At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [35]
Rebel had been eyeing them suspiciously all morning, and when Bridget opened the gate to the meadow, he went into action. He streaked across the grass like an optical illusion, so swift and silent that the peacefully grazing sheep didn’t even see him coming until he nipped one of them on the ankle. The flock bleated and trotted restlessly in a dozen different directions and the dog dropped to his belly, his mesmeric gaze stopping the animals in their tracks. He began to circle and the sheep began to bunch. As though contained inside an invisible circle, the herd trotted toward the opposite fence line.
Bridget had learned quickly that all she had to do to get Rebel to herd the sheep toward the west was to pretend she wanted them herded toward the east. So when she started waving a towel at the flock, urging it on in the direction it was going, Rebel immediately turned the flock around and moved it the opposite way. Bridget kept screaming at him and waving the towel, and Rebel kept ignoring her, trotting the flock toward the open gate of the sheep pen just outside the barn. There Lori stood, ready to close the gate as soon as the last sheep was herded inside.
“Good job!” she called as Bridget came jogging up a few dozen yards behind the sheep. “Not a single straggler!”
“All it takes is a little reverse psychology,” Bridget called back with a grin.
Rebel, his job complete, streaked off to do whatever it was he did when he was not circling the sheep or trying to attack members of the household.
Lori planted her hands on her blue-jeaned hips and looked over with satisfaction at the shuffling mob of securely contained sheep. “And you thought it was going to be hard,” she chided Bridget. “I told you we could do this. And think of the money we’re saving.”
“We haven’t even started the hard part yet,” Bridget reminded her.
“Still . . .” Lori raised her palm for a high five. “Not too bad for a couple of city girls.”
Her optimism was contagious. Bridget laughed and slapped her palm in agreement.
Fortunately the sheep were a relatively docile bunch, and Bridget had no trouble getting a loop around the neck of a ewe and leading her out of the pen to the tarp, where Lori stood ready with the garden hose and the baby shampoo.
“Okay, you just hold him there—”
“Her,” corrected Bridget.
“Right. You hold her and I’ll do the shampooing.”
“She’s a sweet girl,” Bridget cooed, stroking the sheep’s woolly head. “She’s going to like her bath. She’s not going to be any trouble at all.”
And so, for a time, it seemed she wouldn’t be. Lori soaked the woolly sheep with water from the garden hose—which was surprisingly cold on her hands—and poured on a generous amount of shampoo. She added more water to work up a lather, and more shampoo, scrubbing up to her elbows. Rivers of brown suds were sluiced away with the final rinse from the garden hose, and with Bridget tugging and Lori chasing, they finally maneuvered the ewe into the barn.
Two blow-dryers had been attached to long extension cords that were plugged into the barn’s single outlet. They used old towels to rub away the worst of the water and, with Lori on one side and Bridget on the other, began to blow-dry the sheep.
Half an hour later, Lori stepped back to survey the fluffy, white, and rather annoyed-looking result of their efforts. “Well,” she said, though with slightly less enthusiasm than before. “One down, twenty-four to go.”
Bridget groaned out loud. “There has got to be a better way.”
Lindsay carefully spread newspapers out on the newly sanded floor and pried the lid off the gallon of wood stain with a screwdriver. “I’ll start in this corner and you start in that one,” she suggested, “and we’ll meet at the staircase.”
Cici looked up from the section of floor she was scrubbing with a mixture of turpentine and mineral spirits. All of the doors and windows were open, but the air was still sharp with the odor of chemicals and the ghost