“I don’t know what college girls like. Journals? Gift cards? What are you getting her?”
“Haven’t thought about it.”
“I’ll buy something from both of us.”
“Thanks. I have wrapping paper, you know where it is, behind the door in the office. I can wrap it,” Nev said, on second thought.
Ron left after breakfast to cut hay, but Nev stayed to help Kazi with the ewes.
Once in a while a young first-time mother who didn’t understand what was happening rejected her newborn lambs, kicking them off the teat. When that happened, Kazi intervened to swoop the unhappy trio into a small blue lambing pen with one corner fenced off so that the lambs could get away from their mother if she head-butted them. If the mother continued to reject the tiny newborn lambs he let the ewe out into the field, put her ear-tag number on the cull list to be slaughtered with the lambs next May. Farms couldn’t afford to keep bad mothers.
Nev watched the old man rub a towel on a ewe who had lost her lambs. That happened sometimes; lambs were born dead. This particular ewe, number three-eighty-seven, would need to be milked by hand or adopt lambs soon or else she would get mastitis.
“Need a hand?” Nev asked.
Kazi shook his head. “Nope.” He carried the dirty towel over to the lambs who had been rejected by their mother. He crouched. One of the lambs was black, the other white. He rubbed them both with the towel that smelled of the ewe. If he was lucky, the ewe would smell these lambs and think they were her own. Worth a try. The old man carried the lambs, one under each arm, little hooves dangling front and back.
There was nothing quite as precious as newborn lambs, probably because they were so floppy and fluffy, squishy and eager to press soft white noses into the hands of anyonewho approached them. Lambs were gentler than puppies. They would have been ideal pets if they didn’t grow into sheep.
Nev held the side panel of the ewe’s pen open, then slid it shut behind him. The ewe watched as Kazi set the lambs down beside her on the hay. “Go on, then.” Kazi climbed out of the pen. They watched, side by side at the rail, as the ewe sniffed the tiny white and black lambs. Nev held her breath. It didn’t matter how many times she had seen him do it, the anticipation still got her. The ewe, number three-eighty-seven, rubbed her nose against the black lamb’s side, gently pushing it towards her. A hopeful sign. She licked the lambs. Then, forcefully, she head-butted them towards her udder. Success. She had accepted them.
The lambs were rooting around under her belly in the wrong place, not finding her teats. Kazi went back into the blue pen to guide the bumbling little muppets’ noses under the ewe’s udder to smell the warm milk. Lambs weren’t born knowing how to nurse, but they sure sorted it out quick. He held their noses to the hairless pink udder. They squirmed against his hold for a minute, then relaxed, opened their mouths and latched onto the ewe’s fat, finger-like teats.
Nev loved watching the moment lambs tasted milk for the first time. The lambs crouched down and wagged their fluffy white tails in the air in obvious pleasure, the way dogs do. Without letting go of the teats they head-butted the ewe’s udder, which encouraged milk to come down and squirt into their tiny pink toothless mouths. It was all so very instinctual. Primal.I can make sweet milk come out of this squishy blob!
To every newborn lamb it was an epiphany.
33
HIGH SCHOOL EQUIVALENCE COURSE
Nev returned from Auckland on Saturday.
She found Ron in the sheep barn, a bandage taped to her wide neck, hay in her long black curls. The sleeveless Alien Weaponry T-shirt may or may not have seen the inside of a washing machine in the five days since Nev left. Nev handed her a steaming cup of tea and new earbuds.
Ron carefully took the hot mug and jammed the earbuds down the neck of her baggy shirt. “How’d you know I know I lost my old ones?”
Nev suspected she had been up all night helping Kazi deliver lambs. Ron had definitely slept in the loft over the sheep barn. She looked tired but happy.
“Where’s our girl?” Nev asked.
“At a birthday party.”
Good. That meant Gumball would probably be over later for dinner. Nev missed her. “You better not have been up all night.”
“Not all night, no.” Ron set the tea on a shelf and returned to what she had been doing when Nev arrived: bottle-feeding orphaned lambs.
One of the ewes had died shortly after giving birth. Internal hemorrhaging. The ewe had flopped over dead while the vetwas setting up an IV. Tragic business, but Nev was more or less numb to it now, having seen it so many times over the years.
At the moment, Ron only had the two bum lambs that Kazi hadn’t been able to graft onto another ewe. She was bottle-feeding them formula from an old water bottle with a screw-on red rubber nipple. She would fall hopelessly in love with them and want to make them pets. Ron fell in love easily—too easily. If Ron asked, Nev wouldn’t be able to say no.
“You enjoy this, don’t you?” Nev asked.
Ron shrugged. Nev wondered why. Did Ron not know she was glowing? Was she afraid to jinx it by sounding boastful? Or was Ron just physically incapable of admitting out loud that she was happy? Or was Nev projecting her own feelings? “Why do you do that?” Nev asked. “Why do you shrug instead of saying “yes”?”
Ron sat on the floor with the lamb on her lap, petting it while it drank from the bottle. It was the cutest thing Nev had seen since last lambing season. Any of them could have set up a milk dummy bucket, hung it upside-down on the side of a lambing pen, let the lambs suck on that, but none of them had, because Rainbow had been two the first time Ron was allowed to feed her.
Ron glanced up, then back at the suckling lamb who was rocking its little body back and forth and wagging its tail. “I assumed it was a rhetorical question.”
