Sheep Are My Mentors by Eugene Wyatt
September, 2004
When there are no clouds overhead the darkness of the new moon brings out the Milky Way spanning the night sky. The stars are so close, they're in your face. If I take 126 steps from the mud room into the blackness and follow the Milky Way dodging starlit Earth phantoms I arrive at the lambing barn, all the while hoping I didn't leave any tools in my path during the rush of the work day.
Monday night I had to milk a ewe in the barn and bottle feed one of her newborn twins. Her left teat was too large for the mouths of the lambs, the ram lamb was getting most of the milk from the other teat, the ewe lamb needed milk and me to survive. Approaching the barn at night I let the sheep know it's me and not a coyote, I call out "Jong, ho jong, all d'jong..." I talk to the sheep in singsong, why these words, these sounds I don't know, I guess the sheep taught me this language over the years. Seeing the ewe inside, "Hello mama, your men are looking good, mama...you guys are the goods..." The ewe gazes at me apprehensibly, I gaze back blinking my eyes slowly to let her know I'm not a threat to her lambs. I firmly hold her to the side of the pen with one knee freeing my hands and gently squeeze her teat to get the warm milk into a bottle. I kneel with the lamb between my knees, feeling the cold wet manure under the bedding seep through my denims and cradle her new head in my old hand, watching her long eyelashes flicker, as she sucks mama's milk through the nipple.
All my sheep were born here, but this 40 acre farm has a limited pasture resource, there is only space for so many, I can't keep all the sheep nor do I want to. There is another walk to the barn, a longer one, sometimes not long enough, and that is to cull sheep. I cull rationally. I will cull a sheep with inferior wool, I will cull ewes who desert their lambs and I will cull older sheep who may have health problems in years to come. Who is who, observation and record keeping tell me but they don't tell me how, not how to kill, that's the business of the slaughterhouse, but how to live with it.
I wish I could neatly sum up culling for slaughter for you but I have not come to terms with it myself and I hope I never do such that it becomes automatic and unfeeling. The approach that makes the most sense, or nonsense, the one that maintains the gravity of the situation, the one that doesn't dilute it with rationalization or a self-serving, feel-good philosophy is similar to that of Native Americans. One only takes life in gratitude and with reverence, in other words one kills with love, the irrational balances the rational, comfort and discomfort are there responsibly and do not cancel each other, they produce a third feeling, ever changing and indescribable. To know this balance, even as imperfectly as I do, is to know heartfelt thanksgiving, or better to know when I'm giving and when I'm not. Sheep are my mentors, teaching me about myself and I love to care for them.
Eugene Wyatt