If you love animals, or wish to live with them, or have a farm with sheep, lambing season is an intense experience, it is hard even for a professional writer to describe it, I think you have to live it. It is ritualistic, filled with tradition, confusion, surprise and pathos. I told a friend that lambing is like swimming in the river of life, you get it all – exhaustion, worry, sleepness, joy, the miracle of life, and always hovering nearby death and the awful feeling of responsibility and failure that it brings.
The vets always joke that at the end of lambing season, every person involved swears they will never do it again, and then six months or a year later they are on the emergency call list, up at 2 a.m. trying to pull a baby out of a dying ewe. I’ve done it eight or nine times, I’ve sworn each time it will be my last, Maria swears the same thing now, her first such oath. Lambing is medieval, really, not a science but an ancient and primal ritual replete with medicines, herbs, lotions, needles, heatlamps, afterbirth, tails to cut off, umbilical cords to dab with iodine, testicles to tie, hay, straw, manure and filth.
Even with the tools of modern medical science, you never quite know when the ewes are carrying, you never quite know when the babies are due, the only certainty is that they will never come when you expect them to come or when the vets say they will come. This is an article of faith.
Lambing is an opportunity to take the world inside the real lives of real animals, and that is important, because much of the world is forgetting what the lives of animals are really like. The animal people and the pet people stand on opposite sides of the prism, living in different realities. Quite often, they come together on my blog, the miracle of technology. I don’t mind explaining why you can’t give one lamb to another ewe, or why you don’t have to go find one when one is lost, or why all of the animals that come here cannot stay here forever. On the boundary between pets and animals, there is always much to learn, much to share.
I don’t know why I keep thinking each time will be different, this time I am ready, I am prepared, I know what I am doing. The spirits of the animal world must get a good laugh out of me, I am always understanding what a fool I am sometimes. There are great gender moments, too, when the outside world looks at a man and a woman and wallows in their own experiences and troubled visions. The woman is always the sweet nurturer, the man always the clueless and emotionless shadow. I am always saddened by many women’s poor expectations of men. But then, mine are not much better.
No matter how much care you take, there is always a dead lamb lying on the ground next to a frantic mother, desperately trying to get her to stand up. There is always one stuck the wrong way, one that can’t get out in time. There is always one who nearly dies, and is brought back to life to offer a miraculous delivery. Then there are the lambs, to be stuck under heat lamps, to spend the first few days of their lives in a cozy, warm and dry stall, filling their bellies with warm mother’s milk. Then, out in the world, never to be that cozy or coddled again. There is always a white-knuckle drama when you have to slip on the plastic glove, reach deep into the uterus, slide a limp thing out into the air and hope that it will struggle to it’s feet, breathe and cry out in that piercing way for the first time. It always seems a miracle to me.
So this is the thing about lambing. It wrecked us, exhausted us, exhilarated us, it was precisely the kind of shared experience I wanted to have with Maria, it bound us ever closer together. We thought we would keep two lambs, we are keeping four. We thought Ma would die, she is alive. We thought Zelda’s birth would be a snap, it was a painful and fatal thing. We thought Kim was leaving, she isn’t. So now there are nine, and we will give one or two of them away to a good place. In the meantime, Maria will have a bunch of pretty yarn and roving to sell.
Lambing is rich in life, it is a teacher of many things. There is the incomparable joy in saving a life, seeing it emerge into the world, and the painful sorrow of losing one. They are both different sides of the same coin. For the past six months, we have been swimming in the river of life, and grateful for the opportunity to understand what it means to be a alive, what it means to be responsible for animals, what it means to live a life of meaning. We both swore we would never do it again.
I was going to give our lambing bucket, our docker away this afternoon to Darryl Kuehne, the farmer who brought us Ted and took him away. Let’s wait a while, we both said at the same time In case we lamb again.
