by Jon Katz
I could hear my neighbors’ voices: “It’s part of it.” And they were right: if you were going to have lambs, whatever your resolve, you were going to lose some. It was as intrinsic to the experience as cooing over them as they gamboled about.
But I was surprised and sad. If I’d been thinking more clearly, I might have been able to connect Arthur and his mother sooner, given him more of a chance. I admired his spirit, but I’d helped doom him. Anthony, who had no time for Boomer guilt, came by in the afternoon to take his small body away; the ground was still too hard for a burial, and the possibility of coyotes being drawn down from the woods would have imperiled the rest of the flock.
I had changed somewhat in my relationship to animals, I realized. Even my piddling effort at farming had forced me into actions and decisions I wouldn’t have thought myself capable of—shooting a feral cat, killing a ewe, messing around with sheep placentas in the middle of a freezing night. Life and death seemed close.
The welfare of the farm and the herd came first; any individual creatures were subordinate to that. I’d been pulling for Arthur, but he wasn’t a companion in the sense that Rose or Orson were. He was something different, somewhere between a pet and a wild animal. His loss meant that I’d already, through my own dumb mistake, failed in my goal of keeping all my ewes and lambs alive. But I didn’t have the time or inclination to make too much of it. There were too many other lambs arriving, too many other demands.
THE NEXT FEW WEEKS WERE HIGH-VOLTAGE BEDLAM: COLD, wet, late snow, sleeplessness, fatigue, long labors. The thrashes and moans of a laboring ewe could now wake me—like any parent—from a sound sleep. I got used to popping out of bed, into my boots, and scrambling out to the paddock.
Mostly, I then stood by for hours with my coffee, stomping my numbed feet, watching while the ewes pawed and struggled, waiting for the lamb (or two; we had multiple multiples) to emerge.
The slimy blobs slid to the ground, then suddenly moved and stood, fighting from the first for milk. Good moms started a meticulous and careful licking, nuzzling their babies, helping them find the teats. Bad moms seemed schizzy from the beginning, losing focus, getting their babies confused with others, sometimes running back and forth.
After they’d bonded, I carried the babies into the barn, the ewes following me, Rose following them. I’d cut the umbilical cord, spray iodine on the wound, give an oral vitamin supplement and a shot of Bo-Se vitamin booster. After forty-eight hours, I’d tag the baby, then remove most of its tail with the pig castrator, a distasteful but necessary process.
For the first four or five days, I managed to keep careful records, noting the time of birth, sex, tag numbers, and the ewes’ maternal skills. But my ballpoint pens kept freezing; my fingers stopped working; and after a few too many late-night labors, my system fell apart. Paula (the human one), who has as much passion for order as I have a gift for bedlam, said she’d help sort it all out when she came up.
Though all the births involved hours of sleeplessness, most of them were fairly routine, especially after the first few, and most of the moms diligent. When labors grew too long or rough, I put on my surgical gloves, applied the lube, reached in, and pulled the lamb out, careful to make sure that the hooves and head emerged together. Something that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago was now just another day in Bedlam.
Each time I midwifed, my confidence grew. I knew by now what a birth sac felt like; I could grope around to feel the hooves and head and position them properly while the ewe pushed and I pulled. I vaguely remembered our own nurse-midwife telling my wife to do much the same thing when Emma was born. I came to appreciate women even more. “Push, push!” I found myself urging the ewes.
One lamb’s head got stuck in the birth canal, and it took me nearly an hour to maneuver it out. I was sure the lamb would be dead, but it sprang to life right after it hit the ground. By now the lambing pens were full, and I had to cram a mother and baby into a barn corner with a pile of straw or kick a comfortable mom and baby out into the cruel world a bit early.
I found this cycle—birth, nesting, nurturing, reentering the life of the herd—fascinating, even reassuring, but also relentless. Even when we hit a lull, I had little time left after moving heat lamps, mucking out used pens, replacing frozen buckets of water, providing fresh hay to exhausted mothers. The pile of used gloves, syringes, and stained towels mounted. The rest of the world receded; writing became a distant memory; so did casual phone calls, opened mail, cooking, and routine chores. I talked to Paula and Emma in hurried snatches.
Nature, I came to see, didn’t really “take its course” all that reliably; she needed backup from me, vets, and various other helpers.
My farmer neighbors stopped by, joking at my anxiety, scratching their heads at all the heated tubs and Joanne’s beautiful enamel pen. They thought I was crazy, but I was also proud to have their grudging respect.
“I’ll say one thing for you,” said Carr, returned from Florida a couple of weeks earlier than he should have, when he came by one morning to find me injecting vitamins into a lamb’s shoulder. “You keep your animals well.” It was one of the nicest compliments I’d ever heard, and from one of the toughest sources.
Two of the ewes had vaginal prolapses, a serious, life-threatening and evidently very uncomfortable condition that required one of the vets to insert and attach a plastic retainer. Nobody liked this procedure—not Amanda or Kirk, certainly not the unhappy ewe, and not me, the writer of checks.
One of the ewes with a prolapse was one of the few I felt any attachment to. This was Minnie, Carolyn’s oldest ewe and one of the first sheep my dogs and I had ever worked with. Minnie was such a herding veteran that if I yelled “come bye,” she’d head in the right direction even if the dog didn’t. And she was one of the very few ewes who seemed to appreciate human contact and sometimes came up to me for nose scratching and a handful of corn.
I had seen her go into labor in the middle of the night, but no baby came out; after six or seven hours, I called the vet. Dr. Amanda had to insert a retainer. I worried about Minnie, even so; she didn’t smell quite right and seemed intensely uncomfortable. Rose—following the invisible signals of the animal world—ignored her. Perhaps she sensed that Minnie was sick and was responding with some sort of border collie Geneva Convention.
Nesbitt, bless his nasty soul, had done his job well. After two tumultuous weeks, I had nineteen lambs from fourteen ewes. And then there was Minnie, still expecting.
She was wide as a barn, her udders hanging nearly to the ground. She would be the last to give birth, and everyone—me, farmers, vets—thought the fetus was likely to die within her, if it hadn’t already. One vet suggested a cesarean section, something I was reluctant to put her, and all of us, through. Various neighbors offered to put her out of her misery, Hebron-style. I decided to wait it out.
I put her in a barn stall and kept tabs on her, bringing her hay and water. She was trying hard, unable to settle down; she was also old, in bad shape, and smelling worse by the day. We couldn’t let this go on indefinitely.
The night before had been an all-nighter. A ewe gave birth to twins and, not wanting to repeat the mistake I’d made with Arthur, I’d hovered over her for every minute of her labor and birth, then picked both lambs up carefully, walking them backward into their pens.
The surviving lambs, tagged and docked, were already frolicking with one another, hopping on and off hay bales, and nursing—and managing to dart through tiny gaps between and under fences. Unlike their elders, they had lively personalities, and they seemed to grow bigger and more confident by the day. I wanted no further losses due to my stupidity.
By the end of the week I was wrecked, and quite willing to leave things to nature, as everyone advised. But I couldn’t go to bed without checking on Minnie one more time, so I left Orson sleeping by the woodstove, called Rose, grabbed my lambing bucket and gloves, and slogged out to the barn. Winter was in its final days but wa
s going out hard. The back-door thermometer said fifteen degrees, downright tropical, but there was a sharp wind, bad conditions for newborns if we had any more. I was expecting a stillbirth.
Entering the barn, I could see that something was wrong. The wooden gate to Minnie’s stall had been split in two, evidently after some intense thrashing. In front of it, Minnie lay on her back, feet in the air, swollen udders hanging to one side. She was lifeless, cold and stiff.
“Goodbye, girl,” I said as Rose sniffed at her body. “You were a sweetie.” It seemed unfair that one of the few ewes I knew and liked had gone this way. But to be honest, I was too tired to feel very much. In the way even a small farm demands, I had already moved into the gritty, practical phase: How far can I drag Minnie’s heavy body? Where should I take it? It would be hours before I could call Anthony to move her to his father-in-law’s farm, with its dead-animal pile.
Kirk Ayling, the vet who’d stopped by to see Minnie just that morning, had told me that if anything looked wrong, I should put on gloves. “Go in there and pull anything you can feel out,” he instructed. This is part of it, I thought for the umpteenth time. If you want to have a farm with sheep and donkeys, you’re going to put your hands in some previously unimaginable places. So I did.
The cavity was warm and filled with fluids, some of which—smelling foul and infected—came gushing out. I felt a sac, which I grabbed and pushed back, trying to align the head and hooves as I’d been told. I pulled gently but firmly for several minutes until a gelatinous blob came out, looking nothing like a lamb. It plopped, motionless, to the barn floor. The odor made me gag.
As I turned to grab a towel and wipe my hands, the blob suddenly moved and coughed. A brown lamb with a white forelock was shaking itself off, struggling to its feet, searching for its mother. I was stunned. If the baby were alive, I wondered, could Minnie really be dead?
This was a case for Anthony’s Three Steps.
I grabbed the lifeless Minnie and rolled her over, pushing her to her rigid feet. Upright, she shook her head and began searching anxiously for her lamb. Too startled to kick into gear—cut cord, apply iodine, switch on heat lamp—I noticed after a few moments that I’d been staring and muttering, “Oh my God. Oh my God,” for too long. Because it was a bit Godlike, watching that lamb clamber to its feet, alive because of me. Minnie was licking her tiny offspring frantically, trying to clean it and warm it up. The baby, a female, could barely walk but was fighting to get to her mother’s teat.
Could it possibly survive? Would Minnie? I made sure the lamb was breathing and getting cleaned off, rushed into the house, washed my hands, put out an SOS to the Granville vet.
I was elated to think that if my foolishness had cost the life of one early lamb, my experience might have saved another. I was also afraid, as I waited to hear Kirk’s truck in the driveway, that mother and perhaps baby were too sick to survive.
Kirk would probably have been amazed to know just how happy I was to see him. He was as shocked at Minnie’s resurrection and delivery as I was. “On the way over, I was thinking about a C-section,” he said, “wondering if you’d go for that to try and save the baby.”
Then, oddly, we looked at each other and, without any prompting, said the same thing at the same time: “Where is the afterbirth?”
If there was no placenta, it had to still be inside. “There must be another lamb,” said Kirk. I asked him to try to pull it out, but he smiled and shook his head. “No, you do it,” he said. Reluctantly, fearing I might harm the remaining twin, I gloved up and reached in. I wasn’t sure what I was feeling, so Kirk felt around and positioned the fetus. I pulled and pulled and out came a ram, Leo, to join the female I decided to call Gert.
Kirk and I spent a half hour settling Minnie down, cleaning her up and tending to her twins. Then we shook hands and I thanked him for his encouragement. “That was awesome,” I said, and it was.
I could hardly believe that people like these large-animal vets existed any longer in contemporary, liability-obsessed American society. On call almost all the time, they rushed from farm to farm over long distances in dreadful weather, often working with people who had little money for animal health care. They pulled colts out of horses and calves out of cows, got bitten by pigs and kicked by donkeys. They worked in open spaces, mud, and manure. They made educated guesses, improvised, innovated; they made do with what they had. They were amazing.
I felt pretty amazed myself. A ewe I had given up for dead was alive and nursing two small but healthy twins. Kirk said Minnie had developed a vaginal infection—hence the odor—and gave me penicillin and syringes. She’d need shots twice a day.
Still, my lambing season was over, or so I thought. The next day I would dismantle the other pens, put away the heat lamps, muck out the barn, and try to return to my real work—writing. I felt tired, exhilarated, and vaguely triumphant. I had lost a lamb but brought many healthy ones into the world.
One lamb, Murphy, had been shipped off to Anthony’s because its mother seemed to have no milk. Murphy was thriving on bottled sheep’s milk, but having him join two large dogs and a toddler proved a strain on an already clamorous household, so Murphy moved on to a shepherd and spinner friend, Sheila. A couple of volunteers, including Jacob, had helped with barn chores and hay hauling. Even with two prolapses, we’d gotten through, with the help of some good friends and a couple of great dogs.
MY RELIEF WAS, OF COURSE, PREMATURE. THE ENSUING WEEKS just brought a different kind of chaos.
Lambing season, it seems, is not over when the last of the lambs are born. Apart from all the medical care and maintenance, a whole new set of crises can erupt.
A third ewe had a prolapse, requiring another vet visit, more stitching, another bill.
Minnie’s twins didn’t gain weight the way their peers did. Maybe her milk was insufficient or poor quality; in any case, I had to resume bottle feeding. Leo attached himself to me, while Gert hung out with the donkeys. Visitors found this cute, but it was poor animal husbandry, dangerous to the lambs. The only protection sheep have is the impression of bulk they make when they flock together; otherwise they are defenseless. Predators look for sheep wandering off alone, as Gert and Leo had taken to doing. Border collies really don’t like to see sheep traveling solo, away from the herd, either. It made Rose and Orson crazy to see individual lambs roaming around.
Rose already had her problems with this reconfigured bunch. The lambs were too small and inexperienced to respond to her herding attempts, and the once-docile ewes were still morphing into rampaging beasts when she approached their young. Her pasture became a battleground. Several times, as she was charged, kicked, or butted, Rose yelped and ran behind me, frightened and confused.
In one way, my gamble had paid off: Rose, having attended all their births, was very tender toward the lambs, even as their mothers continued to chase her across the paddock.
But she struggled with the problem of how to work with this complex mix. Sometimes she tried herding Fanny rather than take on the ewes. The lambs didn’t understand what Rose wanted them to do, and the mothers stuck with their offspring, so herding became virtually impossible, especially for a young dog who was still learning.
Rose tried all her moves, but she got run off time after time. Resilient and determined, she was also failing for the first time; I saw some signs of stress and hesitation.
Perhaps it was time to recognize our limits and pull back. The problem was, I’d never needed her more. I’d already found lambs outside the pasture several times; they could slither between fenceposts and under gates. Meanwhile vets were roaring in and out of the driveway several times a week and would soon want to castrate the young rams. The farrier would arrive shortly for hoof maintenance, followed in a couple of weeks by the shearer, ready to relieve the ewes of their shaggy, matted fleece. I also had to administer various medications. I needed to move this unruly mob around.
So I turned to my secret weapon. Orson had been aroun
d sheep for years, and if he was too excitable to herd in the approved way, I had nevertheless been working with him every single day throughout the winter. I’d set up our training sessions so that he could not fail, locking the sheep in the small training pen and simply sending him around its perimeter one way or the other, using the “come bye” and “away to me” commands. Usually, he spun himself around a few times, then tore toward the pen, raced around the fence with his beautiful lope, and came roaring back to me for a treat. The sheep, nervously watching as he galloped past with that wild gleam in his eyes, were probably grateful for the fence.
It wasn’t herding, exactly, but we’d worked hard on it. Now, I owed Rose a break while the lambs grew up. Why not see whether Orson could dog-break my suddenly unruly herd? We had done that for farmers in New York and Vermont, for ten dollars or a couple of pies. Why not do it for ourselves?
On a blustery afternoon, holding my breath, I walked into the pasture with my complex and excitable soulmate. The sight of all the lambs hopping around surprised Orson; he stopped and stared. But he didn’t stop for long.
The ewes who’d rushed up to challenge Rose had grown bolder of late. But the first ewe who challenged Orson got a nip in the butt, followed by a tug at her shaggy fleece that pulled her over onto her side. This only had to happen once. The ewe was unhurt but rattled, and after that, at the mere sight of Orson, the ewes all bleated urgently and nosed their lambs toward the training pen and swiftly inside.
Orson wasn’t subtle—no inspiring interplay between human and dog, no graceful minuet between dog and sheep—but he did the job. When the vets came or I needed to administer shots, I just opened the pasture gate and let Orson in. In seconds, no matter where they’d been, the whole flock was either inside the pen or huddled in the barn, whichever was closest.