Lambsquarters (32 page)

SHEEP PATHS

SHEEP FOLLOW IN AN AGE-OLD
pattern of order. Like Sydney, who takes after me through the stile, they trust their leader. Sometimes too well. It’s a trust both exploited and denigrated, encouraged and denounced, but singular. When the alpha sheep sets off down a path, the others are sure to rattle their dags behind. But you do have to get the leader going. She alternately heeds the siren’s call and fears the terrors of innocent barriers: the Scylla of a misplaced stone, the Charybdis of a shadow. My first few sheep were pets, all named. But they didn’t readily learn to come when I called. They followed their dreams, but with no discernment between the gates of ivory, the gates of horn.

In the first cold snap of the first sheep-autumn at Lambsquarters, before the barn rebuilding, before the
arrival of the sheep-herding dog, I carved a beast hole in the stable, which looked like an oversized urban cat-door, covered with a sheet of sacking, to woolgather and wind-hinder. Though the sheep could only benefit from this come-and-go door, they suspected something on the other side of the small straw-bound threshold. Circe’s spell? Neither fresh hay nor warm shelter could entice them to cross the threshold. The door was new, unknown, untried; they would not risk being turned into swine.

I zigzagged behind the mob, small as it was, snapping my fingers and clapping my hands. They clustered, flocked, moved forward then broke free, scattering right and left, winnowing in the formation of some ancient country dance. But they did not go in. Would not. Their eyes widened, their nostrils opened in fear at the approach, and they split into two concentric patterns away. We cycled and cycled until, in frustration, I finally remembered that sheep follow. Cream rises: sheep follow. So down I got on all fours in the barnyard. I eyed the flock over my shoulder, created the track and took myself through the door. They were there behind me, all in a line, calm, noble, trusting. They formed their winter path. And I learned that day to lead.

JUST BEFORE
the January thaw there are no sheep paths at all, except for the pacing-trail in the pen and the line scuffed away at the base of the mangers, which
exposes the dry, hard, frozen manure pack. On the coldest storm days, when the bitter east wind attacks through the updated sliding door, which is left open the width of two pregnant sheep in wool, there are no tracks at all. Just a huddle of beasts, frosted white on cream fleece, white on white, winter white. On those days the frost itself makes tracks, outlining whiskers otherwise unseen, frosting catfish mouths. The sheep look like kittens who’ve been sniffing in flour tins, with sparkles.

To close them in and out of the weather on such days, I create a path for the track door, which after all the snow and ice cannot find its channel and slide. The sheep watch with worry as I attack the frozen mass of straw, manure and snow. It isn’t easy work, and it isn’t quiet, and it certainly isn’t warm. I dress in typical
bonhomme
fashion, in long johns, jeans, wool socks, sweater, scarf, mitts and toque. I don the snowsuit my father-in-law left behind from a thinner time and felt-lined boots. And I begin to shovel and to chip. The crowbar, its weight lifted and dropped, asks gravity to make a breakthrough. Slowly, a bit at a time, the debris comes away and a trench forms. The axe would work faster, or the heavy maul, but I’d need steel-toed boots and they aren’t warm. So I play it safe and struggle on. The sheep disappear behind me in a steam bath of mutton-breath. The spade lifts out the pellets of frozen dung, the chopped bits of straw, the cubes of ice. Somehow there is never much loose snow. In
strong winds it travels, fills up the stable far beyond the door, swirls up the walls over inside stones and through the boards high in the mow, salting the stacked hay as if to preserve it from rot.

If sheep leave few tracks in the storm, the mammals in the mow redeem them. Cats, their claws pulled in, use furry mittens with pink suede palms to mark the snow, and the sharp skeletal marks of rodent feet run just ahead of their tracks at a clip. The chase is circuitous and confusing to decipher, tracks sashay and shuttle in the macabre dance of cat and mouse.

In the stable the sheep huddle for warmth, wear a circle in their bedding, and punctuate it with the deep commas of naps in the straw. They pace eventually, more bored than cold, and yearn to follow, to move in a line. When the wind stops, I dig once more in new snow, haul the door along its groove and watch as cooped critters try to bound through, three at a time. They wedge themselves in the doorway until one gives up and retreats, and they fall into their famous follow formation. As they make new tracks in deep snow, I fill the channel with straw, cover it with a board and wedge it tight with the door. The digging will be easier next time. I’ll fork instead of pry.

Before the white deluge, they had their path to the Sidefield, their tracks to the apple trees, where late fruit still fell on shallow snow, and grass could be uncovered with the scrape of a hoof. They filed one by
one, through a narrow passage between garden and gate, then fanned through the field on the worn gullies of previous Gullivers.

At dusk on those days the order dissolved and mayhem reigned in a moment of remembered lambdom. Heels kicked, heads bunted and all the gambolling of youth condensed into a few minutes of late light. They ran in; they ran out. They led; they chased. Imbedded tracks dissolved in the dark, making the field a mass of jumping wool, which moved like wheat in the wind. You had to be quick to catch it. Like glimpsing the kneeling oxen on Christmas Eve.

Winter trails are limited, hindered by snow and cold. A good storm will fill the barnyard, bury the feeders, block the gates. The adventurous can step over fences on white walkways, wander to the fields beyond and be gone. But nothing beckons from the blue-white wilderness, so the sheep stay, stalk circles and lines from feeder to straw, from shelter to sun, back and forth on the slippery board over the threshold. They click or stomp or jump right through, leaving neat hoofmarks in a narrow swath.

SHEEP LAMB
behind closed doors. They make their labour track in a corner, dig a nest with a forefoot, walking back and forth in the timeless distaff pacing of early contractions. Afterwards they follow me as I lead carrying their newborns to a special pen, where tracks are impossible to lay.

On the first day of spring, when the doors open to the light, they rush to be first to the path, the familiar route to fresh green heaven. They run in full-footed jumping gambols, in sideways kicks, in neck-turning tumbles. All the pent-up energy of winter gestation, labour, birth and nurturing explodes in a May Day festival under the sky. They head down the chute between the Meadow and the Hayfield, nibbling and bleating, putting fresh prints in muddy paths silted over in the thaw—and forget their lambs.

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