Lambsquarters (16 page)

SCHOOL BUS

THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL.
Kindergarten.
Maternelle
. All day, every other day. Twenty minutes to eight in the morning until after four o’clock. A long day for a five-year-old. But she was ready. Eager and willing to clamber up the steps of the school bus, sit at the front, ride for over an hour until the school came into sight, then ride the bus again until she arrived back home, clutching paper creations and her lunch box, running up the lane, the dog wagging alongside.

We’d made no preparation for the school bus. Neither Thomas nor I had ridden one. We had always walked to school—in the days when the snowdrifts were half the size they are now and the schools were close by and the school boards were local. We’d gone to schools that had names like Fairbanks and Culloden, Brantwood and Central.

On the first few chilly mornings of September, I
walked down the lane hand in hand with my five-year-old and we waited for the bus together. If her brother was still sleeping, I let him lie; if not, he came along, held tight in my arms, as soon as I heard the bus coming up the road over the hill from the east. The red lights would flash, the stop sign swing out by the driver’s window, and the wheels spit to a stop in the gravel, throwing pebbles at the dog if she got too close.

As the weeks went on, my small scholar became more confident, and I let her travel the lane by herself, waving goodbye from the open door at first, and then from the window, and finally from the kitchen table, over my tea, watching her leave for the day from a distance. Zoë kept her company, desperate to join in the journey, and more than once had to be booted off the bus, her tail between her legs, her hanging head full of dejection and woe.

It seemed an inordinately large bus with a ridiculously high first step. My daughter scrambled on all fours to get in.

HAY CUTTER

MUCKING TO THE BARN,
the late autumn wet squishing under our rubber boots, dripping off our work clothes, my small son and I head back from his big sister’s bus to feed the animals. He’s rarely clean for long, and farms
are
dirt: a rich mix for growing, nitrogen for greening. He scurries around teasing the cats or playing with his toy tractors, Lego, or trucks, while I chore.

Spring’s growth of hay is packed tightly in the barn. Nestled shoulder to shoulder, each hay bale lies stacked in the barn, filling the mow with the scent of sweet-grass and dried clover, wildflowers and weeds. Country perfume. We make hay while the sun shines, then feed it in the dark.

It’s always tricky deciding exactly which fall day to supplement the waning pasture with a little hay, and when to bring the sheep right off the fields and start feeding out exclusively. Once I start, the ewes become
demanding, forgetting how keen they were to get out of the barn in spring and onto fresh grass, how they begged and baaed as they eyed the green sprigs beyond their courtyard, refusing my argument that the pasture must reach a height of six to eight inches before they could get their first taste. By now they’ve chewed it all down in rotation: the Meadow, the Pie-shaped Field, the Swamp, the regrowth in the Hayfield, the Meadow, and back again around the circle of pastures. The ewes have huddled under each field’s sheltering trees in heat and storm. And they’re bored. They want to give their bottom teeth a rest and use their back molars. Spend their days chewing and ruminating and gestating. Let
me
be the one to forage for them.

It is routine, perhaps: the need for adventure in the spring and for coddling and a warm stable in the fall when the light grows dim. They cocoon in their thickening fleeces, grow lambs under their skin, eat for two. Or three. Or four. And I feed them, bracketing my family’s feedings, our breakfasts and dinners, with trips to the barn where the menu is invariable: vegan’s choice.

THE FIRST YEAR
I wintered animals I had big cumbersome bales to deal with. Bales that were heavy-handed, human-handled from baler to wagon, wagon to elevator, elevator to mow, mow to stable floor. They were over a metre long and too wide to fit easily into the
bale feeders we had built from a blueprint designed by a Ministry of Agriculture technician who never imagined the scope of the flying Dutchman’s baler. The feeders have a square platform up off the ground and a hollow top column designed to enclose the hay, upended for gravity feed. The ewes can fit two to a side and munch through the stilts. The hay falls as it’s eaten. But I couldn’t lift the bales up to tip them in, and a square peg won’t fit in a square hole if the bale is bigger than the hole. So I had to undo the strings, pack the feeders by hand.

My neighbours eschew knives for the baler cord. They upend the bale on the floor, push down on one edge, grab the nearest twine and pull it bodyward, to the corner and away. Easier watched than done. Then they snap the hay backwards toward the remaining twine and the bale breaks apart. Undone, it falls into thick sheaves, each compressed stack as big as a bread-box. Twines, now just ellipses of air, are parked on a nail in a beam to accumulate, to dream of a future as fence fastener or flower tie. But most end up in the dump eventually. They rot and return to the earth.

For a while I opened my bales the way my neighbours do, my time extending to fill the chore—there were no babies waiting in their beds or milling at my feet. I hauled the green brutes up to standing, struggled with the near twine, wrenched my shoulder pulling the cord off, got enough purchase to split it backwards,
broke nails and got hay bites on my hands. The second twine would invariably get lost in the mess and end up in the feeder, posing a danger to the flock if it emerged around a neck or a hoof. Then my brother-in-law gave me a Swiss Army knife and I started cutting.

Over the years the bales have changed. Smaller, less intense, lighter to accommodate the mechanical bale-thrower, they slide easily into the feeders, slip down like a centreboard in a sailboat, like coal in a chute. I can pick these bales up whole, plop them in, cut the strings with my knife and I’m away. It sounds easy, but hefting and carrying even lightweight bales of hay through a hungry flock is not quite so simple. The sheep become a mob. They have no fear. They crowd and stomp on my toes and bunt each other to be first. My children are at risk from the clamber of hoofs, the forest of legs moving at speed. Sheep have no table manners. No table.

Ultimately I had to devise another method. Inside feeders helped. Long sturdy wooden racks hold a bale spread out and offer it through slats on the pen side. An eight-foot-long cribbed manger serves eight shorn sheep, or seven fleecies, or maybe six in both lamb and wool. These feeders are perfect on inclement days, blizzard days when outside hay blows into the next township, joining the odd bit of laundry that flies off the line during a summer gale. The feeders work well before and after lambing, when the sheep are divide d
and fed according to their fecundity (whether they are pregnant or not), and then their productivity (whether they have twins or singles) when the lambs are too small to go out. And the feeders protect my son as he runs up and down the gangway between them, or sits on a pile of straw playing with the cats who mill about his snow-suited body and bat his mittens, which hang from their strings, while he ignores the cold.

But these rack feeders are wasteful. The sheep pick out their favourite flowers and strew the stems at their feet. The stable floor gets that high-chair look—a circle of debris within dropping range—once perfected by my kids in the house. The beasts get picky in ways the bale feeders don’t allow. And perhaps the sheep get lazy too when they’re fed inside. They avoid having to walk.

Gravity was the answer. An old door set into the side of the mow over the stone courtyard became the perfect spot from which to pitch hay down into the bale feeders. Standing so high above the ground is treacherous, but a few boards nailed across the bottom of the opening make me feel secure each morning and keep the children from falling as I open the door to the world below and beyond. Sometimes the view is breathtaking. Framed in pine barnboard, weathered grey inside and out, the dark mow opens to a blast of natural light. The winter sun rises more to the south than the east, so is off-centre in the doorway, but the light surges over snow in an explosion of white. Sleet
storms coat the trees and stone walls in fairy ice, and rain pours straight down past the opening, as there’s no gutter or sill to stop its fall.