Trauma Farm (46 page)
Once the European populations rebuilt and became overcrowded again, the Black Death that climaxed in the 1300s was followed by another round of global cooling, which likely encouraged the collapse of both complex and simple civilizations such as the Khmers and the Greenlanders. It’s now clear that traditional agriculture, though not as potentially dangerous as our Oil Age, is capable of affecting the world’s climate.
Despite these climate change episodes, our populations continued growing, and the animals died in ever-increasing quantities. However, with the dawn of industrial food production we learned how to hide animal slaughter behind locked doors. Death is now relegated to films, books, distant wars, car accidents, and our own ghettoes. It’s the last great taboo of modern society, an event discreetly hidden since we began moving away from the land and the animals. Europeans and North Americans not only conceal death behind factory walls, they’ve also erected walls of gushy sentiment—the trusty pet mourned with much ceremony and tears. But most of all, we want it out of sight, even when it comes to our relatives and loved ones. Grieving with the corpse has been shrunk to a single ceremony for the community, with very little time for the actual relatives. No more the body laid out on the table or the uncovered coffin in the home.
However, death walks openly and commonly on every mixed farm. There’s not only the loss of the trusty dog, the horse, and the ancient, much-loved hen or ewe. There’s the slaughter of the chickens, the lambs, the cows, the pigs. Then there are the surprise deaths—the attack of a cougar or wild dogs, or the ewe that delivers a lamb and just walks away, uncaring about her crying offspring. What twists me up most is the startling way death can arrive, like a mystery guest at a party, wearing a different suit or dress each time.
One day a friend, the poet Patrick Lane, and I were sitting in the sunroom, drinking Scotch, several years before he went dry. We were being bad in the afternoon and enjoying it, until a tree swallow darted in through the open door. Recognizing its mistake, it made a sharp turn and tried to exit through the window beside Patrick. It bounced off the glass with a fatal
ka-thunk,
landing dead in his lap, while he sat there, stunned, whisky glass half raised to his lips.
“Does this happen to you often?” I asked. “Or was it a special performance just for me?”
YOU TURN YOUR BACK
and fate arrives, usually at the most awkward times, the dead ewe you have to perform a Caesarean on in the pouring rain, with barely seconds to save the chilled lamb, and then you do save it, and it revives, coughing in the wet grass while you desperately towel-rub it, bringing warmth and blood circulation into its newborn limbs.
The dead lambs—they made me understand how delicate and precarious the miracle of life is. There was the terrible year a lamb died being born. Suddenly, in the next stall, an older ewe perished giving birth, yet her lamb survived. Sharon, determined to save the living lamb, tried to give it to the ewe who had lost her baby, but she rejected it, pushing it away from her udder. So Sharon skinned the dead lamb and tied its hide around the rejected one. The mother was suspicious of the gore but recognized the smell. She didn’t reject it, quite, though she didn’t accept it. We kept her chained for the day to the wall of the birthing room so she wouldn’t trample the lamb to death if she did reject it. Then suddenly Samantha darted into the room, and the ewe, seeing the dog, converted into an instant mother, ripping the flimsy chain from the wall, chasing the collie out of the room, and herding the suddenly accepted, disguised lamb into a safe corner. I always considered this episode the goriest in our history on the farm, maybe because I didn’t have the willpower to do what we both knew had to be done. Only Sharon, who’d worked her entire adult life as a nurse, had the strength to save the lamb. Out of the gore another life leaped, a lovely lamb that went on to become a prime ewe in the tribe.
WHEN I LIE WITH THE DYING LAMB
When I lie with the dying lamb
in the manger, I desire so little,
because life is already
more than I can take,
nestled in the hay, listening
to the gasps of tiny breath—the hiss
of the propane lantern hanging overhead.
The mother is dead in the corner,
and soon death
will follow death as it has done for the millenniums
since this unholy mess invented itself
in a chemical fog that should
make any thinking creature bitter.
How our blood surges for the newborn,
the gorgeous miracle and enigma—
even though we will slaughter this lamb
for meat in four months if it survives,
which it won’t. Death is seconds away.
I look into its eyes, seeking the mystery,
but they are already filled with the secrets
of the other side, the place
where we can’t go, until we go.
And I lie still in the hay, holding the black hoof
of a dead lamb—feeling left behind once again,
uninstructed.
The strangest thing about raising sheep for meat is that you will weep for them, fight for their survival; and then, when their time comes for the market, you will kill them. Mike Byron slaughters in his field, the old way. I’ve field-dressed deer and moose and eaten bear in the bush and thrived for nearly forty years eating raw fish and sometimes raw meat, but I was taken aback the first day I helped him slaughter a lamb and saw his gore-covered killing platform in the field behind his house. Then, after watching him carefully, and following his instructions, I learned his techniques for killing as many as a dozen lambs a day (during his most productive years) and his way of keeping the flesh clear of contamination. He moved his killing site so that contamination wouldn’t build up and handled the hide with one hand while skinning it, thus preventing his knife hand and knife from being soiled by the hide. Then he winched the lamb up as he finished skinning and gutting so that the cleaned lamb wouldn’t contact anything foul. During his forty years of slaughter he’s never heard of anyone getting sick from his meat. Traditional slaughter is a lot safer than it looks. However, it’s still a shock to city denizens, who appear to believe that meat is born prewrapped in plastic on Styrofoam platters.
Sharon and I were visited by friends from Montreal and their two children, Jacob and Isaac. The boys were twitchy at first, but like most children they soon began to enjoy farm life—until the day we dropped in on the Byrons to pick up extra eggs. Mike was in his field, wrestling with a recalcitrant lamb as we drove up. “Here, hold this lamb,” he instructed in his no-time-to-waste voice. I was so used to working and talking with him that I just held the lamb and he slit its throat, then efficiently drove the knife into the neck vertebrae, quickly severing the spinal cord and ending its suffering. His standard technique. The lamb’s corpse flung itself into its final convulsions, bleeding out on the grass. The youngest boy began hyperventilating. Slaughter was so much a part of our life that it never occurred to me, in that brief moment, to recognize how harsh it would appear to a city kid. This was the moment I realized how distant I had become from the urban world. I went red with embarrassment and guilt while Marie-Louise led the sobbing boy away. It would be a long time before I heard the end of this affair. “What’s the matter with him?” Mike asked, handing me the knife and dragging the lamb toward the skinning trough, where we swung it up onto the platform so he could begin the skinning and gutting. Then I quickly returned to the car with my friends, apologizing profusely and endlessly.
Over the years I’ve learned to respect the traditional slaughter of animals, along with age-old growing techniques for vegetables and fruits. Modern concepts of hygiene and cleanliness can be even more dangerous than the “dirty” practices of our ancestors and the animal world, as the now-immense scale of meat recalls and food poisonings reminds us. I’ve known a few deaths in my time and slaughtered my share of game and livestock, and usually I want to weep when I look at the body. It’s claimed that the dead instantly become three-quarters of an ounce lighter: the weight of the soul. That’s too little, in my book—death is much heavier.
Usually, we don’t know death unless we know the victim. Bloodbaths in Zimbabwe, or suicide bombings in Jerusalem and the customary reprisal that inevitably kills children in Palestine, are distant until we see the distraught faces close up, and then our heart unravels, as it does when we lose a relative, a friend, or a pet. Whether it’s Old Yeller or Lassie, dogs especially grab our emotions—maybe because they can be among the sappiest creatures on earth, or because their world is based on the pack mentality’s need to please. Cats aren’t far behind. When ancient Egyptians lost a cat, they shaved off their eyebrows, and if their dog died, they shaved their entire bodies. Who doesn’t feel sorrow reading the story of Odysseus coming home after nineteen years? His ancient hound, warming its old bones on the dung heap where it had been relegated, recognizes him immediately, raises its head, and whimpers before it falls back, dead, having fulfilled its obligation—waiting for him to come home. Dogs love us unconditionally. I wish I could be as good a person as my dogs think I am. They can love you more than you can love yourself. Maybe that’s why the French say the best thing about a man is his dog.
For several years we kept two dogs on our farm. The border collie, Samantha, to round up the sheep, and Olive, to fight off the raccoons that prey on our chickens. Samantha was such a good shepherd that you hardly noticed her working. We used to delight in sending people out for walks in the fields. A motley, rambling crowd would leave and then return in a tight cluster, tripping over each other’s feet, not realizing the dog had invisibly, patiently grouped them. She looked at you with eyes that said: “I can get around you.” And she could. Everything they say about the intelligence of border collies is true. Her partner, the giant, galumphing hound Olive—as black as an olive and as graceful as Olive Oyl—has about three brain cells, and not all of them are switched on at the same time. One of her favourite tricks is to drop her ball in the pond and then mourn its disappearance after it sinks—staring at the water, sometimes for hours, hoping someone will rescue the ball.
Sam died before dawn at Malcolm Bond’s new pet hospital. Pancreatic cancer. It was sudden. We thought she’d eaten something bad, but when Malcolm opened her up she was full of cancer. We never had the chance to say goodbye. Dead dogs stick to us like ghost limbs. After my first dog died I locked myself in my room for two days with a bottle of whisky. Leonard Cohen knew the feeling exactly when he sang about fathers and dogs dying.
Olive was so sickened at the sight of Samantha’s body in the wheelbarrow that she drooled. She refused to come near the grave and say goodbye as we buried her. Olive sat on the far side of the pond, staring at the water.
At least Samantha had a good week before her death. She and Olive had driven a marauding deer off the property. The next night we came home with a quarter of beef and they had a feed of scraps. The dogs must think we’re the ultimate hunters. We go out for a few hours and return laden with bones.
Then they treed the biggest raccoon they’d ever fought in their lives. It was almost as big as Sam. It took both Olive and me to kill it during another one of those brutal, five-inthe-morning fights. Sam loved it. Everybody was bleeding by the end. She always tracked the raccoons and then let Olive move in. In her youth Sam actually used to climb the fruit trees after them. We buried Samantha in the late morning with twin lambs that had been stillborn in the night. We were too distracted to notice them until we were burying Samantha. Then we realized one of the ewes was calling. Her calls led us to the dead lambs.
So now Samantha has two lambs to shepherd under the willow tree where we buried her with a lovely little black-and-white, Oriental-looking stoneware lidded pot that I turned on my wheel ten years ago. We dragged up a quartz-crystalline rock for a headstone and Sharon transplanted some flowering snowdrops next to it. Later in the afternoon Olive slipped out of the house, alone, took her favourite ball down to the willow tree, left it on the grave, and returned to the house, silent with the private sorrow only a dog understands.
A
ND NOW THE
day has come to its liquid end, the sky as blue-dark as deep water—another of the many blues that our sky has given us over the years. At dusk the peafowl make their regular night flight to the maple, using our upper deck as a launching pad. Perched on the rail, they pump themselves up like Thai kick-boxers preparing for a match. Building a rhythm, their heads bobbing before they leap, the birds pound their wings against the air until they rise like helicopters into the high tree, where they perch, faintly silhouetted among the leaves.
In the gathering darkness the dogs are desperate for a night walk, so we go down to the gravel intersection beyond our farm. Our footfalls echo in the relative quiet, accompanied by the frail and querulous cry of the killdeer and a couple of crickets. A lonely tree frog makes itself known by the pond. Our spring “wall of frogs” is muted now, and we will nervously await their return next spring. Like so much of the world, they are endangered. Out of 6,000 known amphibians, 1,900 are threatened with extinction from the chytrid fungus. Already 170 have gone extinct. All we can do is provide habitat for our gang, planting more shoreline reeds and willows to shelter them from the fish, herons, and raccoons.