24 Lambing

It is about 150 days between joining and lambing, so by back-calculating, it seemed that Cecil got to work pretty much as soon as he was allowed to mingle with the ewes. Interesting they call joining work. Judging from the rate at which the ewes dropped their lambs, Cecil was treating it as a retirement holiday. On real farms with real ‘working’ rams, all the lambs come over a few days. This makes it easy for the farmers to do what farmers have to do all at once. Like she said, I didn’t know anything about lambing so I had to find out pretty quickly exactly what farmers have to do.

The first three ewes didn’t need me. In fact I wasn’t even there when their lambs came. They were baaing instructions to their offspring who were feeding, bleating and bouncing like in the movies. It continued smoothly until a week later when I noticed one ewe wasn’t completing the birth process. It lay down, tried a push or two, stood up and walked around, laid down and tried again; a bit like when Jane was born. But in this case the lamb was stuck half way out like a fat sausage. She said ring the vet. That would cost money so I hopped across the river on the rocks to seek out an even higher authority that would probably be free.

John came straight away, leaving the dishes for later. No discussion, he just caught the sheep, sterilised his hand by wiping it on a nearby tussock, and plunged it in around the lamb. It’s dead he said, we have to get it out. I was ready to receive my instructions but the ‘we’ was apparently a royal one. He pushed the lamb back in, flicked it around and it and other stuff plopped out. The sheep got up and ran away. He resterilised his hands on the tussock and that was it. The lamb was enormous.

In the Boy’s Own book I had once read the hero fastened up the bereaved sheep, skinned the dead lamb and tied the skin on a lamb that had been dumped by its mother. The sad lamb and sad mother instantly became a joyful pair. This was a great idea, but there were no spare dumped lambs, yet.

Basil came two weeks later. He was second of twins. His mother decided he was a runt or had the wrong father or something. She just kicked him away whenever he came for his milk. The first lamb was nuzzled, licked, fed copiously and otherwise treated like a prince.

Her mothering instinct came to the fore. What can we do she said? Can we poddy it? In this case the ‘we’ wasn’t royal, it meant ‘you’.