Lambsquarters (6 page)

When they leave the barn for pasture, the sheep find that gates and chutes lead to few choices for grazing, as this farm is not large. The standard hundred acres of the original tract was split early in the last century, and a quarter was severed off.

Lambsquarters named itself.

IN APRIL
the renewing flock transforms the barn. Loose housing—big pens divided only by wooden gates—is rearranged every few days to accommodate the
changing configurations of new mothers and lambs.

Sleep-deprived and short-tempered, I move slowly to that barn some mornings, stiff from kneeling over a difficult birth the night before, from bending under a ewe with a suckless lamb shivering from a midnight drop. I drag myself out of bed before dawn to check on my flock, help those in distress, feed the rest who are demanding their seasonal grain and molasses. The greedy ones brown their noses in the powdery sugar or choke on great mouthfuls of oats. The dog follows me to the Dutch door, hoping to slip into the barn where she will race up the stairs and send the cats to the top of the mow in a flurry of fur motes. The rooster crows-in the dawn, optimistic testimony to the morning’s certain arrival, and summer pastures seem a distant wish, hiding under snow or muck or the pervasive grey of winter’s end.

But May brings changes. Greening and preening, everything gears up to escape trapped winter spaces. Grass spears through the mud, legumes unfold, tree buds swell with juice and pulp until finally they burst, unfurl and test their fronds like new wings limp from the chrysalis. Early migrators land, hibernators wake, the tomcat misses meals. And young lambs, who’ve never even dreamed of grass, get their first taste. Like artichokes in balsamic vinegar, or asparagus in butter, the grass melts in their mouths, sparking virgin taste buds, calling perfect miniature hoofs to travel over this quarter farm to test out the endless salad on fence edge and borderline.

Weeds near rail fences have the best odds for full-gloried growth. If the rails are closely stacked, lamb’s quarters can hide just out of the flock’s reach and sprout between the posts. Occasionally a sheep will find enough room between the rails for its nose, then space to put its head through. It will munch its way to the pillory, get trapped and rarely think to retrace its route along the rails. Stuck in the stocks, it will tug and pull, dig in hind hoofs, shine the rail smooth with a lanolin neck, and bleat pitifully. The only way out is the way in, back where the rails were further apart. A handful of fresh greens will lure the sheep to freedom. Led by lamb’s quarters to danger and back.

The ram, penned all summer in a paddock of his own, bounds to the garden gate on weeding days, begging for the mallows and grasses and lamb’s quarters that I cull from the vegetable patch. With anchorous taproots, mallows are chained to the ground like Houdini. They break at the stem when I try to pull them out. Rarely do I turn the right combination and bring them up whole, but when I do, they’re a feast for the tup and a triumph for the tiller. Twitch, crab and quack grasses have underground runners that travel over continents without stopping. But lamb’s quarters, peppering the potato and pumpkin plants, are easy prey. Their roots are delicate and fibrous, and they jump out of the soil into my hands and into my ram. They leave friable earth in their wake; I can see where I’ve been.

TENACITY

A MOTHER HEN FUSSING,
a hawk roosting, a dog with a bone. We expect animals to stay on track, to focus, to concentrate on survival. Attention deficit disorder is disallowed. Darwin in the barnyard.

My twin lambs are a combination of proton and electron, positive and negative. Named Alpha and Beta, called App and Ben for short. App is accepted, the lamb of her mother’s life; Ben is bunted, marginalized. I look at him and think of the
Messiah
. For him the sad role, de-spis-ed, re-ject-ed, a lamb of sorrows and acquainted with grief.

Neither called nor answered, Ben wanders alone in a nursery of radiant mums and jubilant lamblings. If he approaches his mother’s teat he is abandoned. She walks away, looking for her first-born, the darling. Afraid he will starve, I prepare a bottle. I expect to find him hunched, hungry, cold. I expect he will have given
up, that he’ll be pining from the abuse.

But Ben is tenacious. He is focused on eating, primed for surviving. If he is vigilant, he can approach his mother from behind to suck, but only when App is sucking from the front. I have never seen this configuration before. The attentive ewe, nuzzling the forward lamb, ignoring the backward. Can’t she feel the pressure on both teats? Does she really not know?

For the milk to let down in a ewe, the lamb must bunt the udder. Not with a mere nudge, but with a vigorous punch from the pate. A large lamb will lift its mother right off her hind legs with the force. So Ben’s backward move is not subtle. First he gives a pound, then he takes a pull. But as long as App is sucking in front, the ewe co-operates and allows Ben the hind teat. This isn’t a quick suck and a calculated getaway. Ben is there for the duration. When lambs are young, their mothers stand still for minutes at a time to give them a continuous feed. Ben’s mother stands politely, nosing App, talking to her, nudging her into the teat while Ben drinks from the rear. Usually twin lambs will settle on one side of their dam and not cross over. At this point, just a week after their birth, App and Ben are unsure of their territory. Sometimes App will reach through to the opposite side while Ben takes over, tail wagging, to finish what she’s left.

A few days later and Ben strengthens. He is not as clean as the other lambs, since he must concentrate on
the back end of his mother, but he is vigorous and growing. When he connects with the teat, he’s a limpet—barnacle Ben.

Anything but stupid, sheep learn by example. A buddy has been watching Ben’s antics and today I saw her imitate him. Ben was behind one side of his mother, and the unrelated lamb zipped in on the other. App, standing at the front, where a good lamb really belongs, was baffled to find no dinners left. She must have been connected first, for her mother would not feed only Ben. And the ewe clearly thought App was still on. She was nosing and nudging App, who was wagging her tail in anticipation and excitement (and frustration) while Ben and his friend were getting all the milk.

MANY MOTHERS
are less than perfect. Our culture values only the vague concept of motherhood and offers little instruction in parenting. Sheep culture doesn’t provide alternatives. If a ewe refuses to breastfeed, she doesn’t have access to formula. Not by herself. An unfed lamb in the wild or in a hill flock would die. Attentive shepherds are like the Children’s Aid: they round up lost souls and foster and protect them. But why is one mother kinder than another? Why favour one offspring more than the next?

It has been proven that a human baby recognizes its mother’s scent, and will move toward it in a
rudimentary way. If given an hour to lie naked against the mother’s thigh, a newborn will slowly begin to move its legs. It will crawl to its mother’s breast and attach itself, if we give it the chance, much as a lamb will find the teat. New lambs are awkward, splay-legged creatures, easily confused between front and back mother-legs, but their determination is boundless. Sheep mothers are there to help. They rise immediately after birth, offer the teats, lick off their newborns.

Bonding between human mothers and babies is sometimes more difficult. Women in labour have a history of being tied up, strapped down, rendered unconscious. We don’t sniff; we gaze into eyes, we touch, we count body parts. We listen, we feel, we think about our connections. When human babies slither up their mothers’ naked bellies with the cords still attached, and latch on to newly secreting breasts, the secrets of motherlove are released with the let-down of milk. But only babies can hear and taste them. The cord is cut, but the bond remains.

Or does it? Some mothers of twins manage football-holds on their babies, tucking one under each arm. The infants suck away in tandem. These mothers perfect a skill, nurse in record time, plop the full feedlings on their depleted chests, cross arms and burp one over each shoulder, lay them down in matching cribs, never needing to check the nail polish on the discreet toenail to tell them apart.

But for other mothers even one baby is a burden. They growl after the birth, turn to the wall. They prop the bottle and walk away. They shake, scream, hit, burn. We punish these mothers, having never supported them. We just expect them to know how to nurture. To have the mothering instinct. Collective unconscious. Primal knowledge.

YEARLING EWES
make fragile mothers. They are teenagers, slight, sprightly, silly; they are often ill-equipped to settle with a lamb. Birthing may be difficult for them, or fairly quick, but they sometimes skitter, jump away from the birthing site, look around at their progeny in utter (and udder) disbelief. Mine? Are you serious?

These adolescent mums need tenacious lambs. They need lambs who have the will to win them over, bring them around to the idea of motherhood, of protection, of forgoing the freedom of lambhood to take on nurturing. It is a lot to ask. Even of a sheep. And some are not up to the task.

App and Ben’s mother, despite her three lambings, had never raised twins. As a yearling, she loved her single lamb and was a nervous but competent mum. One late afternoon in the heart of spring, she was out on pasture and had found some soft new grass for a birthing bed. I brought her into the barn for protection, for attention. She and the lamb thrived and
returned to the field proud and connected. The following year she lambed alone, overnight, unattended. While I slept, she gave birth to twins, the first a large lamb encased in a caul. It never breathed air.

I ran to the lifeless lump on the straw, reaching out to clear its airway, dreaming, like Mary Shelley, that I could rub it to life by the fire. But in its perfect package it was cold, slimy, dead. Neatly contained in a pellucid envelope, as beautifully wrapped as a Japanese present, this creature would provide no gift, be nobody’s pet. I was glad for the healthy second lamb, although had it not arrived, the mother might have released the first from its silver cage, licked off its nose, pawed its back and chuckled it on.

With her history of raising only singletons, perhaps this ewe cannot conceptualize twins, even when they are conceived within her. All her lambs are alpha lambs. Firsts and onlies. But her beta lamb is not giving up. Little Ben struggles on, backwards, but moving ahead in his own tenacious struggle to reach some personal omega.

LOFT