Footprints on the Web

The farm had sheeps in the 1000s. Over the years it has strived to maintain about 500. The newly born lambs either get sold to other interested farms or stay back in the farm to replace sheeps who retire or die of medical complications. But there is a number in the lambs inventory that goes to the “market”. Yes, they get sold for their meat. Sheep’s meat, which is mutton, does not have much of a demand in North America. I had been asked if I was ok with the fact that some of these lambs I had been feeding and cradling will likely end up on someone’s plate. I chose to avoid those questions and pretended that I didn’t hear them.

Every Tuesday we have ladies night. This is where  few of us middle aged women sit around a campfire chatting with someone strumming a guitar and singing tunes. It is BYOB and we each try to bring a food item. This is a nice community within my community. Everyone overshares (in a good way) and it is a judgement free zone. Most of them grew up on the island or are from small towns nearby that they refer to as ‘the city’. They call anything that is not the island and actually suburbia, the city. Having lived in places like NYC, Boston, California, Miami, Mumbai, etc. I find this kinda comical. You haven’t experienced city until you have lived on a small piece of island with 8.5million people bustling through and you have to push through them just to take your dog on his daily walk.

As we continue to do lambing checks, disturbing sights are inevitable. For me. Usual for them. One of the guard dogs had eaten one of the lambs. Our guess is the lamb came out still born and hence dead. The dog in charge of the field had blood all over its face and lay next to the remains of the lamb. In another occasion, we found another guard dog laying next to a little lamb who looked like it had a chunk taken out of its abdomen and its head was covered in maggots. Our guess here was that a fox or coyote had taken the bite out of the lamb (possibly a still born again) and was feasting on it somewhere hidden where the dog chased it away. The dog then must have dragged the body to a place where we could then spot the lamb’s body. The dog was clear of any blood or flesh around its mouth which is how we were positive that it couldn’t have been the one who took a chunk out of it. Some of the guard dogs are smarter and more sincere than others. Sincere as in they truly stay with their sheep and guard it with all their life. They take their job very seriously. Whereas some of the other dogs tends to wander and jump the fence at night.

These days I smell of nothing but lamb formula milk and baby lambs themselves. Just like human babies have a scent, so do lambs. It’s hard to describe the smell. All my clothes smell like formula milk or lamb’s poop. I have been making boatloads of formula milk in big containers all day, everyday and going back and forth between the barn where I bottle feed them and the basement kitchen in the farm house. With the number of fosters having exploded we use the bucket feeding system. This is a bucket that we fill quarter of the way with milk and has 5 nipples on the bottom. Lambs cant self regulate themselves so you have to monitor them as they drink. Some fill up super fast (nice round belly), some take a long time and others sometimes overfeed. Overfeeding can kill them. Best to underfeed them if anything. There are some that simply cant figure it out so we have to still bottle feed them. There is a little one who is blind. He bumps into walls and is always looking for a warm body to snuggle upto. I want to adopt him because I know she has very little hope for getting adopted by another farm. Which means she will end up in the market. I would love to adopt her and have her hang out in my yurt and in my yard. But they don’t like to be alone and need company- one of their own not just my dog I was told. Especially when they are blind, they need someone to follow and learn from. Plus I know this time on the farm comes with an expiry date for me. What will I do with her when I have to leave the farm and have to go somewhere with no outdoor space? It is frustrating so I have taken some pictures and videos of her to post them online and hopefully find someone with a big heart who will give Blindy a home.

Walking into the farm house everyday, I get to see lambs who are getting special care. Either in warming box or being fed via a tube or administered antibiotics. I have gotten to tube few lambs at this point carefully as not to gag them by pushing the tube down the wrong pipe. Its uplifting when they make it. But I also do walk in on mornings to find dead ones we had worked on. And when they are dead, their entire body becomes stiff, very rigid. Not the limp, weary lamb I would have held the night before. With all the spilling of colostrum and powder milk everywhere, my dog was stocking up on his nutrients. Atleast he was helping us clean up.

The month of May sees May flies on the island. They swarm all over and it makes you hard to breathe or talk because they fly right into your nostrils or mouth. And they are not your regular flies. They are huge. The thin long bodies reminds me of dragonflies. The fields are full of them as well. They don’t bother the flock much. Unlike bot flies. These guys can feast on any wounds and cuts the sheeps may have and it gets infected where they are no longer grow wool there and it gets absolutely gross. The tails of the sheep being long  and with poop stuck on their behind, bot flies find this a perfect place to infest as well. For this reason we crop the tails of little lambs but putting an elastic band where the skin ends and eventually the free handing tail falls off. So all our sheep have little stubby tails with their butts having clear passage to poop. When I had first arrived in my yurt, I had noticed two giant spider webs on the outside of my back door. It was very intricately made but I had made a mental note to clean it. With my days being so busy, long and tiring cleaning spider webs in my yurt was not on my list. One day I had noted that the spider webs had caught lots of may flies. It prevented it from entering my yurt. Sometimes things in mature might an absolute inconvenience to you or not very esthetic. But unless it is going to kill you, maybe leave it alone. It is benefiting you in a way you may not realize now.

With the recent power outage, the island was without power for 3 days. Having livestock that are fenced in with electrical fences to keep predators away, matriarch of the farm who has debilitating lyme’s disease and relies on being fed daily through tubes that run on electricity- a power outage in a farm can be lethal. Not to mention serving tourists who come to take pictures in well lit barns and purchase from the wool shed. We ran on generators those days. I had one working outlet and using a surge protector I was able to get all my necessary things like fridge, space heater, etc. plugged in. The island is a small community with 400 people where everyone looks out for each other. I remember one evening while dining out at the seasonal diner that open very limited hours on weekends only in the summer and run by volunteers, I was waved at by the driver of every car that passed by. Island living, I guess. This diner was known for their fish & chips on Fridays so I had to check it out (the New Yorker in me, I guess). It lived upto its reputation. Their poutine which I have not had in decades was delicious. And eventually I got to taste their Saturday morning donuts which made me slobber while eating it. Everyone on the island knows each other. When I went to the chiropractor, I was randomly approached by a lady asking me who I was and why I was there. She was just a curious bystander. She also asked me if I was the one who had just bought a lot on the island looking to build a house. I wish!

My dog has been blending in pretty well. And by blending in, I mean he looks like one of the lambs. When some of the tourists came to check out the foster lambs, one of the farmer instructed them to open the door and close it quickly behind them so that no lamb got away. Well, my dog managed to sneak out and the tourists had a fit- Oh my gooooood, one of the lambs got away!!! Please get it! The farmer and her helper assured them it was a dog. The tourists seemed very confused. In the mornings, we have the ritual of doing the “parade”. This is basically where we run with the lambs from the barn where they spend the nights to an outdoor pen built for them to interact with tourists who reserves time slots to bottle feed them. It is usually only 15-20 lambs but given they have the attention span of a gnat, they scatter away or run back to the barn sometimes. There’s usually 2 of us who run with them so as to make them think we are taking them somewhere they get to have milk. My dog has gotten in the habit of running in the parade with the lambs because he likes to run in general. Seeing him run towards the pen (since that’s where his momma is headed), motivates some of the lambs to do the same. So he is of some use. Because clearly he was not very useful in catching the mouse in the yurt. I had to use a trap for that. When I came back from a weekend, I had noticed that the trap was no longer where I had put it. And ofcourse I found it off in a corner with a tiny little thing. I put the trap in a bag and placed it outside my yurt.  It took me a day to mentally prepare myself for the deed. God thing I did it the next day because the body had started to decay with a bad stench. I disposed it in the field right behind my yurt for the guard dog or barn cat to snack on. Or simply immerse back into earth.

The weeds around my yurt was overgrown to the point that when my dog would be sunbathing and laying in them, he was hard to spot. He just kinda disappeared. This also brings the risk of ticks on him. And me. As those were very prevalent on the island. One morning as I was using a weed whacker (first time!) around my yurt, one of the farmers messaged me asking if I would like to go on fence check and learn how to use a rifle. I jumped at it and tagged along with her. It was a great morning and we had some great chats. She showed me various plants that you could find everywhere on the farm that were edible. Shit, did I just weed whack most of the ones around my yurt?! There were ones that could be used in salads, as coffee (roots of dandelions), tea (from nettle), for pain management, anxiety. WOW! Not only was I already getting my vegetables from the farm (asparagus, spinach, squash, etc.) but I had my own pharmacy as well. The farmer was into foraging. She went onto explain how that was ok because anything that dies, goes into the soil and it sprouts back up. Everything on this earth is meant for each other’s consumption. I also found that she is a Christian like me. Then we talked about mercy killing. She was one of the two farmers who did the shooting of sheeps on the farm when they were in suffering either in labour or from being sick. She described to me how its one shot to the head and their bodies tremble a little right after but then they die instantaneously. We went to go smoke out a den with fox and her kids as they had been hunting our herd on the farm. She showed me how to measure the voltages on the fences and what was a good vs. weak measure and how/where to spot it along the field. Then we went to the bluffs. This place is so unreal in its picturesque views. By the water, with a lighthouse along the cliffs. We drove in the gator named Lucy. The fields had lots of ditches, uneven grounds and low hanging tree branches that made it hard to drive anywhere on the open field except along the cliffs. I was holding onto my seat. Hard. She taught me how to load a rifle, use safety lock, hold it and shoot. We had protective wear on -earmuffs and safety glasses for kickback from the rifle. She had bought along a pizza box with a target drawn onto its center. I shot 11 rounds. For someone who had never seen or held a gun in her life, all my shots were pretty damn close to the target. On our way back to the main farm, the neighboring farm’s black lab followed us. He is such a happy fellow.

I have been asked if I would be ok seeing or shooting a fox or coyote disrupting the flock. Can I shoot a sheep to end its suffering rather than see her bleed out to death? Can I forage wildlife to survive? Some of us are very clear on our responses. For some others, it is not so black and white. In 42 years I have known myself, I have seen my views transition on topics I once thought I was so sure about. Our experiences in life shape us, change us and then reshape us. So at this point all I can say is that the longer I live on the farm, the longer I handle livestock and deadstock, that clear thick line separating the black from the white is getting blurrier and blurrier.