Lambing Season
by Tanner Hansen
Content warning: Animal death
He called the girl Tadpole, but that was not the girl’s name. Tadpole was a pet name that Grandpa found for her in his cluttered memory, like the coat that he lent her which belonged to another girl in another decade. Her city fleece would not do here. Grandpa did not begrudge Tad her twelve years in the paved-over bay, but he would not condone any mention of that life either. The girl’s mother had left her in his charge for the week (the desperation that had brought her to do so, Grandpa could only imagine) and as long as she was living under his roof, he would expect no less from her than he would from a hired man. She would help him repair the brush mower, she would clean the hoop house, she would feed the dogs, and she would help him shepherd the flock. He would insist upon it.
But Grandpa could not have anticipated how willing the girl would be, more willing to partake in the work of ranching than any of his own children had been. The three-hour drive to Scott Valley had been spent in furious silence. As the girl and her mother wound their way through the mountain passes and over receding reservoirs, Tad was making up her mind about her grandfather. She decided that she would love the old man whose face she could barely recall. She decided that she would love the country that passed indistinctly by her window, a country that her mother had abandoned. And she decided that her love for this country would validate the untethered feeling it seemed she had always had in the bay.
So, it suited them well when, upon meeting, both Tad and Grandpa insisted that she had always been and would forever be a ranch kid. Grandpa was older than even Tad’s twelve-year-old imagination could have predicted. Age had filled his face with more skin than he could justifiably use, and vagrant rolls hung around his eyes and neck and cheeks. When he walked, he let his belly lead and dragged long arms at his sides, giving Tad the impression of a silverback. He was rude, terrifying, perfect. He regarded her presence on the ranch as unremarkable, which was alright for Tad. She followed suit and tried her best to believe that life on the ranch was unremarkable too.
Within the first few hours of her arrival, Tad and Grandpa took the UTV into the fields to bring the sheep in for the night. With bored indifference, Grandpa demanded that Tad drive, complaining of aches in his hands. Tad had never driven anything larger than an arcade racing machine, but she did not hesitate. She gripped the wheel as though she expected the vehicle to buck and sank her foot into the gas pedal without apprehension. The UTV jerked forward, and Grandpa cackled. The wheels of the machine tore the sopping, grey earth and they launched into the field. Farm dogs leapt from their rest and sprinted ahead, weaving around the trunks of sparse pine trees that quivered under a textureless sunset sky. The UTV slipped in the mud, and Grandpa threw the machine into four-wheel drive. His body filled the bench, and Tad jostled against his huge form as she tried to hold a steady path. Frigid air lapped at her face, stinging and thrilling her. She was happy to have Grandpa’s warmth, even though he smelled of sour tobacco and jerky. To the south, Shasta sat on the dark horizon, uncomplicated, a child’s drawing of a mountain.
They peaked a gentle rise and the valley spilled out in all directions towards the foothills. In the distance, Tad could see the flock of sheep ahead speckling the fields with white. Under the authority of Grandpa’s grunts and whistles, Tad and the dogs guided the flock slowly back to shelter. In the moment, Tad believed it to be the defining experience of her life.
In the hoop house, Tad was formally introduced to the flock. She followed close to Grandpa as he pushed his way through the crowd of sheep that were so much bigger and more self-assured than they had seemed moments ago in the field. The ewes belched up ear-splitting moans. The air was thick with flies and the reek of manure and sheep-breath, a hot odor fermented deep in the gut of the herbivorous animal. Grandpa clapped the ewes on their skulls as he went, a gesture that Tad took to be an affectionate one. They each had a number painted on their matted sides, though this seemed to serve no purpose, for Grandpa knew them only by the names of his ex-wives and female celebrities. Big-eared Laurie-Anne (Tad’s grandmother) stood side-by-side with a half-shorn Monica Lewinsky.
It was November, near the end of lambing season, and all around the main pen lambs darted between the legs of their aunts and sprung off the bellies of resting ewes. Tad was stunned by an irrepressible fondness for the little sheep, a fondness that she worried might not have a place in the new world she belonged to. Days or weeks old, they played like puppies, flailing their back legs in the air as if kicking away the stiffness of the womb. To her relief, Grandpa was warm towards them as well and even permitted them to tickle his outstretched fingers with their leathery lips.
In a cramped side pen well-furnished with straw bedding was the enormous Patsy Cline. (“Now there was a woman.”) The ewe stood with her head in the corner, offering them a clear view of her gaping vulva. Her pregnant belly was bloated like an oil tanker, and the creatures within her threatened to escape out her sides. Grandpa walked around the side of the pen and took Patsy’s head in his hands. She was the last of his ewes to lamb.
“Just plumb-full of babies,” he said. “Maybe as many as three.”
To Tad, she seemed to be in agony. She barely moved around the pen but stood with her eyes fixed on a point on the ground, the invisible nexus of her discomfort. Grandpa said that it would be any day now. Tad asked if she would need their help with the labor.
“She might bitch and moan, but we oughtn’t pay her any mind.”
Over the course of the next few days, Tad bluffed and intuited her way into a feeling of competency on the ranch. At the time of the visit, Grandpa was in-between wives (Tad had not known another man who had been married more times after the age of sixty) and the upkeep of the ranch was their responsibility alone. Tad rose before the sun every day without complaint. She drank the terrible coffee that Grandpa brewed for them and ate his meat-filled breakfasts. In the light of pre-dawn, she was out in the hoop house, shoveling manure, refreshing water buckets, and filling the feed troughs as though she had done so every morning for as long as she could remember.
As though crafting a wonderful conspiracy, the two cultivated a sense of permanency in their partnership and for their partner a sense of appreciation. Tad grew confident, fed on Grandpa’s joyful petulance, his thin sarcasm. Grandpa, for his part, had never known a blood relative who made him feel comfortable in himself and in his way of life the way he felt around this strange and fearless girl. He began to enjoy himself around her. He drank and smoked indiscriminately, whether the girl was near or not. At night, they built bonfires together out of pallets and whatever trash they had produced during the day. As the putrid, plastic smoke swirled around them, Grandpa played guitar and sang the songs of his Appalachian father. He was not a good musician. Perhaps he had been once but no longer. The songs disintegrated in his arthritic hands. Frequently, he lost the lyrics and substituted his own, some variation of, “Oh, lonesome! Oh, awful! Oh, depression!” Tad hung on his every word and grunt. It seemed that even the wind cried along to his elegiac singing, but it was only the highway, closer than Tad had thought.
Tad checked in on Patsy every day. As Grandpa and the dogs shepherded the flock into the fields, she stayed behind with the immobilized mother, petting her snout and thinking that her chatter was soothing her. Tad checked her rear often for a sign of that wonder and horror that danced in her imagination. But for many days, Patsy was just the same. She was never more than a foot or two away from where she had seen her last, standing awkwardly and chewing the dry feed. Tad began to feel that there was something sacred in her suffering. The enormous burden straddled between her legs, the pity concealed behind feathery, white eyelashes, it was more than she could confine to the standard business of ranching.
On the sixth day of the visit, an afternoon rain brought the flock back into the hoop house. Tad and Grandpa filed in behind the sheep, flattening the straw bedding with their muddied boots and hooves. The smell of wet wool warmed the air, and the rain played a rubbery hum on the tarp above. Grandpa shook the water from his trucker hat and lumbered to Patsy’s pen, where the ewe was dangling a sack of black fluid between her legs. Tad leapt towards the pen, but Grandpa held her back.
“No need for that, Tadpole,” he said. “Watch. Ol’ Patsy knows what to do.”
Grandpa lit a cigarette and sat down in the straw outside the pen. Tad stood watching the ewe stamp and paw the ground. She drummed her fingers on the fencing. Grandpa pulled her onto the ground beside him.
“Sit down, child. You’re makin’ me nervous.”
He kicked off his boots and massaged his bunioned feet. He sucked on his filter, barely paying attention to the ewe’s heaving stomach or the ropes of blood falling from her rear. A week-old lamb stumbled into the huge swath of Grandpa’s lap and fell asleep. Grandpa tugged thoughtlessly on the lamb’s ears, looking at the infant with what could have been a smile.
Tad struggled to steady her heartbeat, the first real test of her resolve. From a quick survey of the other animals in the shed, it was clear that the situation demanded composure, and if Grandpa was to be mirrored, boredom. Even Patsy seemed more content now that the labor had finally begun. Hard as she tried though, Tad knew that her thin veil of calm was not fooling anyone, not even the lambs. The unfolding scene was too important to be denied. Enraptured as she had never been before, Tad stared at the field of devastation that was Patsy’s backside, the wool heavy with thick, bile-yellow fluid. She could not escape the feeling that what she saw was greater than the game she played with Grandpa, its authority extending beyond the property lines of the ranch. Tad watched and hoped that she did not appear to care.
After a few minutes, something dark began to peak out of the carnage. It might have been a face or a hoof, but before Tad could decide which it was, the whole thing began to slip through the strained opening. It crashed on the floor with a splat, followed by a torrent of pulp-filled punch and the vicious odor of amniotic fluid. Tad jumped to her feet, certain beyond hope that the thing on the ground was dead. Grandpa yanked the hem of her coat.
“Easy. Have a little faith in our girl.”
The lamb lay still, covered in mucus. Unhurried, Patsy began to lick the infant’s mouth, clearing its airways, pulling away shreds of membrane that clung to its face. The lamb gave a wet cough and began to squirm. Grandpa clapped the back of Tad’s head, stabbing a fat finger triumphantly at the infant.
“What’d I say. Patsy’s an old pro.”
The second lamb came sliding out of the birth canal fast on the heels of the first. The younger sibling took much longer to become animated, but Tad was not afraid this time. She was awestruck by the patience and calm of the mother sheep as she coaxed her child into the first breaths of life. The ewe seemed to trust her child. She gave the lamb the freedom to decide whether the struggle of life was worth a few sweet gasps, a few bites of rain-drenched grass, or whether it was better to call it early. There would be no shame either way. After a minute, the second lamb began to bleat and kick its knobby legs.
Grandpa hobbled to his feet, fighting against the weight of his stomach. He flicked his cigarette away and stepped into the pen. Taking up each lamb in turn, he dried them with a dirty towel. He trimmed their navel cords with a penknife and sprayed their bellies with blood-red iodine. Satisfied, he cupped Patsy’s chin in his hands.
“Good girl,” he said. “I appreciate your professionalism.”
Then he strode out of the pen and beckoned for Tad to follow him back to the house. The lambs were just starting to push at the ground, testing their alien appendages. Tad asked Grandpa if she could stay with them for a little longer. Grandpa said that he could not be made to care what she did.
“Do me a favor,” he said. “Scoop out the afterbirth when it passes, will you? Patsy’ll eat it otherwise.”
Alone, Tad entered the pen. She found a dry patch of straw and sat down. She forced herself not to touch the lambs as they fumbled on their knees, navigating the limbs they had been given. Patsy licked carelessly at their faces and rears, settling into the routine of nurturing. It had become late. Tad pulled the borrowed coat around her body. The rain pattered on the tarp overhead. The air was heavy with earth and the stink of new life. Tad took greedy breaths. A trembling joy sprouted in her chest. For a moment, she believed she had found something worthy of her love.
Then, something else collapsed on the ground. Tad saw it wriggling in the straw between Patsy’s legs, assuredly not the afterbirth Grandpa had mentioned. The surprise (Triplets!) was soured the instant that Tad stood and began to parse the lamb’s strange features. Like her siblings, her face was dark and perfect. Her body was slick with blood and feces. Like her siblings had been too, she seemed confused by her body, only her body was not the same thing as theirs. Her spine was twisted. Her legs were splayed and spidery. The lamb shuddered as she filled her lungs, beginning the miracle of her life. Tad looked with all the love in her body at the incalculably precious creature and knew that she was broken.
A premonition-like violence struck Tad. In an instant, the game she had been playing over the past week crumbled into a childish fantasy. The person she had pretended to be, the person she had allowed herself to imagine her grandfather was, both were abandoned without hope. Something else took control, a more enduring truth that she had already learned about men. She knew what men did to broken little things.
Without questioning her decision, Tad took up the lamb in her arms and fled. She would never again act as quickly or as confidently as she did at that moment (and the reason for her action would become one of the small mysteries of her life). Patsy hurried after, licking at the infant’s dangling legs. Tad closed her in the pen behind her, offering a final look of apology. Patsy watched the girl run into the night with her baby while another began to drink from her body for the first time.
Tad ran through the pasture for somewhere to hide. On the valley floor, there was no concealment but in distance. She ran until her stomach was shot through with stabbing cramps. Then she walked. She put herself as far away from the light of the house as her strength would allow. The wind tossed her hood aside, and rain pelted her face. Rivulets poured off her eyebrows and lips. Tad struggled to keep a grip on the lamb. The rain and blood made her slippery, and she seemed to grow heavier with every step. She was frighteningly warm, a match that burns bright and shivers out too quick. Tad tried to make her arms large enough to wrap around all the infant’s holy pieces, but the legs slipped free, knocking against her side as she went. Mostly, the lamb was still. The absurdity of her life came to her in waves. She would struggle for a moment then surrender again to a fate that had always carried her. Tad tried to soothe her with pointless little words, but nothing in the night retained meaning but their own solid bodies.
The two ended their flight under the only large tree on the ranch, still visible from the house, despite Tad’s efforts. She carried the lamb, crouching under the low, meandering limbs. The old tree gave them partial cover from the downpour, though they were both already soaked to their skin. The wind and rain animated the tree, making it spin and bow under the great tumult of the sky. Tad had never known real cold before. Her skin tightened around her arms and chest, holding on to any warmth left in her blood. The cold thickened over her senses like ice, carrying her away to distant places. She did not notice that the lamb was shaking until her soft cries startled Tad back to life. The lamb’s lips opened only a crack, and she attempted to make contact with the world for the first and only time, just to let something know she was unhappy. Tad tried to rub some warmth into the infant, and when that did not work, she stuffed her blood and rain-soaked body under her clothes. Under the weight of Tad’s coat, the lamb settled. She did not know how long she stayed like this with the lamb’s body resting on her skin, or how many times she felt her fill with air and empty again.
Tad heard the sound of an engine in the field. The farm dogs barked. The headlights of the UTV bobbed on the contour of the land, as though coming from a vessel rocked on the sea. He came with all the light and noise of a wrathful god. Tad could almost hear the sound of paws and tires tearing wet earth. She could almost smell the hot diesel exhaust. In the moment before they were discovered, Tad pulled the lamb in close, as though her child arms were enough to guard her from death.
Grandpa did not understand the sight of the child knotted at the base of the tree, so he became enraged. He filled his hand with whatever he could get and dragged the girl to her feet. Tad tried to hold onto the lamb, but it slipped out of her arms. Grandpa saw the creature fall onto the ground, the spidery legs and the contorted spine. He saw the old coat, ruined with bloodstains and feces. Understanding came to him slowly. He stopped for a moment. Tad wrenched out of his grasp and stumbled, taking up the lamb that had fallen in the wet grass. The farm dogs ran a cyclone around them, thrilled by the drama of the rescue. Grandpa took a step back, examining the girl. His wrinkled eyelids were grotesquely large, like the bark of a tree collecting around a wound. Who could say what he saw behind all the skin and the years of his life? He approached the girl slowly, as he would a frightened animal. He took the lamb from her, and the girl did not fight. Grandpa looked down at the twisted bundle of life. It seemed more comfortable in his arms.
“Don’t,” Tad said. “Please, Grandpa. Please don’t.”
“It’s hurting,” he said. “Things that hurt don’t want to live.”
“Yes, they do.”
“Tad. Tadpole. Be fair.” The name was still heavy with threads tying it to other loves, other children, other broken hearts. Grandpa ordered Tad into the UTV and told her to cover her ears. Tad did as she was told. She watched through streaks of rain as Grandpa placed the lamb gently in the grass. He produced a pistol from the small of his back. It had always been with him, only tucked away where Tad could not see it. The pain in his joints fought him as he pulled on the slide, shaking hands trying to grasp another thing that had eluded them. Tad closed her eyes and buried her fingers in her ears. In her mind, she was already going home.
Tanner Hansen is a writer and filmmaker based in Northern California. He enjoys telling stories that examine rural spaces and rural lives. He currently works for the farmers’ market in Chico.
