Dirty Chick (11 page)

The other surprise was that turkeys can fly. I suppose I should have known this, but in fairness, I'd only ever dealt with them shrink-wrapped in plastic. I figured they could flutter a little here and there, much like our awkward chickens, so Rebecca and I had fitted a loose wire mesh over the top of the turkey pen. This proved worse than useless. No sooner had we released them into their new home than these turkeys began collapsing their bones inside their bodies, squeezing through impossibly small gaps in the wire, and heading off in all directions. One turkey crouched atop the shed, and another took off and soared effortlessly across the property, finally roosting on a shaggy old beech tree, where it gazed down at us like a smug pterodactyl. The third appeared to have an intellectual disability. He just shuffled around
in the wood shavings, eating rocks and stray turds from his roommates.

“Great.” I groaned, eyeballing the pterodactyl. “Now what?”

“I'll get the one on the shed,” Peter volunteered. “But you guys are gonna have to figure out that other guy. He's pretty high up.”

There was a stream at the back of the property, and the beech tree grew diagonally out from the bank, so our renegade turkey was doubly inaccessible: elevated about thirty feet off the ground, he was perched on a slim branch that extended over muddy water.

“I don't know what to do,” I muttered to Rebecca. “Just wait here. I'll try to get to the other side of the creek.”

This involved hiking out to the road, then over to our neighbor's property, jumping an electric fence, and crossing a cow paddock to make it back to Rebecca on the opposite bank. By the time I got there, she'd just about given up. But at least I'd had time to formulate a plan.

“I'm gonna chuck rocks at it till it starts flying,” I called. “Then you're just gonna have to grab it.”

Positioning myself at the edge of the crumbling bank, I began collecting projectiles: small stones, discarded fencing battens, twigs. Each of these I hurled at the offending turkey, trying to unsettle him enough to take off, but not to injure or kill him in the process. The turkey started making a nervous trilling sound. Over in the pen, I heard his dummy roommate trilling in reply.

“They're talking to each other!” Rebecca called. “This is good. Throw another one!”

I picked up an apple-size stone and propelled it at the tree limb, cracking the branch right beneath the turkey's perching claws. It
squawked and took flight, showing off its epic strategic reasoning powers by flying right back to the pen and perching on the loose wire mesh.

Rebecca was ready. Crouched inside the enclosure, she flashed her hand out and nabbed the bird by its ankles, yanking it back inside. “Gotcha!” she hollered.

“Damn.” I lay back on the bank, panting at the effort. “That is one stupid bird.”

THE FIRST ONE IS FREE

J
uly arrived, and with it the damp chill of midwinter. Purua's climate is wet and temperate, perfect for helping things grow. This did not apply just to fig trees and peaches. Our bedroom ceiling blossomed with mildew, wafting invisible spores on our heads. Slugs appeared in the bathroom, sliding wetly across the tiles. And a rich green slime began to coat the outside of the house, filling in the ridges on the wooden deck until the planks were as slippery as an ice rink.

Our compost heap grew moist and slimy, and one morning I found a cluster of pale, plump maggots writhing blindly on its surface. I should have known then that something fundamental in me had changed, because I did not scream or throw up, as a normal person would have done. Instead, I fetched a jar and collected the maggots for the chickens.

The growth wasn't relegated to slime, mold, and maggots. Everywhere I looked, little lambs began appearing in the pastures.
Sometimes they were so small that all I could make out from the road was a tiny pair of ears, sometimes pink, sometimes black, peeking out above the top of the lush green grass. And in Purua, lambing season meant just one thing: Calf Club Day.

Calf Club Day is a farm exhibition in which children are paraded with livestock. That sounds more depraved than it should. It's actually very sweet and educational: the kids raise their own baby goats, calves, and lambs, and on the big day, they lead them around a ring on a harness. Working farmers ask them questions about livestock care, and the winners earn ribbons with gold lettering.

But for our family, the lead-up to Calf Club Day was a nightmarish cycle of torment. This is because Rebecca and I both got hooked on the lamb.

I don't know what made me do it. Six months into our stay in the country, we already had twenty animals on the farm. At any other time in my life, that would have been crazy-person territory. Nobody sane has double-digit animals. Twenty cats in your house? Call the SPCA. Twenty hamsters, or ferrets, or dogs? You are an unemployed person who hears Jesus talking in your head.

But out here, in Purua, all those animals seemed normal. The cows, goat, and alpacas were very low maintenance, and we hardly ever saw the two cats. Two dogs didn't seem all that unusual, the chickens produced fresh eggs for our family, and we planned to slaughter the turkeys in time for Thanksgiving. The only animal who seemed at all questionable was Jabberwocky the rooster, with his scrappy attitude and insatiable libido. And after all, he was a cock. We could hardly blame him for acting like one.

But, then, that's often how addictions start. A little nip here, a little fix there, and before you know it you're on to the hard stuff. And our drug of choice was the lamb. The entire community raised
lambs for Calf Club Day, which is another way of saying “But everybody's doing it.” When local farmers had a sheep who died in childbirth or one who rejected her baby, they gave the little lamb away. Like crack cocaine, the first one was free.

The danger with lambs is that they're cheap and irresistible. The first time I held a newborn lamb, I was devastated by its cuteness. The big soft ears; the gentle, melting eyes; the tiny hooves; and the fluffy white tail—I didn't stand a chance. No matter that we already had twenty animals and no plan for a house in six months. I had to have one.

We put the word out in the community that we wanted to raise a lamb, and then we waited for the phone call. Rebecca spent her days running Google image searches for “cute baby lamb,” and then squeaking in delight when she found a good hit. As for me, I laid in supplies. I stacked up bottles, rubber teats, and milk replacer like an anxious mother waiting to hear from the adoption agency. I cleaned out the dog kennel, piled up fresh towels for bedding, and studied books about sheep rearing. “Isn't it
wonderful
?”
I babbled to Peter. “The farmers will give you a lamb for free.
For free!
Just because it doesn't have a mother.” I shook my head. “Guess they're too cold-hearted to rear a lamb by hand.”

But no, those farmers aren't coldhearted. They just know what they're dealing with.

To begin with, there's the time commitment. A newborn lamb should be fed six times a day. That's a lot of work, especially if you're trying to do something else, such as feed a family. Shower regularly. Hold down a job.

The other thing the farmers know is that lambs grow into sheep. This may not sound like an astonishing fact, but when a lamb is hand-reared, it is unafraid of humans. Which is fine when it weighs
five pounds and looks like an Easter toy. But when that lamb becomes a hundred pounds of sheep tackling you for a love cuddle, it gets a little dangerous. Of course, I knew nothing about all that, and if anyone told me, I chose to ignore them. I had a vague idea that our lamb would one day grow up, but in the early days that seemed abstract and irrelevant.

When we got the call, I was over the moon. Rebecca and I sailed out of the house and raced to Maria's sheep farm in record time. When we pulled up the driveway, there was Ba, a tiny, shivering baby taking shelter in a wooden doghouse. I lifted him up, the scent of his fleece slightly spicy like a newborn baby's smell, and he nestled into my shoulder right away. I cuddled him close, my body flooding with the warmth of new motherhood. Nuzzling my ear with his feather-soft nose, Ba bleated softly against my neck, and my boobs just about let down with milk.

That was my first taste of the lamb.

As for Rebecca, she was astonishingly nurturing. We already knew she was talented with kids, and a few weeks on the farm had demonstrated that she was equally impressive with animals. She pitched in with every job, from calf feeding to turkey wrangling, and she even made a couple of halters for Cinnamon and Lil' Lady so we could lead them around by hand.

But the reason she was so good with children and animals, it turned out, was that Rebecca didn't distinguish between the two. To Rebecca, the difference between our baby sheep and a human infant was academic. As far as she was concerned, one of them cried less and smelled like lanolin, but both should be equally treasured.

Initially, her fastidious lamb care was a blessing. A newborn lamb is legitimately fragile, so you do need to take extra care
with its feeding. I begged some cow colostrum off Hamish, and Becca nursed Ba from a bottle right away. He couldn't get a latch on the lamb nipples, so I dug up the old baby bottles again, and Rebecca warmed the colostrum on the stove as she would have for an infant.

Then, on the second day, we had a little scare. Ba wasn't drinking well from rubber nipples, and he started to get dehydrated. I left to pick up Miranda from preschool, and I was just collecting her backpack when Rebecca rang me on my cell phone. “He can't poop anymore,” she announced. “I think he's constipated. But don't worry. I found a solution.”

“Oh, great.” I covered one ear to block out the squealing cries of children. “What do we need to do?”

“Well . . . it's a little gross.”

“Yes?”

Rebecca hesitated. “When they're out in the fields, the sheep mother will . . . uh, lick the lamb's bottom.”

A child raced past screaming, and I leaned against the wall, not sure if I had heard her right. “Rebecca,” I said sharply. “You're not actually
doing
that, are you?”

She giggled in a way that sounded not entirely convincing. “Oh, no. I was thinking maybe we could try a warm washcloth.”

In retrospect, I see that the lamb-licking episode was a warning sign, but then our slide was imperceptible. Rebecca made a bed for herself on the living room floor, and the lamb was supposed to sleep in a cage beside her. But after dark, I'd hear the cage door slide open and Rebecca's soft voice as she coaxed the lamb into her bed. In the morning, I'd come outside to see the two of them cuddled beneath the blankets, tangled together like exhausted lovers.

Becca wasn't the only one who started to slip. Because Ba had to
be fed so frequently, I routinely cancelled dinner parties and parent-teacher conferences. I lied to my friends, making vague excuses about housework and headaches just so I could be alone with my fix. I mean my lamb. After I fed him, I'd sink my face into his fleece, breathing in his sweet woolly smell and letting it fill me with a sense of peace and well-being.

If you've never raised a lamb, you might wonder what the attraction is. After all, it's just a baby sheep. It's got hooves and a tail. It's basically livestock. What's so great about a lamb?

To that I would counter: Ask the lady crackhead what's so great about drugs when she's living under a bridge with a glass pipe and facial sores. She doesn't see the squalor. She sees only sunshine and rainbows, peace and pleasure forever.

That's how that lamb seduced me. It was cute like a baby, but unlike my own children, it didn't whine or annoy me. On the rare occasions when I did leave the house, I found myself thinking about my lamb, wondering how cute he was being at that precise moment. Was he leaping? Prancing? Gamboling, perhaps? I felt sorry for people who didn't have lambs, because their lives seemed so gray and predictable. Unlike me, they didn't live in hyper-elevated lamb reality, full of cute things and sparkles.

Maybe that was when I started to lose it. When Ba wasn't sleeping with Rebecca, I often carried him against my body in a sling. Sometimes he walked around with a little diaper on, but even when he didn't, it wasn't really a problem. Kowhai followed Ba everywhere, and as soon as he pooped, she gobbled the turds with gusto. Even our dog was getting a taste for the lamb.

I snuggled Ba first thing in the morning, and sometimes when Peter wasn't looking, I brought him into bed with me for a cuddle. Meanwhile, our home was scattered with filth. Dirty dishes
cluttered the sink; the laundry hamper vomited its contents across the floor. And I was blind to what this fluffy white toxin was doing to our family.

Yet instead of cutting down, I took it up a notch. I let the local farmers know we wanted one more lamb, and when Jackie called one evening, Rebecca and I raced out the door to collect our new baby. “She's just a few hours old,” Jackie warned. “You'll have to get colostrum into her straightaway, or she might not make it through the night.”

A tiny bundle of fleece pressed against Jackie's overcoat, two shiny black eyes peering out.

“D'you want me to dock her?” Jackie asked.

“Dock?” I looked confused.

“Cut her tail off,” Rebecca clarified. “They take off the tail so it doesn't get dirty.”

“Ah, we won't cut it,” Jackie corrected. She held up a small rubber ring, about the size of a Cheerio. “We just clamp this ring on, then the tail goes necrotic and falls off. Gets a bit whiffy, but it won't harm the lamb.”

I wasn't sure about that. When things go “necrotic,” it's not usually a fun time. “Does it hurt?”

“Might be a bit sore. But it's quite safe.” When I finally agreed, Jackie brought out a strange tool that looked like a large pair of pliers and clamped the rubber ring on our new baby's tail. She didn't even bleat, so I considered it more like a circumcision than a mutilation and promptly forgot about it.

It was dark by the time we got home. Ba bleated loudly at the sight of his new sister, and Peter rolled his eyes when he saw the swaddled shape in Rebecca's arms. He pressed his lips into a tolerant line. “I'll feed the kids,” he volunteered. “You'd better go talk to Hamish.”

Rebecca was already arranging herself in a nest of blankets on the couch. “It's okay,” she urged. “I'll cuddle the babies.” She was not referring to our children. The two lambs were sharing a blanket on her lap, and Silas and Miranda were nowhere to be seen.

It was already seven o'clock. I peered doubtfully across the road at Hamish's dark farm before picking up my milk bucket and setting off. I didn't really want to ask him for any more stuff. We'd been so picky with his milk, and he already thought we were useless city people. Tentatively, I knocked on his door.

The person who greeted me was so different from Hamish that it was as if aliens were inhabiting his skin. Showered after his long work day, he wore a clean white T-shirt and pressed gray slacks. He sipped from a cold bottle of beer as I stammered out my request.

“We have a new lamb, you see. She's just a few hours old, and we've got to get some colostrum for her, so I was wondering, I mean, I thought maybe if you have some . . .”

I trailed off lamely, waiting for him to fix me with his trademark glare. Instead, he broke into a friendly smile. For the first time, I noticed his eyes were a nice shade of hazel. “Ah yeah, that's no worries. Here, let me get a torch. I'll take you out to the sheds.”

I followed his pool of light, and he led me to the back of the milking shed, where a few buckets of thick, yellowish colostrum were lined up by the wall. He picked up the first one, and even in the shifting light we both saw the bugs floating on top, the chunks where it had started to curdle. He hesitated, put it down, and went for the next pail, then filled my bucket with fresh, creamy milk.

“Hop in my ute,” he suggested. “I'll give you a ride back to the road.”

We bumped along the rough terrain of his farmyard, and
Hamish was actually chatty with me. “We used to raise lambs and sheep. I was a wool farmer for years. But wool's got no value anymore. People just buy the synthetics. You earn so much more off the same land now when you're farming dairy. Miss the lambs, though. It's good for the kids, to raise 'em up.”

He stopped his truck, and I climbed out, stunned. “Er, thank you. Thanks!” I stammered, as he steered his truck back up his driveway.

Was it the beer? Hamish's grumpy farmer mask had tipped, and underneath he was this sweet and friendly guy.

Or maybe he was just enabling us. I named our second lamb Colette, and we called her Cou-Cou for short. She also needed to be fed six times a day, so now we were up to twelve feedings in all, with a timetable posted prominently in the kitchen. Rebecca and I took turns, but we were still measuring formula and warming milk every couple of hours, and if their feed was just a few minutes late, Ba and Cou-Cou cried out like starving toddlers.