Carolina Cold

So, after NAVC it was time to head north to NC where JP, her farm, and Raven awaited me. Unfortunately for poor JP, I arrived in my most unappealing possible state: Jet-lagged, sleep-deprived, virus-laden and somewhat the worse for wear after several months of combined winter- and injury-induced inactivity and stress- and Holiday-related chocolate consumption. Whilst JP was driving us around, I was actually hallucinating; I'd fall asleep in the middle of a sentence, entering a weird fugue-state in which I was simultaneously listening to the conversation, sleeping, aware I was sleeping, experiencing auditory hallucinations, and aware I was having auditory hallucinations. Such events lacked all sense of time: they might have gone on for a microsecond, or a half hour. Someone in the hallucination state was telling me aaaall about what Diane had to say. I have no idea who Diane is. I know some truly delightful women of that name (or a variation thereof), but I have no idea if it was to one (or all) of them that the hallucination referred. But I digress.

Raven appeared pretty confused to see me at first. It is a measure of JP's dog competence (and her absolute trustworthiness as one in whom to place your animal's well-being) that Raven looked to her for explanation, even while she was re-acquainting herself with my scent and voice. That made me feel good, to know that Raven trusted her so well; JP has had her care for nine months now, and I feel less as though I had abandoned Raven, knowing that she landed in so safe and worthy a spot. Intellectually, I knew it would be so, or I would not have done it in the first place, but it brought me a little extra measure of peace to know that on another level; to see it with my own eyes. It's one thing to know it will be all right. It's another thing entirely to Know it.

What with one thing and another I was entirely useless til the next day. JP and I went out in the early afternoon to see what Raven could do. It was amazing, and overwhelming, to see how far she has come in JP's skilled hands. Out into the pasture went my little black and white dog, much as I have known her all along. And then JP sent her, and all of a sudden it wasn't just my little dog. It was all the dogs that came before her, their genetics gathered and sorted and combined and re-combined into the particular array of what Raven is; bits and pieces of all the stock dogs of her line, her own unique combination of their genetics contained in that one small body, and summoned by the skill of a shepherd.

Damn, I thought. I'm way over my head here. There's no way I'm even one percent as good as the dog is.

Oh, well. I always knew that between us, I would be the weak link.

I practiced at first with another of JPs dogs, a made stock dog who will, she says, work for anyone. An honest dog, and one who forgave my idiocy readily, bless her lovely heart. I practiced with Raven, who was less sure of me and her job, and inclined (most likely out of stress and uncertainty) to dive in for a little ye-hah moments, feeling the pressure of my unfamiliarity to her as a handler, unsure of my leadership. I was dizzy as it was from sleep deprivation and the head cold, but I quickly got dizzier still trying to stay in front of Raven's speed in the round pen.

After a bit - needing to regain my equilibrium both literally and figuratively, I paused for instruction. JP pointed out that my voice was too kind, a concept that gave me a wry grin; I have spent so much of my professional life cultivating that voice, the one that coaxes the terrified dogs and cats from the backs of their cages to creep, trembling, but trusting through their fear that my tone speaks the truth of my intent, to my hand. So I must reach further back, to my days as a racehorse groom, when I had cultivated a voice that with a certain well-pitched "Ahhht!" could convey to a randy colt the laid-back ears and pinched nostrils and bared and snapping teeth he would have gotten had I been his lead mare.

In the open pasture JP showed me what Raven's mother, Twist, is made of. Here is a dog that needs no instruction beyond knowing what the job is that she is asked to do. She is an agile, tough, lovely little dog, so quick to read her stock and adjust accordingly in order to accomplish the task that, before your mind can process the conscious thought of what needs to come next, she is already at least two moves past it. If you have ever seen a good competition reining horse or working cow pony working a steer, weaving back and forth (while the rider sits quiet, staying out of the way of the pony's instinct), heading the steer off almost before the steer has had the thought to bolt, you have an idea of Twist on a sheep. She knows what to do, and she does it, correcting herself and judging her stock so fast that is is like magic, like a dance, like she and the sheep have rehearsed this all before and know what comes next. She's kind to her sheep, and a joy to behold. It's difficult to understand just how good she is while you are watching it, so fast does this dance move; it is only later, when you replay it slowly in your head, that you really start to get it.

In one of the pens JP had several ewes, one with a lamb at side. Ewes with lambs are inclined to fight the dog, rather than giving in to it. Moreover, there was one ewe - the crazy red ewe - who was inclined to cause problems in general. We took Raven in there, JP meaning to show me some of the other dynamics that Raven should be able to handle for me on the farm. It was a useful lesson. The stock split, the ewe with the lamb going one way and the rest, with the crazy red ewe in the lead, going the other. Raven placed herself where I thought she was wrong, off balance to the handler, and looking away from us at the small bunch of ewes headed by the crazy red one. But JP waited, and I watched. The ewe with the lamb faced Raven, stomping her foot, challenging her. Raven spared her an occasional glance, but kept her body facing toward the other ewes, where most of her attention was focused. In inter-dog or dog-people dynamics, this would indicate that she was either submitting to some degree (declining to engage directly, turning her shoulder), or stressed enough that she had to look away. But JP's narrations brought it into another light for me.

"See? She's using her physical presence to hold the ewe with the lamb, and using her eye to hold the crazy red ewe," JP told me. Suddenly the awkward triangle had symmetry and balance, and I thought: Trust the dog. She knows things about what is in the minds of these sheep that I will never be able to see. A moment later, two moments, and JP and Raven were proven right. The mama ewe, given a few moments to think while Raven held her with just enough pressure to keep her from bolting, turned her back, giving way. Raven came to her feet. The mama ewe eased over to the other ewes, bunched up behind the red ewe. Raven came to the balance point, heading the whole group and balanced to the handler. The ewes turned and filed into the stall that was our intended goal. And I felt completely humbled by this little dog, created by JP's good judgement and by a hundred and more years of Raven's forbears, honed by the work that they do and by the judgement of generations of hill shepherds.

The next day we drove to RF's farm for some different work on different sheep. There I worked Raven in a larger pen, and it went better; we started to get a feel for each other. She started listening more to me, getting a sense of my leadership, which steadied a bit with more practice and less spinning in dizzying circles. I corrected a flank and Raven stopped, listened, went the way I asked her to go. I called her off and she came, still eager for her sheep, but waiting to be sent.

I watched others work their dogs in bigger areas, with greater obstacles and more challenges. I watched some work their dogs in the round pen, or in a packed pen jammed with sheep and handler and dog so tight there was little space to move. I could not tell you what things I was learning from that, but I find that my eye now seeks different information when I look at an animal; perhaps my brain is weaving together the subtle and elusive tapestry of information that comprises stock sense. A rudimentary form of it just yet, to be sure, but the beginnings of it.

So it was a productive visit, although in some ways a muddled one, thanks to the head cold. Like Florida, it had been unseasonably cold in NC, so there were two kinds of cold to deal with - although compared to the deep sub-zero we'd endured for weeks in AK, it was quite pleasant for me. But I must say that there was a deal of warmth, as well... I was blessed to meet a number of people who I had known only from the Border Collie Boards, or other Internet contact, and I was charmed and delighted by these Southern women, so lively and warm and kind and mannerly, but also so full of fire and spice and wicked humor. There's something about the combination of hospitable good manners and cut-to-the-chase directness and pragmatism that is deeply engaging. I think I like the South... the food is as good and plentiful as all the stereotypes would lead you to believe, but the people are better than you would be able to imagine from any description.

I highly recommend it.

A Fool's Progress

So today was sheep chore day. This is something that really should not be attempted without a working stock dog, but mine is in training just now in North Carolina, so I'll have to do it the fool's way - without a dog.

First I went to Wildwood, to meet up with S and R, who have a stock trailer that we'll use to go get the last two ewes. R greets me with a cheery smile.

"Want to come see our new goats?" she asks. The answer to this is Yes, I really DO want to, since they've just that morning gotten a new doe and a buck. Now, I've been hearing for months how truly stinky the bucks are. At different times, both Dr. P and Dr. J have independently regaled me with the story of how they went one day to a farm to castrate a boar. A six hundred POUND boar, mind you, an enormous smelly kind of beast, who was kept in a barn (which does tend to concentrate the fumes.) There was also a buck in the barn. Both Dr. P and Dr. J - each without the other there to put words in their mouths, nor to egg each other on - told me that the smell actually burned their eyes. Literally an eye-watering stench. They also both said that the goat smelled so bad you couldn't even tell there was a hog in the barn, even if he was 600 pounds.

Anyway, at Wildwood we go on down to the pens. I can see the buck, but I don't smell a thing. Oh, wait a minute. I DO smell something, and I'm still 30 or so feet from the pen. Upwind, I might add. Urk. He does kind of stink. He smells like some kind of really rank, stinky cheese that has gone off - so not only is it even stinkier, but it's a really revolting sort of stink. And there's also an undertone of something else, maybe slightly sewer-like, or perhaps.... well, it defies description. Oh, well. He won't be around long (just long enough to breed the does), so I figure it's not really THAT bad a thing to deal with.

We climb back up the hill and S and I load up to pick up the last two sheep I'm adding to my flock for the winter. These are two moorits, so now, quite by accident, I have two of each of the colors I own: two moorit, two silver, two black, two white. The white are Trinity, the ram, and Gigantor, this year's ewe lamb. The moorit are Chanel and Olivia. The two black are Jacinto and Mesquite. The silver are Priscilla and (unimaginatively, perhaps) Silver.

I will defend the choice of "Silver" a little, though it's akin to naming a black dog "Blackie". I decided to name the three dog-broke ewes after towns in Nevada (in honor of the person I bought them from). Mesquite is near the Utah border, and perhaps not an inappropriate name for a ewe that's black as charcoal. San Jacinto is the name of one of my all-time favorite Peter Gabriel songs, so I named my favorite black ewe that (favorite because she's calm and pleasant, and is missing a little sliver off the edge of her right ear, which for some reason I find endearing.) Silver is for Silver City, which may not be creative but it'll be easy to pick out who I'm talking about (in part because Priscilla is a dark sooty grey, and Silver is really - well, silver.) But I digress.

S and I drive to the farm where my last two ewes await. The owner gathers the ewes up in a pen, and I help her and her son hoik them over the fence. The new ewes don't want to go into the trailer. They try to lay down at the threshold, folding their knees and trying to wedge them under the back of the trailer (or maybe that was just coincidental), requiring us to lift them up into the back. Once there, they're highly motivated to escape, and squirming yourself out the gate whilst leaving the ewe in the trailer isn't as easy as it sounds. These ewes are fast and a little wild, and extremely opportunistic. They're also fairly small, being Shetlands, so they don't need much of a gap to get out of the trailer, and once they hit escape velocity, they're not easy to hold onto. But the trailer is divided, so we use the partition to hold one ewe secure while we wrestle the other.

Loaded up, we trundle on back to Wildwood. Here's where it gets interesting. It's snowed recently, and the driveways are a bit slippery. I'm going to have to walk my ewes down the hill to the pen (S not wanting to take the heavy trailer backwards down the steep hill, and I can't really blame her.) I have Dave's partly-trained stock dog with me, but these sheep are not dog-broke in the slightest degree, and I can just picture them rocketing off in opposite directions into the woods, never to be seen again. It seems wiser to have them under some control, and we have a little stock halter. They won't lead, precisely -they're no more trained for that than they are dog-broke - but with a person in front and one behind we can pull and shove them down the hill. Probably. In my mind I'm picturing the ewe darting forward, slamming into my knees from behind, running over my prostrate form and then - if I haven't managed to drop the lead - dragging me on my face down the hill.

I'm SO looking forward to this.

As I contemplate my fate, I pause. What's that smell?

Oh, yeah. The buck. Now that the light breeze has died, it becomes apparent that his powers of stench are vastly superior to anything I have imagined them to be. In the time our trip took, I have forgotten the exact aroma, and moreover, I have seriously underestimated his ability to Make His Presence Known. The very air seems faintly sludgy with his rotten-cheese scent. No wonder S and R are eager to have him move along... or else to castrate him, once he has put his testicles to the use which God intended.

Oh, well. At least it's taken my mind off of my imminent demise: Death by sheep.

I manage to get the halter on the first ewe, Olivia. Olivia is strong and canny, and a willful wee bitch, and makes several attempts to escape during this maneuver. She is thwarted by the fact that I have a death-grip on her wool. We quickly apply a topical wormer while I hold her against the side of the trailer, and then we open the gate and point her outwards. Naturally, as soon as the halter is on, the very LAST thing she wants is to leave the trailer, but we shove her out unceremoniously, slipping on the thin ice on the drive. I find a patch of exposed gravel lickety-split and dig in while we adjust the halter, which is showing an inclination to slip off over her right ear. Now we make a halting, lurch-and-stop sort of progress down the hill, me on the lead rope, S's daughter YS pushing from behind, and S (who has injured her back and should probably be lying down) coming along to operate the gates.

We manage to get Olivia into the pen without either choking her to death by accident, hyper extending any joints, falling down or letting go. We release her into the pen, where she immediately joins the other sheep, seeking comfort. Back up the hill. Next is Chanel, who is calmer, and once caught, less inclined to try to rocket away. She is, unfortunately, less inclined to move at all, and in self defense we try using Pepper to see if she'll push Chanel forward. But Pepper wants to head her, not drive from behind, which isn't really helping us (unless we intend to walk her backwards the entire way). About this time R comes to the rescue, roaring up on her six-wheeler, and we heave Chanel into the bed, where YS holds Chanel balanced up on her woolly rump, all four legs pointing uselessly out, thwarting escape attempts. Resistance is futile, little sheep. You are becoming a member of the hive. Er, flock.

Well, that wasn't too bad. However. Now we have to worm the rest of the sheep. This means we have to catch the rest of the sheep. I did mention something about March hares, didn't I?

We have a strategy based on the combination of greed, guile and Pepper. We have food, and the dog broke sheep are (relatively) easily caught and wormed. That just leaves us Priscilla and Giagantor in the ewe pen. Unfortunately, there are five other ewes and four does in the pen, and they all want to split up and go different directions. YS and Pepper and I start quartering the pen, pushing Priscilla into the small enclosed area. She escapes at least twice, but we finally get her (and about 6 other animals) into the enclosure. Priscilla has been there before, however, and she makes a running start from the back of it, knocking other animals aside like tenpins. I run to the exit (this hasn't been that easy, and if she gets loose it'll be that much harder) and make a dive. At the same moment, Priscilla, now going approximately fast enough to escape the atmosphere of the earth, tucks her head into ramming position and puts on a last burst of speed. I grab wool just about the same instant as her skull makes contact with my shin. That pretty much drops me on the spot - but it drops me on Priscilla, and I don't let go.

"Son of a bitch!" I exclaim. "MAN, that hurts!" [Here I should perhaps point out that, having groomed race horses for several years - not to mention having hung out with pilots for a lot more years - I have a mouth on me that would make a longshoreman blush. Mostly, I keep it in check, but every once in a while you really need a good, pithy curse to vent your feelings. "Oh, golly!" wasn't going to cut it.]

"I know," says S, applying our topical wormer as quickly as possible. "It's amazing how much they can hurt you, isn't it? I got kicked in the shin by a sheep one year - and that doesn't sound like anything, does it, just a little kick from a sheep. They're not that big. It hurt for a year." She finishes with the wormer and I let go of Priscilla, who hops up and canters jauntily away. Me? It's two minutes before I can stand.

I go limping out to help corral the last of our ewes, little Gigantor. (Okay, she was giant as a lamb, but she's not even a year old, so she's littler than the other ewes.) Several times we have her trying to go into the protection of the enclosure, only to have Peanut - one of the does, with a pert little set of parallel horns sticking strait up on the top of her head like antennae - drop her head and make menacing thrusts with her horns, convincing Gigantor to pass the opening of the enclosure and race perilously by me. At last we manage to scoot her on in there - with almost everyone else. YS - an intrepid lass - wades in amongst the animals, trying to strategically place herself to corner and catch Gigantor. She's doing a good job, too, but at the last second Gigantor makes a quick feint to the right and YS's fingers just miss a grip on her. Luckily, other animals block her from veering left again and I manage to dart in and field her neatly, just as she's making a leap to clear the goat blockade. Once caught, she gives in with good grace and we worm and release her.

Phew. That's all the girls done. Now it's just Trinity. He, however, is a piece of cake. He's as greedy as they come, and he trots right up to YS when she arrives with a bit of grain. He's also conveniently equipped with handles - two large, beautifully curved handles - and once we have his horns in hand he stands placidly while we worm him. I don't trust him this time of year - he's a bit of a bastard lately, and his testes are about twice the size they were a month ago, hanging like a large woolly persimmon, impressively large and low now that they're reawakened to their mission, with the fall rut - so I make sure everyone is behind him before I let go. He ignores us all completely and walks calmly over to eat his dinner.

We walk past the buck, Truffles, to go back up the hill. The air seems thick and unbreathable with his rank scent. S tells me he started urinating on his face immediately on arrival (this is a normal, if completely disgusting, behavior), and described him choking while he was doing it. I theorized it was from the smell, but S disabuses me of this notion, because he was urinating up his own nostrils.

I am SO glad I am not a goat. But evidently the does are enchanted by him, pointing their noses skyward to catch his scent (as if they could miss it), flipping their upper lips backwards the better to funnel his stench - I means, his aroma - into their nostrils. I think I'll take my sheep, thanks. Even in rut Trinity doesn't stink, and he's never urinated up his own nose.

So now I am home, ice packing a rather spectacular bruise (which I dread to look at tomorrow). I have a probably-related cramp in that calf, and my hands smell faintly, and not unpleasantly, of sheep. However, everyone is wormed and de-loused, I have 30 bales of hay in the shed, I did not have to toboggan down the hill face-first at the end of a shank with sheep heels flying inches from my eyes, and all is more or less right with the world. However, even though I didn't actually touch the buck, my clothes smell faintly of rotting cheese, and something else I can't quite describe. I'm almost afraid to wash them with any other clothes, lest they all come out smelling like that.

Oh, well. I think I'll go make some tea with honey and whiskey in it - strictly for medicinal purposes, you understand. But meanwhile.... what is that smell?

I have Sheep Lust

No, not THAT kind of sheep lust. What do you take me for?

What I have is a distinct longing for more sheep to add to my flock.

Right now I have five sheep, all Shetlands. I never in 1,000,000 years thought I would have sheep. Ever. I mean, I raised orphan lambs when we were kids (this started as a 4-H project, which I wasn't very good at... I loved raising the lambs - and I WAS good at that - but I hated the record-keeping that the 4-H-ers wanted you to do, I didn't like showing them, and I really really didn't like that my little lambs were going to slaughter in the fall, to reside in our freezer for later consumption. For one thing, I didn't like the taste of lamb, particularly, and for another... ick. That was my pet. It just seemed wrong. But I had no choice in the matter, at the time.)

As you might imagine, all of that sort of put me off of the idea of ever having sheep as an adult. But. I got Border collies. Now, I will say this is not my fault; Pepper forced me (FORCED me, I tell you) to fall in love with Border collies. It is futile to resist. It's part of her Evil Genius. So once I fell in love with Pepper - which I will remind you was not my fault - more Borders were an inevitability. And then I found myself on an Internet chat board-o-BCs. And then I got sucked into the world-o-BCs a little bit more and a little bit more... and suddenly one day I was taking my dog for training. And then - quite by accident, I assure you - I got another BC, this one bred out of a good working farm dog belonging to a friend of mine, and by [cough cough] the dog who won of the 2007 National Cattle Dog Finals (and placed in the top 10 in 2008).

Still, I thought I was safe. Ignorance is bliss, and all that. After all, I had no place to keep sheep. I have no sheds or outbuildings, and as I live on a ridge, not enough flat land for stock pens. But I did not figure on The Power of the Border Collie. I look back on it now and shake my head at my childish innocence. I'd only had my stockdog pup for a year when The Worst happened.

I got sheep.

It certainly looked like an accident. A client who had to downsize her flock offered me some registered Shetlands "for free". A neighbor who used to have sheep (but had gotten out of them for a while) had been missing having sheep on her farm and was willing to trade chores and board for lambs. Suddenly I found myself riding in a pickup truck, hauling a stock trailer into a farm yard and wondering when, exactly, I had gone completely insane.

I'm still not sure when it happened. I AM fairly certain that it was sometime before I found myself helping two other women wrestle a large and annoyed ram by his (rather impressive) horns into the stock trailer. And it was definitely before we all started tackling a series of ewes who were the approximate wildness and agility of your average mule deer (although luckily, not so tall). It was certainly before I was helping my friends unload the sheep into their new pen. But by then it was too late. Bemused, I asked my sister: "When did I become a farmer?" She said: "You've always been a farmer. You just haven't always had livestock."

So, in went my new ram with my new ewes, with the hopes of producing tasty little lambs in the spring. Because, in the many years since I reared 4-H bottle lambs, I'd made two discoveries: One, I like the way lamb tastes. A lot. Especially if it's Shetland, which really does have a distinctly different flavor from the usual market breeds. And two, I STILL don't think it's right to eat bottle babies... but I have a lot less objection to eating lambs bred for production, reared by their own mothers, and not made into pets.

So, come spring, there was lambing. Here are two of my ewes, plus one lamb (daughter of the brown ewe, Nutmeg). For the uninitiated, in Shetlands, "brown" is referred to as "moorit" (which is probably Gaelic for something much more elegant than merely "brown".) This lamb - a ewe lamb, which means one I won't eat and therefore named - was quite huge, literally twice the size and weight of the other lambs. Hence we call her Gigantor. Don't ask me why she's eating a feather. Probably she'd already disposed of the rest of the bird and is using it to pick the bird fragments out of her teeth. Just in case there should be any awkward questions later on, or maybe forensic investigation for incriminating evidence.

This is Zena with her spotted lamb. He was a little weak at the start, so we put him in a lamb sweater. Lamb sweaters are made of Army-surplus neck-gaiters with leg-holes cut in them. Wool, nnaturally. (What else? No self-respecting sheep would be caught dead in, for instance, cotton - or, God forbid, poly-pro.)

The black ram-lamb. We started him in a sweater too, but he took it off. Maybe he thinks wool is itchy.

Gratuitous picture of adorable baby goats of Wildwood Farm, which may be the only thing on earth cuter than lambs. They may also be the only thing brattier than Gigantor.

Aaaand, more of Gigantor (whose middle name should be Houdini, as she has demonstrated quite a talent for escape, mainly by squirting through the square wire. You'd think that would be over now, as she's much bigger, but she still makes escapes from time to time. I don't know how. Levitation, perhaps.) I told you. Bratty.

This is my ram, Trinity.

Now, here I must pause to say that rams in general can't be trusted and most of them are right pains in the arse (or knee, or hip, or wherever they decide to - well, ram you). Trinity, however, is the kindest, calmest, most good-hearted and gentle ram I've ever met. This is not to say I ever really turn my back on him or completely trust him. It's also not to say he's okay with you taking his ewes away (which we do in order to control when he breeds them, so that we don't have lambs too early in the chilly Alaskan spring). In fact, come late summer, when he's getting a little rammy and starting to think amorous rammy thoughts, he isn't really even okay with you taking the chickens out of his pen. (Don't ask me why the chickens like to hang out in his pen, but they do. Also do not ask me what, exactly, he thinks he might DO with the chickens, but suffice it to say that he Is Seriously Not Okay with you taking them out of his pen). However... if you, say, want to bring him food or water, he stands back politely as you enter the pen, and then follows at a respectful three-foot remove, waiting patiently for you to fill his manger and walk away before he goes into his gluttonous, I'm-being-starved-here, they-haven't-fed-me-for-a-month act. Also, once you get your hands on him (for shearing or worming, or to have his feet trimmed or his blood drawn), he's really pretty tractable - easier in temperament than any of the ewes. Even easier yet in that he comes equipped with a pair of useful handles, in the form of those nice full-curl horns. The shearer loves him; she says he's amongst the easiest sheep she's ever shorn (AND she can't say enough about how nice his wool is). Plus, he never went after me for treating Nutmeg when she had eclampsia, even though they were penned together. Still.... even Trinity isn't above trying to run down a stockdog, and I never lose track of where he is when I'm in the pen.

Now that you see how handsome he is, can you blame me for wanting more ewes for him? Besides... lamb. Yum. And wool. Nice wool. Sheep to work my dog with. And maybe some dairying... sheep cheese.... sheep-milk soap.... sheep-milk yogurt.... sheep milk in my coffee.... D'you think I can make sheep-milk ice cream? And no, I am NOT psychotic. I am blinded. By sheep lust.