We Kept Sheep

Overall you, my readers, seemed to like the Hot Toddy post last week. Comments were as follows:

“I’ve been doing colds all wrong.”

“I think I feel a cold coming on.”

“I kind of wish I had a cold.”

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And from one of my AA friends (I do think of them when I write about drinking, not enough to stop writing about it, or drinking, but isn’t it the thought that counts?)

“Why not just drink the whole bottle of whiskey. You’ll forget you even had a cold.”

“Thanks for the great recipe and another good read.”

Another thinks the refrain I suggested to solve recipe problems “Add more Whiskey” could be a book title (I agree).

Yet another shared a quote from another famous whiskey drinker Mark Twain. “Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”

Such as smart man, that Mark Twain. Because the blog continues to inspire comments I know it is read and appreciated. Thank you for your feedback.

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These cold days in January and February make me think of lambing season on the farm. I reprinted an old farm story about orphan lambs, one of my first blog posts, and damned if that story doesn’t have whiskey in it too, though not the good kind to which Mark Twain referred. And now to this week’s post.

We Kept Sheep

We kept twenty or thirty sheep across the road on a three cornered patch of low pasture, maybe five acres. A creek ran through it and it was too wet to farm. The triangle was created before I was born when they changed the path of Illinois Route 9 between Bloomington and Pekin. The new road, we called it the hard road because it was concrete, cut through our small farm at an angle different from the old road. Our corn crib ended up across the hard road on that three cornered patch. The sheep kept the little pasture clean and were easily tended. We’d throw ears of corn to them from the crib and take hay over to them when snow covered the ground. Dad used to put a bale of alfalfa on his back and walk down the lane with it towards the crib in the winter. I’d walk beside him. When I got old enough I took it over in a wheelbarrow or on a sled. Taking care of the sheep became my job.

The ewes lambed in the winter, usually January and February, often on the coldest nights. They would give birth to their lambs in the crib driveway, not that it offered much protection from the cold. That is where I would find the new lambs. Lambs need to nurse soon after birth. They are up on their feet almost immediately after being born but they need their Mom’s milk quickly to survive. Sheep often deliver twins. Sometime a ewe will take to one lamb in a set of twins and ignore the other. Or she’ll deliver a single lamb and walk away from it. Won’t let it nurse. Worst is abandoned twins. On a cold winter nights lambs without milk or their Mom’s attention die quickly. Sometimes I would find little orphan newborn lambs cold and dead by the crib. Other times I would find them abandoned and alive. Weak but alive.

Like this time. I stepped inside the crib and saw the lamb, a little huddle of tight black wool. He looked dead. I picked him up. He moved his head ever so slightly. I looked at the sheep and saw the ewe that had just had him. I knew by the mess on her hindquarters. She took no notice of me or the lamb. I ran across the road with the lamb in my arms and yelled for my Dad. As he came up from the barn I handed Dad the lamb. We went into the house and went down to the furnace room. “Go get a cardboard box and an old towel,” he told me “and put some milk on the stove.”

When I got back to the furnace room Dad was sitting on the steps by the door with the lamb between his knees, legs up. Beside him was a wooden box he kept in the furnace room just for this. In it, among other things, was a pint bottle of Hiram Walker and an eye dropper. Dad tipped the bottle and loaded up an eye dropper of whiskey. After prying open the lamb’s mouth and getting his little finger in the corner he squeezed a dropper full of whiskey way back into the lamb’s throat. He didn’t respond. Dad looked at him closely and gave him another one. He wanted a reaction from the lamb and finally got one. The little lamb snorted softly, twisted its neck, and gave out the weakest most pitiful little “baaaa” you could imagine. Then Dad rubbed the lamb’s belly, its legs, its head, and turned him over to rub his back.

“We gotta get the blood flowing in this little guy” he said.

“Why do some ewes do this?” I asked.

“People can learn things but with animals it’s all instinct.” He kept rubbing the lamb, too hard I thought. “Good ewes don’t learn to lick their newborn lambs and get them to nurse, they just do it. And with instinct, animals either have it or they don’t. Now go get the milk and put it in a pop bottle.”

We always had empty returnable pop bottles on the back porch. I liked the way the milk looked in the green bottles so I grabbed an empty twelve ounce 7 Up bottle and filled it with the hot milk from the stove. I did all this really fast, as if the lamb’s life depended on it. It was exciting.

Dad kept black rubber nipples in that furnace room box. He made a nipple bottle by fitting the short black nipple on the 7 Up bottle where the cap would go. He tried to get the lamb to stand but it couldn’t so Dad sat and put the lamb back on his knees, spindly legs up and limp. He pried open his mouth and put the nipple between his teeth. The lamb wouldn’t suck. Dad worked his jaws with his fingers, compressing the nipple then letting go, so the milk would run down into the lamb’s throat.

“Work his throat, will you David? Let’s see if we can get him to swallow.” I stroked the lamb’s nubbly little throat with my finger saying to myself ‘please swallow little guy, please.’ If he swallowed I couldn’t tell. Lots of milk ran out of his mouth. We got as much milk in the lamb as we could and then Dad said “Well, we’ve done everything we can. The rest is up to him.” I wasn't sure we got enough milk down him.

I put him in the box, the towel both under him and covering him, and put the box by the big coal furnace. The lamb just lay there, sleeping. I was afraid he would never wake up. Dad went on with his work and I tried to do other things, but all I could think about was the lamb. I checked on him all the time. No change. If we can get them to the house alive, we almost always save them. That’s what I kept telling myself.

Later after chores, when we were almost done with supper, still at the table, we heard the loud bleat of a lamb. Noise traveled well from the furnace room, up the hot air ducts and around the house. Hearing the lamb was the best sound. My Dad and I looked at each other. He smiled.

“Looks like he made it, David.”

I ran down the steps, jumping the last four, and threw open the door to the furnace room. The lamb was standing up, its black head just above the top of the box. I ran back upstairs, got the bottle from the icebox, stood it in a pan of water to reheat it, and when it was warm flew back to the furnace room to give him the rest of the bottle. He sucked well and his tail wiggled as he ate. For days the lamb would just eat, sleep, eat, and sleep again. It was true. If we could get lambs in the house alive we could save them. Dad was good at that, like he was at everything it seemed. I thought it was miraculous.

When the lamb was big enough we put him in a pen in the dairy barn and raised him there with the calves. I fed him every day. The next time Dad and I were in the sheep lot together, feeding corn and hay, he said

“Can you pick out the ewe that left that lamb out in the cold?”

I knew the sheep pretty well and pointed right at her.

“Will you remember her in the summer when we ship lambs?” I nodded yes.

“Okay,” he said. I’m counting on that.” I didn‘t know what he meant.

The lamb grew big and became a pet. We named him Shadow because he followed us around all the time. He hung around the house like a dog, combing the lawn for white clovers, plucking them from among the blades of grass and chewing them slowly. When we tried to return him, putting him back across the road with the other sheep, he just stood at the gate and cried.

“That lamb doesn’t know he’s a lamb,” Dad said. “He thinks he’s a cow or a person for gosh sakes. Bring him back.”

Later that summer when the lambs were eighty to a hundred pounds, long after we’d cut their tails off, we looked them over, kept a few of the biggest and best looking ewe lambs, and called in the truck to ship the rest to market. They would become leg of lamb and lamb chops for city people in short order. We never ate lamb or knew anyone that did. We were keeping Shadow to be the buck for a little flock of sheep that a friend of ours kept on the other side of Danvers. We weren’t real sure how he’d do as a breeding buck but Dad promised to bring him back if he didn’t perform. Farmers would trade buck sheep back and forth to keep from inbreeding their flocks.

As we were loading the lambs into the truck Dad said “Where is that ewe that left Shadow to die in the cold?”

I looked at the group of sheep that were standing watching the goings on. “She’s right there.”

“Let’s see if we can get her up here.”

Dad went to the crib and threw out a few ears of corn. The sheep came running. He dropped some more ears nearly at our feet.
“When she gets close let’s grab her."

Sheep are pretty easy to catch. They don’t resist long. If you grab them and hold them for even a short time, they’ll give up completely and lay there like a sack of potatoes. Sometime they’ll lay there all defeated even after you’ve let them go. Anyway, this ewe didn’t put up much of a fight.

“What are we going to do with her?” I asked.

“We’re going to ship her with the lambs. No need to put another lamb through what Shadow went through last winter. She’s not a good enough mother to keep.” And with that he picked her up and put her on the ramp going up into the truck.

“What will happen to her at the stock yard?”

“Well, she may be a sheep today but she’ll be mutton tomorrow.”

And that’s the way it was keeping sheep. We saved lambs’ lives and decided the fates of their mothers. It was all part of the work.