“Peaceful,” echoed Bill, with feeling, “I’m so chuck full of peace I can’t hardly hold any more. I’ll bet if a feller was to hit me, I’d only ‘baa-a’.”
There was a vast amount of “Baa-ing” going on at the ranch, where Mary and I were raising a few score orphan lambs on the bottle. There was a voracious chorus whenever we appeared. They jumped all over us and as soon as they got hold of the nipple of the bottle they flopped down on their knees and did not release it until they had gulped down the last drop of milk, after which they stood up, their little sides sticking out as though they had been stuffed. As much care had to be exercised with the bottles, the temperature and quantity of the milk as though we had been feeding so many babies.
There was no milk at the outside camps and no one to care for the poor abandoned lambs whose frivolous young mothers refused to own them, leaving them to starve. Occasionally an old ewe of truly maternal instinct could be fooled into adopting one of these little “dogies” or “bums”. The skin of her dead lamb was taken off and slipped over the orphan, which was joyfully accepted because of its smell!
When the lambs made their appearance in May, the bands were separated, we had additional herders and they had to be more watchful for “Spring lamb” is also very tempting to coyotes. It was easy for a herder to lose ten or twenty lambs, for the little things congregate behind rocks or clumps of weeds and go to sleep, are overlooked when the sheep are driven back to the camp in the evening, and become the victims of those prairie wolves which continually lurk about.
Sometimes when we were driving, a tiny white speck would come racing after the wagon, a lamb, which had been left behind. Lambs are such senseless little things, when they are frightened they will adopt any moving object in lieu of a mother.
We pulled them out of prairie-dog holes into which they had thrust their heads and become fastened by having the loose earth fall in about their necks—they were troublesome but so appealing and amusing, they were a never-ending source of entertainment from the first moment they appeared, a tiny body supported on long, wabbly legs.
As they grew stronger “playful as a lamb” acquired a new meaning. They capered and they bucked, they raced around the corral in the evening when the ewes were contentedly lying down, they frisked about on the backs of their patient mothers, they jumped stiff-legged, and in a wild excess of joy bounded into the air giving a cork-screw twist to their hindquarters, which produced a most ludicrous effect.
Old quotations from the Bible came to have added significance; as the shearer held a poor frightened sheep between his knees and rapidly clipped off the fleece with his gleaming shears, there was not a sound if a clumsy movement cut a deep gash in the tender flesh; the “sheep before her shearer was dumb” indeed.
I spent days in the shearing sheds watching the proceedings from a pile of wool sacks or passing out small metal disks in exchange for the fleeces the shearers turned in. At the end of the day the disks were counted and each shearer credited with the number of sheep he had shorn.
The fleeces were rolled and tied separately, then thrown up to a man on a platform, who packed them in a long sack which was suspended from the top of a high frame. As it was filled, it was taken down, sewed up and rolled into the end of the shed to remain until later in the season when the wool was sold and hauled to the railroad.