Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [46]
Long before my father had cows, he was a shepherd.
One of the Friends by Nekoosa had sheep, and Dad says that’s where he got the bug. When he moved to the farm in 1966, he began to gather the flock. He got four ewes from his brother-in-law over by Hillsdale, and bought another four from a local man named Earl. Earl wanted thirty-six dollars. Dad wrote a check. Earl looked at the check and then he looked at Dad, and then Earl said, “This better be good.” Dad reminded me recently that this used to be sheep country. “Lots of people used to have sheep,” he said. “The Mareses, Norths, Skaws—they all had sheep.” He’s right. I tend to recall my farm childhood through the frame of my youth—when it was dominated by classic family dairying. I had forgotten the early days when farming was still a patchwork endeavor holding the line against the narrower specialization to come. I start working my way around the repurposed or vanished farmsteads all around the township, and sure enough, I do remember these people having sheep. “You sold your milk all year round, in the winter you logged, and in the fall you sold your lambs,” says Dad. In other words, you kept a diversified portfolio.
Ask my father what he “does,” and nine times out of ten he will reply, “I’m just a dumb sheep farmer.” But listen to a dumb sheep farmer for long, and you’ll realize the self-deprecation (rooted in the relative unlikelihood that sheep will put you on the fast track to the Forbes 500) does a poor job of masking some underlying affection for husbandry. My dad, a man not given to pet names, often refers to his “woollies,” and once when someone suggested that sheep weren’t too bright, Dad responded with a question and answered it himself: “Y’know what you get when you inflate a sheep, paint it black and white, add two faucets, and remove its brain?”
He waits a beat. “A cow.”
From my largely oblivious childhood perspective, Dad’s sheep were a sideline, whereas cows required our daily attention. When you weren’t working with the cows you were working on chores predicated on cows. The sheep were just always there. Gray lumps in the distant pasture, only remembered a couple times a year when we rounded them up for worming, or shearing, or when we cut the buck from the flock.
In the early part of the year, however, the sheep begin to wedge their way back into the schedule until they dominate. In February Dad sets up the pens and feeders and gathers the flock to be shorn, after which—having lost their winter coats—they take up permanent residence in the lambing shed until spring and the grass return.
Lambing season amounts to a month of insufficient catnaps. You tromp to the sheep shed every couple of hours, around the clock, four weeks straight, until the last ewe delivers. The thing you’re looking for is a sheep showing signs of imminent birth. She may be pawing the straw, circling, or simply looking distracted. A ewe experiencing the early twinges of labor will sequester herself off along a wall or in a corner. At the onset of a contraction an otherwise placid animal will extend her neck, raise her head, roll back her upper lip, and wrinkle her nose. A laboring ewe will grunt softly, as if she is being nudged in the belly (I hear a chorus of female voices: As she is, Einstein!). Another means of early detection: Put out fresh hay. As her compatriots rush the feeders like woolly pigs, watch for the ewe who remains apart—she’s next.
Midwifery-wise, your basic job is to stay out of the way. Observe from a quiet remove and let nature take its course. Recede. Wait.
Anneliese is having a rough time of it. She just can’t find her way to sleep. The weariness shows in her eyes every morning, and the best I can come up with is a hopeful “How did you sleep?” This is only forces her to confirm that she didn’t sleep well, while I stand there like a fence post. Tonight when I come in the house