Lambsquarters

by Barbara McLean

  Little lamblings look out big new doors framing brave new worlds. Timidly they take a step in the sun, the way you would dip a toe in a lake, then withdraw and run back inside. But their mothers are gone. The lambs bleat and cry. They circle and pace, and just when they are about to give up, their dams come rushing back, all noise and push and bad manners, and claim them before heading out again, en famille, to pasture.

  Along the chute the track is wobbly, evidence of some secret navigational device wrapped in wool. Like the hound following the scent of a rabbit, the flock undulates along determined lines, hillside or valley-wise, further wearing the path that was worn over and over by their ancestors. They disappear through cedars that grow too close to the ground for me to pursue, and emerge on two roads, the high and the low, to converge on the grass at random. They eat and walk without restraint. No beadles keep them to the path.

  They sidle up to the edge of the Pie-shaped Field, trim the cedar woods to a hedge-on-sticks, graze and browse their way. They disappear through the woods, leaving pellets behind, not breadcrumbs, to mark their trail. Single file. A woollen crocodile on the move.

  On hillsides they flock to the verge like Pre-Raphaelite sheep, straying and napping or bunting their buddies, oblivious to the danger of Gabriel Oak’s young dog, poised to chase them over the brink. Or they worry the fence to the Hayfield, trying to break a new trail to the fresh alfalfa. There they would gorge and bloat until, like more Hardy sheep, they would suffocate unless the trocar could be found in time to pierce their sides and expel the noxious gasses that would build from the unaccustomed fresh forage after a winter of dry feed.

  One spring, Belinda, a beautiful Hampshire yearling, ran off, manoeuvred her head through the fence and ate her fill of alfalfa. By the time I found her she had doubled her size and was gasping her last. The gas had formed, the rumen was distended, the diaphragm was trapped, the ewe was dead. What nurtures, also poisons. Eating alfalfa is a matter of moisture and timing. And the balance tips turvy as well: grass wants height before the sheep arrive. Their bottom teeth drag low and damage the early crop.

  Sheep teeth are a surprise to some. On the roof of its mouth, a sheep has only an empty hard palate with no teeth at all in front, just a tough cutting board to scrape the grass against. The lower incisors sever it, and the back opposing molars chew it and chew it again. All that grass goes through all these stomachs: the rumen, the reticulum, the omasom and the abomasum. Rumen, reticulum, omasom, abomasum. Like a Latin chant. Euphonic. The sheep chew to the chant’s rhythm, marking 4/4 time.

  They spend the season following paths and patterns. Out early for dawn grazing and back to the barnyard for a morning nap. Out again mid-morning, then resting in the afternoon shade by the drive shed or cedar copse. The cycle continues through until dusk, when again they return in a line, the alpha sheep in the lead, to the barnyard’s safety. Their ongoing odyssey—white threads spread over the loom of the land, then woven up at night, into a tight weft of woollen tufts. The sheep lie ruminating together, their lambs at their sides, stretched out in the comfort of home. Just before dawn the web is picked apart once more, to wander free in rows unravelled along paths the sheep work, back and forth, like shuttles, for another day.

  TRACKS

  MY PATH TO THE BARN CHANGES every day. In summer I meander, detour past the roses or through the honeysuckle. In fall, I kick and crunch amidst coloured leaves, and in winter I tread through snow as the wind blows the lane in and the neighbour blows it out. He knows my timing by my tracks, and however hard I try to beat him, there are days when he’s here before I’ve fed my flock. Although he’s never said, I feel his slight censure, feel my faint failure, and I resolve to rise earlier the next day, get on task, trudge my track through that fresh frost and do my chores on time.

  Country tracks prescribe time-worn expressions: As the crow flies. Shortest distance from A to B. From here to there. Paths, lanes, highways. Sidewalks, ditches, verges. For every mile of road on the way home, there are two of ditch. Corduroy, gravel, macadam. Grey, beige, black. Bumpity, dusty, slick. Our tracks. Slashed through the country like ancient roads carved with uncurved blades, imperialistic impositions on a landscape that undulates, veers and vectors, jags and juts, resisting straight lines. If we measured crows with our instruments, would they fly straight?

  Country tracks also deviate. Crows do not circle like hawks catching thermals in a vortex of their own, rising, falling, suddenly swooping off course for a tasty rodent that has rashly exposed itself. They do not fly in a V like geese, suggesting perfect formation, but really even geese shift and scatter, replace each other in line, now follow, now lead. Crows don’t circle or V. Nor do they bisect the sky with a cleaver. They have their detours, their distractions, their disruptions between departure and arrival. Like ambitious mothers with aspirations, they get preoccupied with the dailiness of feeding and preening, breeding and nesting. Destinations are postponed, cancelled for another season. Even migration is waning in the nineties and the noughts with more birds staying all winter in the warmer weather.

  I’ve seen swans follow roadways, tour the highway each spring in search of the cold tundra, taking the curves with the cars. Small planes do this too, use the roads as their guide. Or they fly over huge hydro corridors gouged diagonally out of the land to carry juice from heavy blue-water generators on sunset beaches to the big smoke of the city. Flyers spend their Sundays above the high wires, without a net, trading neon lights for the view of a straight swath that has been tamed and sprayed with toxic chemicals and toxic rays. On damp days the hydro lines sing and buzz, and a baby’s pram wheeled beneath them will vibrate, metal moving metal, energizing more than the lines. Kids grow big here. And tall. And quickly too.

  Hydro helicopters follow the corridor looking for problems or leaks, for spare electricity escaping into the atmosphere. And damage comes from the energy they attract as well as convey, for lightning loves them and forks jagged nails into the towers like divine fingers, galvanizing the hot symmetry of the line. But only ice makes them crumple and fall.

  Police helicopters look for dope in the fields, thick plants concealed in caches and creek beds. Choppers check the corn rows, following lines of their own over backwoods, riverbanks and clearings, flying low so others won’t get high.

  Herons fly from pond to pond, their enormous bodies reduced to floating down, their doubled necks folded like garment bags to carry on, their claws pointed as rudders. Their wings span an adult’s arms and cup the air at the low pace of the metronome. Slowly, with purpose. A Mahler adagio. No wasted move. But the hydro lines transect the ponds. Impose an unnatural barrier at just the wrong height. And the herons notice late, swerve, bank, fluster and dive. They return to rethink their plan, re-navigate their altitude, their path. Where hawks land, herons falter. They are not linesbirds.

  Starlings travel in a ribbon. They fly a fickle path, turning the strand inside out and over and down, up and around. Migrating noisemakers, they fill trees at night, squawk at dusk, queue on wires at dawn, gossiping. Don’t hang your laundry out on starling days. Particularly if there are wild grapes and chokecherries in the fencerows. One flyby stains purple.

  WHEN I WALK through a wet wood or field to the magic beech, the corduroy road or the watercress and double home on my tracks, I can see the folly of my straight intentions. There is no crow’s line here, no level, no plumb, no transit. My path hedges and falters around the groundhog holes (front and back doors— some with carports), the odd thistle or burdock. It swerves to investigate a plant or a bug, shifts in direction with the whim of the moment.

  There is so much to see. And why not be waylaid? The pussy toes have grown to whole feet. The goldenrod flush in full payoff. The chicory reflects the sky. Alfalfa blooms purple and mauve again, and some late clover grows alongside the shrivelled heads of flowers past. Queen Anne’s lace is ruffed around a rich murex centre big enough only for the vase of the smallest sprite. Haws hide the thorns. Appl
es are yellow and red, striped and russet.

  I walk in a wavy line, a path I create anew each time, or follow one side of the tractor trail. Until I realize it is taking me elsewhere, away from my destination. Such is the draw of a path. In planted fields I walk on the edge. Must not damage the crop. But the edges are rough, grown over and perilously close to the ploughed trough. In a harvested field nothing can be hurt, but still my inclination is to keep to the verge or walk in the rows imposed by machinery. By humanity’s need to control, to order, to straighten curves.

  On summer walks, fresh cow pats fester in the neighbour’s fields. The shit-flies, large amber insects, ironically fragile and filigreed, work steadily, taking what they need and leaving the nitrogen for the field. But while they tread softly on top, delicately doing their salvage work, I will sink in, squish and slide and carry cow pie with me over the hill. So these too must be seen and swerved for. Sheep scat, pelleted and solid, is more forgiving, but it finds the cracks in my boots and lodges there, content to see the world from dark to dark, tread to tread.

  Tracks signal a journey. Only the trekker can decide whether the journey surpasses the destination. Walking in the wild commands all the senses, the gross and the delicate. Wide eyes absorb the vistas and fine focus catches the details. The elm, survivor of decimating disease, despite its Dutch stewards, stands alone on a crest and is a surprise every time. It rises from the planted earth like a cairn to loss. A sole specimen of a noble race. But if my eyes hug the path to help my feet dodge the tripsters and pitfalls, I can miss it. I can scurry right by without noticing. And how few of us even know it is there?

  I am a walker, not a maker, of paths. There are those who obsess with cutting the swath, while I am content to follow on foot, on skis, or snowshoes. As a child I watched my grandfather’s hired man, Harvey, with his machete. He’d cut and clear miles and miles of paths from cottage to boathouse, cottage to bathhouse, ice house to woodshed, and all around a northern shoreline too long for me to walk in a day. He carved magic paths just beside the water, over granite and through raspberries, exposing gnarled roots of yellow birch spread like giant atrophied fingers over rocks and moss. His paths revealed fungus to draw on, lichen to dye with, wintergreen for tea and moss for pillows. Every kind of maple and ironwood and birch. Cedars, white and Jack pine, red oak, hemlock and balsam. And so many ferns. The only way to see that wood was through his paths, or by paddling close to the shore and peering in. But underbrush conceals and canoes follow paths of their own.

  The first time I took Thomas to that place I led him away from the road, along a mile of sandy gravel lane, which had been laid so many years ago. We struck for the path through the woods to see this place together, to walk on the soft needle carpet.

  Harvey was gone by then, as well as my grandfather, who had lorded over that land. And to my horror, so was the path—all of the paths. They’d grown over in a season, relentlessly filling in. Unused and unbrushed. Thomas felt my sorrow, surpassed my skill. He took up the machete, and the paths, one by one, reappeared. Now my daughter, tools in hand, heads back to continue that work, follow the legacy and create her own corner in that land of our blood. And her brother will join her with his own clearing tools.

  OUR SON has tracks of his own. Single track, close-clipped and tirelessly thrashed, designed for danger and thrill and speed. Tracks for mountain bikes and snowboards. Tracks with hairpin turns and jumps. Tracks that need constant attention, cutting and brushing, brushing and cutting.

  My father made tractor tracks in his woods. Drew out more logs than his fireplace could ever burn. Made whole summers of tracks, whole winters of wood. The sound of the Ford 8N, which lives here now, the sound of the chainsaw. If the neighbours miss my dad, I doubt they miss that noise. While fishers trolled quietly and bathers sunned, he took on the forest. Tamed it with his trails, his fluorescent tape and iron stakes. Each morning he put a nickel on the map of the land so my mother would know where to look if he didn’t return. And she said to me, “I never would.”

  WINTER TRAILS leave less room for meandering or independence. Whoever breaks the trail gets to choose the way—that slogging work has its reward. Single tracks double in the snow. Two skis, side by side, imprint the way.

  Coons leave their nailprints by the river, and dogs dicker in the mud. But I’ve never seen a fox track in anything but snow. And nothing is so distinctive. One small foot in front of another and another. A straight line of feet with few diversions. Foxes know where they are going. Purposeful A-to-B creatures. Straight as crows.

  Rabbits, silly ziggers and zaggers, are so busy in snow that their tracks turn to half-pipes, patterned over and over with lucky footprints, like the path of a giant mole with its roof removed for study. So busy, these bunnies, backing and forthing between brush piles and tree roots, bringing the news from there to here and taking it back again. The ants of winter.

  Other snow tracks are harder to read. The soft marks of birds fluffed on perches or the minute snow angels formed by flying and landing, spaced at odd intervals. Only the imprint of the wingfeathers or a tail gives them away. A ruffed grouse, bobwhite, or blue jay pausing. Or a jumping mouse, who leaves ridiculously far-fetched spaces between landings, little holes in loose powder, with tail-lines behind. As if some sky creature reached down to make a pattern in the snow for its own amusement, using the field as a celestial board game.

  Summer smells of sweet hay and honeysuckle give way to rank dew and leaf mould, scent of late asters and fermenting fall berries, then winter crispness freezes nostrils. Only the crumple of evergreen underfoot perfumes the air. Woodsmoke rises from the farmhouse until March, when it mingles with the sappy smell of maple burning and boiling, as syrup bubbles in the cauldron. Circular sugar tracks lead in a maze of sidesteps to individual trees that give up their bounty in a lachrymose labour. The full sun triggers a steady stream of sap, but in the cold and grey, the maples close their eyes in dormancy. The snow track becomes mud mixed with rotting forest floor. My big black boot heels wedge their stamped rubber maple leaf pattern into the real thing under each tap. And even the rabbits must wonder at a path with so many turns, so little distance, filled with the baby steps of Mother May I, necessitated by carrying a bucket growing ever heavier with sap.

  CROWS FLY in curves. We carve or careen, make tracks straight or crooked, or follow the undulations of the moment, never stepping on the same ground twice. Like water, the earth, rock and plants morph with time, and as we are changed from day to day, so they alter, atom by atom, ever recreating the path, the destination and the quest.

  BUS BUST

  AS THE GROUND CHANGES and the season changes, so do the faces I see at my morning table each day. They change ever so slowly, moving from the crook of my arms to the raised cane chair to the booster seat to the pressback, until suddenly they are grown, they are going, they are gone. And the familiar face left is crowned in grey. It has lines now, mirroring my own.

  The hands that move over the table have changed too. From the first grip with chubby palms, the first grasp of spoon or crayon, the first fist of displeasure, to the expressive movements of creative thought, the manual illustration of rational thinking, the cursive writing, the keyboard tapping, the filling in of applications and forms, the tentative opening of mail announcing acceptances, scholarships and imminent departures. And the hands left behind have callouses and veins and tracks leading from all the elements of this place. Scars and memories of the thorns and nails, the softest down of newborn children and lambs, the bites of hay and brambles and the lashes of wire and stone, the knowledge of countless skills. And still the hands fold on my table. Our table. And reach across to each other.

  The quest—that need to discover this land, to learn to create, to steward our piece of earth—stays with me, with us. But the players age, they grow, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the number we started with. Just two. The children we never even dreamed of when we first came here are now setting off on th
eir own.

  The bus still travels our road. It’s a tad later now that it doesn’t have to stop here, and it goes by a lot faster. I don’t miss marking my day by its schedule. Sometimes I see it from my bed while lying barely awake, or reading, my tea steaming in its mug. No more wake-up calls, packing lunches, doing last-minute laundry. I do not miss those stresses, though the void they leave is filled by other holes, tiny vials of blank space, tiny vacuums pulling part of me, tugging gently, relentlessly.

  WE HAD a number of bus drivers over the years. The religious, the righteous, the reverser, the hunter who craned for deer every fall. They broke down, got stuck, got ornery, got stubborn and got my kids safely to school and back, and they were saints to do it. At the start we were cautioned that the children might have to walk to the corner, not too far, but along a hilly gravel road where pickups travel too fast. I would not have been able to watch them waiting at that corner, nor shelter them, nor trust in their safety, but it never happened. The bus always came to the lane. The ancient maple was threatened when it prevented one driver from turning the bus. But it just presented a challenge to another, who would simply back up to the door. The gift of reverse. The bus still goes by and the maple remains, though it loses limbs in each storm and its crown grows thinner each summer. The tree stands, shades, shelters and safeguards this place like a sentry.

  The bus house, which saw small children enter its door, peer up at its back window and press noses on its front one, housed my daughter and son through elementary and high school. It housed more and more items as more of its space was taken up by the children’s growth: mouse nests, fossils, a collection of rocks and papers too important to pitch away. In bad weather I could watch from the kitchen on days when even the dog wouldn’t venture down the lane. My kids would be blown sideways, hands to their hoods, lunch boxes flapping against their thighs as they disappeared altogether in a sudden whiteout. They would gingerly open the door of the shelter, scramble inside and close themselves in, fogging the glass with their breath.