.
Leave a Reply