Deep Creek by Pam Houston

Author:Pam Houston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-11-28T16:00:00+00:00

Ranch Almanac: Lambing

My shearer, Tom Barr, says Icelandics are the toughest sheep he shears, the strongest and the most unruly, but since they’re the only sheep I’ve had, I can’t compare. I find the ewes sweet and self-sufficient, if a little bossy, and I like sitting outside listening to their bleats and baas when they’re grazing around the house in the afternoon.

When the sheep are out, the wolfhounds are in, or we have a hell of a rodeo. Fenton got his ribs smashed hard a couple of times when he cornered Motown down by the creek one day, and Jordan lost a pretty big clump of wool from her butt to William who was very insistent she sit down right now. So far Livie has been smart enough to keep her distance, and there’s never been any blood drawn on either side.

Lambs are born, like clockwork, on the twenty-fifth of March every year. They come alone or in pairs, black and white, or orange and white with big white stars on their faces, and sometimes a color I’d call pure golden blond. From the minute they are born until they are three weeks old, they have the softest, tightest, most beautiful curls you’ve ever seen.

During lambing season mamas and babies stay in the big pen 24/7. I’m grateful when the new lambs turn out to be female, because I’m not a good enough farmer to raise multiple rams, who do as their name suggests. I raise all the lambs to respond to basic voice commands and to enjoy a scratch behind the ears, but uncastrated, all my rams eventually become unruly, and nobody has much use for an aging, castrated ram.

I’ve learned a lot over the years about lambing: how to recognize when a ewe is in trouble, when to step in and when to leave well enough alone. But at the first birth I attended, a year after we got the sheep, my then ranchsitter, Mary Kate, and I stood outside the pen wringing our hands and saying encouraging words to Jordan the ewe who was down on her knees panting and looking more than a little uncomfortable.

Motown the ram stood over her, calm by his standards and, we thought, protective. We’d read lots of conflicting advice on the internet and had decided to go with the “most Icelandics know exactly how to do this themselves” school of sheep ranching. Mary Kate is an RN and kept repeating the first rule of nursing, “If it is not broken, don’t fix it,” until one black and white little lamb popped out, leapt immediately to his feet and started to nurse. We had about thirty seconds of cooing and grinning before Motown took a few steps back, got a running start, and tossed the two-minute-old baby into the air using his giant full curl of horns. Mary Kate ran to the baby while I threw my body on top of Motown, got him in a chokehold, and pulled and pushed him out the gate.

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