November and February and March. Those are dark months of sleet, wind and mud. The fog. Where weeks on end are grey and greyer in Grey County. Where the ceiling is so low the sun never appears and the blue of the sky is bleached into wisps of memory. Slush on the roads and ruts in the gravel, washboard before all the stops. Nothing is clean or easy, and it seems better to stay right at home; to eat the food in the freezer, the cans in the cupboard, the roots in the cellar and the jars on the shelves. Going to the barn is the biggest trip of the day—and sometimes the most resented too. Hungry animals, baaing their needs, meowing their discontent, clucking their disdain if I’m late. I throw out the hay, fighting the wind, and miss the feeders and sprinkle those precious fleeces. I drop a bale from the mow and graze a moving kitten, who merowzes in pain and indignity. The water overflows and floods the stable. And the sheep need rubber boots to keep dry. And I break down before fixing it. Wondering why I’m here. And I stay.
The lives of my children, teenagers now, are complex and intricate and away. Their friends are not close by; they must drive to see them, and that adds hazards of its own. Vehicles crash into icy ditches, are write-offs, yet they walk away. Not all are so lucky and the sorrows start. Three schoolmates killed with guns. Self-inflicted. And illnesses take two more. A snowboard kills one and carbon monoxide another, and the favourite teacher drops dead of the shock. It’s like war. Sorrow in battalions. The flag is at half-mast most of one year, and how do I comfort my children for that? How do I reconcile living in this place, which makes so many so desperate? And I watch my daughter and son age and mourn and learn from experience way beyond their years. And I grieve. And still I stay.
Just before shearing, as I’m preparing the barn, I fall backwards over the shearing board and bring the heavy sheep scales down on top of me, breaking my arm and trapping my legs. I’m all alone; Thomas is away. I fret I won’t get free, but somehow I do and totter outside to plunge my bent arm in the snow. I pull my watch off my swelling wrist and call for help. And of course it arrives. The flying Dutchman, driving more slowly than I’ve ever seen, carefully delivers me to the hospital after buckling me into the truck like a child. The Harrises send help for the shearing, which goes on without me, and clean up the mess I left of the barn.
The nurses all know me, and the doctor too, who takes time after the X-ray to order me dinner before he heads down the road in an ambulance with trauma so very much worse than my own. I lie in emerg and friends arrive, and then thankfully Thomas. He holds up my arm (my March break) for his colleague to cast hours later when the ambulance returns from the city through the snow.
Finally spring comes with its thin reeds of hope. Light thickens and lengthens. Lambs arrive and fill the days and nights with work—awkward work with only one hand to help. Earth appears through the snow and finally greens. Healed. And I’m still here to start it all over again for another year. Staying.
HELEN
I NO LONGER SLEEP in the barn during lambing. I have extra responsibilities in the house and away—my children and my work—and I have tried to breed a flock that can lamb without my help. No longer Hampshire crosses, with their bullish heads and necks, but sleek Border Leicesters, their snow-white Roman noses built for birth canals, their shoulders supple enough to slip through a pelvis, their bones fine and elegant. But still I check on them. I stay up late; I get up early. Some nights I set my clock if a ewe looks imminent. For still I cannot suffer losses, and if I’m there to help, the losses rarely occur.
I never get used to the miracle of birth, though I am so conversant with the process that little phases me. There are variations certainly. If the cord breaks over the lamb when it emerges, blood will spatter on the tight new wool. Rich scarlet spurts over fresh white hide. I’ve learned that the blood is just the remains from the umbilical cord, thin blood vessels stretched by the journey breaking naturally with the tension. The blood comes from the placenta, not the lamb, and not really from the ewe either, as the cotyledons begin to detach and the afterbirth sloughs away. But it can be frightening for an uninitiated observer. Blood equals danger equals fear.
The lambs themselves look different depending on the amount of amniotic sac still clinging to them, on the waxy material within, or on the presence of meconium, the first feces, which the lambs expel before birth if there is stress. The lamblings can be stark white, solid yellow or speckled brown. And occasionally they can be as black as the ace of spades.
IT WAS THE SPRING of the school exchange. We hosted an Inuit boy from the north and the trees amazed him. The forests. And though he knew everything about hunting and fishing, about slaughtering wild beasts for food, he knew nothing of farming or the cycle of life in sheep.
Our northern visitor arrived during lambing. He watched a pair of living twins being born in record time with little fuss or confusion. But he was disturbed by the sight. Disgusted even. Sickened. He had to leave the barn and was reluctant to return throughout his stay. Perhaps he sensed disorder. Perhaps he knew all was not as it should be. Certainly he contributed cultural assumptions different from our own.
The mother was attentive to her twin lambs, but indeed something was wrong. Where the ram was sturdy and getting sure of himself, valiantly trying to reach his feet, nosing his mother for first food, the little ewe lamb was floppy. She couldn’t get herself up, despite her energy and determination. Spindly and spastic, she flopped in the birth waters like a boat-trapped trout. She contorted and twisted and tensed, all her synapses working at odds. The suck reflex was there, but she needed support to feed.
My son joined his new friend in the house. Thomas silently shook his head. My daughter rolled up her sleeves and helped me deal with the new one, dry her off, hold her up, ensure she got a bellyful of colostrum from her mother. We involved ourselves in the immediacy of the work to delay the concern and put off the solution, just focused on the problem at hand right there in front of us. Every few hours we went back to the barn to check, to assist in her feeding. She was eager, she was hungry, and her mother loved her. A survivor.
THE BOOKS call it “daft lamb syndrome,” a typical veterinary descriptor like blue bag for mastitis, or black leg or pizzle rot. Unlike human medicine, which revels in obfuscating meaning between practitioner and patient, animal disease talks plain. At first I wondered if the lamb had a case of swayback, with her twisted neck and permanent glance over her left shoulder. For the first few days she could not stand at all. I had to help every few hours, day and night, to hold her to the teat and let her suck. Most farmers would have thrown her on the manure pile; she had no future as a breeder.
Over the years I’ve lost and I’ve saved many critical lambs. Cold and weak newborns, barely breathing, have come into the house in towels under my barncoat to be put by the wood stove, propped on a hot water bottle, dried with the hair dryer. I’ve fed them brandy to boost their energy, colostrum through a tube, or with a syringe if they can suck at all. I’ve had precarious little beasts revive, bleat, shake and stand on wobbly legs in their box, graduate to a child’s playpen when mobile and accept the humiliation of disposable diapers with a hole cut for the tail.
The successes are enormously gratifying. But they are mixed with many failures. The lamb left too late. The one too cold. The pneumonia that gallops ahead of the antibiotics. The sorry of spirit.
When I was pregnant with my own children, we lambed early to have the ewes’ labours over before mine began. But the cold was vicious and the losses were great. I’d trudge with my big belly to the barn, lumber over gates and crouch awkwardly to help. I’d question my adequacy to mother when my ability to shepherd was impaired. More than once, the house sheltered babies of both species—in and out of wool—all in diapers.
Finding a dead newborn is devastating. Not attempting to revive a weak one is unthinkable. It might have been easier, when my children were small, to dispose of moribund lambs than to have them die in the house, hear their death rattles and watch their muscular fascicul
ation after they gave up the ghost. But disposing of them is not a possibility. Sometimes they recover. I have to try.
Despite the wonky lamb’s grave problems, she had the determination of a coon raiding the feed room. She would tense her muscles and will her survival, founder and fall and finally flop up onto unsteady feet. She was able only to circle to the left. But she was up.
I left her with her mother as warmth wasn’t a problem and I couldn’t risk her rejection. I believed she would learn to feed herself—negotiate a path to her mother’s teat, latch on, stay and suck. But whenever she got close to the udder she’d continue in a circle again, away from the very thing she longed to capture.
The dam felt confined in the small pen. She stomped, wanted out. Her patience waned, as did mine; no longer would she stand while I held the squirming lamb to suck. I got out the bottle.
Helen, as my daughter named her, for Helen Keller, took to the bottle. She stiffened and shook, spilled and sputtered, left as much milk on us as inside her, but she wanted to live, she wanted to eat. With wool matted around her neck, she smelled sour. But she charmed like a heartbreaker, a beauty, a Helen of Troy.
She thrived on her feeds and tied me down to a schedule in the barn and a chore in the house. Sheep’s milk has more fat than cow’s, so I buy a special powder to feed a bottle lamb. The formula mixes poorly with water, making my kitchen a mess of blender, bottles and spills. A lamb needs six feedings a day for the first while and is not like an infant human, who nuzzles the breast in the warmth of the bed and is returned to the crib across the hall or stays to snuggle until morning. Artificial lamb feeding means alarm clocks in the house to heed needs in the barn. I must wake, dress in boots and heavy coat and mix the gloppy mess of coagulated milk. I warm the bottle in a beaker of water, distrusting the microwave to preserve nutrients, and carry it sloshing across the yard. The journey is dark and cold, but the silly broken lamb’s delight paid dividends. The sleepy flock, too, squinting from the light, entertained me with yawns and stretches, chuckles and bleats. Ewes lying down, their lambs on their backs or tucked into their flanks or under their noses. Little family clusters arranged within the pen. Helen stiffened on my lap, her rigid muscles in constant flex. But her good eye shone with pleasure and her mouth worked away.
In spring my son visited the Arctic, set out on a snowy journey with his new friend and learned the details of the hunt. At home, dealing with the domestic, I tried putting daft Helen out with the main flock, but she couldn’t cope with a six-acre field. When the others came into the barnyard she lagged behind, travelling in circles, oblivious to the rules of direction. In the tiny Sidefield, which is less than an acre and narrow, she could navigate crookedly along the fence to straighten out her circles, and find me or my daughter when we brought her bottles, which dwindled down to four a day, then three, and finally two. Her path through the pasture was patterned like a pulled-out Slinky, around and around until, after overshooting, she finally connected with the bottle and sucked it dry, snorting and huffing and making it her life’s work.
Her hunger woke me every morning, and her gratitude rewarded the early rising. She was always ecstatic to see me in my ratty coveralls, pulled on over my nightshirt, bottle in hand. Helen marked the dawn and the dusk. She woke the farm and put it to bed with her baby bleats, reminding me daily of possibility and promise, of conviction and tenacity. Her head was sideways, her legs crooked, and she had about as much stability as a drunk walking a line.
I watched her all that summer. She listed wildly to the left and her front legs were misshapen and misdirected, splayed and awkward. She grazed, but on a tilt, unable to compensate for the earth’s curve. A flat-earth lamb. Between steps she looked almost normal, her head askew, puzzled, working out a problem. Her belly was distended from the bottle feeds, her muscles lax, her wool lank. She couldn’t see with one eye. But she ate, she grew, she felt the sun on her back and gave no sense of being censured. Her mother answered her bleats, and her brother encouraged her grotesque parody of gambolling in the evenings, when lamb devilment peaks.
Even after weaning, Helen needed the fence to guide her to water and oats. She spent the autumn with the other yearlings, avoiding the truck and the market. When the ewes were bred, I let her run with the flock, certain that the ram would avoid her, leave her alone. And he did. She spent the winter in the barn, moving back and forth with the others to the courtyard for fresh hay each morning. She found herself a spot at the manger for grain, sidled up to the water bowl, nuzzled into the straw each night and slept her crooked sleep. She never straightened out, never learned to walk without a list, never mated, lambed, nursed. But she gave us all her special favour of attention; she was tame to anyone who cared to pet her.
My shearer just glared at me that March. Then softened and lovingly removed Helen’s wool, which was matted, she thought, from an inability to shake. The undersheep. Kept, not killed. Helen found her spot in the flock, as mascot, touchstone.
By spring she was still going in circles, but had mastered the art of the field. Always last to the barnyard, Helen could almost keep up. She no longer needed a small space, and the new crop of lambs played with her. She began to fit in. No longer falling over, she could jump with the others. She was a springy sideways creature, barrel-bellied and contorted, fun-loving and carefree.
But what about fall breeding? Helen couldn’t foster lambs. Couldn’t hold still to feed them or find them or keep up with them. That was a problem I never solved. One morning in October, just before Thanksgiving, Helen lay sleeping in the fold. But as I approached her, I recognized the ultimate sleep. Not a sign on her, not a clue. Just lying dead, muscles finally relaxed. She was so calm and unbent, I had to look over the others to be certain it was her. Helen, that daft lamb who flopped into this world and fought her way through, died in her sleep overnight amongst the flock she learned to graze with.
I clipped some fleece that day. Just enough to make something to remember her by. It lies in a basket, lofty and white, waiting for the perfect moment, the right project, the distance I need to touch her again. So she will once again touch me, as she did the moment she spilled into the world, thrashing and gasping. A wee bent animal, terrifying to behold, but full of the most remarkable frustrations and pleasures.
RACCOON
AFTER THE THANKSGIVING bounty, after the glorious sunsets of Indian summer, when fall merges into winter and the cold rises and the days diminish, the sheep stay close and the summer animals disappear. The groundhogs go under and the coons find their dens. Chipmunks bed down in subterranean condos. There is time to reflect on the passages of the year, on the visitors, the parasites and the thieves.
Now that my children are in their teens, I remember back to my own youthful days. I watch them interact with small children, with animals. I dread telling them of Helen’s demise, then marvel at their acceptance, their energy and their patience. The summer I was fifteen, I looked after my cousin’s children in Muskoka, as a mother’s helper. She taught me many things: to drive, to make jam, to sail, to think very hard before having babies. There were adventures, a couple of love interests, a lot of frustrations and a baby raccoon.
Its mother had been killed—there were no details. The baby was a mere suckling. And because I was desperate about animals and deemed responsible, I was designated to care for it. I filled a baby bottle with milk and sat on a kitchen chair with the coon nestled on its back in my lap. My first soft nursling. Its four rubbery feet wrapped around the glass, its eyes closed wistfully in their black mask, its belly bulged. It sucked, grew, was weaned, became snarly, was released to the wild.
My next contact with coons was in Montreal in the form of an antique coat. It must have weighed more than the combined poundage of the poor souls who made it up in those days before boycotts and spray paint, but it braved blizzards and the deepest snows I’d ever seen. And I wore it to shreds.
Grey County is serious coon-land. Every farmer has stories of raccoons fo
und, raccoons dispatched, raccoons trapped. On the rafters in the hay mow, my first coon here seemed harmless, beautiful, sleek and exotic with ringed tail and reverse purdah, only its eyes hidden. Days later I stumbled on the nest in the hay. Four perfect babies, identical, tiny and trusting furballs, happy to be held and coddled. I replaced the bale but returned each day to inspect, to hold, to show them to my children, defying the cautions of their teachers about animals in the wild. It wasn’t long before the denlings snarled. Bared their teeth and let me know I was a stranger, as they had been instructed.
My relationship with raccoons has spanned many years. And if it’s a competition we are in, the coons are winning. But I do not submit. The battle is one of wits. And of tenacity. When raccoons move into the barn, they do so not just for shelter, for birthing mangers and sweet-grass suites. They also crave food for their growing broods. And my feed room is a coon buffet. The cat food is their favourite. The small circles of dried protein, fat, flavour—cat Cheerios—tempt others besides my feral mouser and tame tabbies. If the cat food is left in a bag, the coons chew the corner. If it’s put in metal cans with childproof lids, the thieves open the lids and tip the cans. Bungee cords sometimes work. Sometimes not. The coons eventually undo the cords with delicate hands and help themselves.
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