Heidi’s Story: A tale of an unloved lamb

So I have this black sheep.

Her name is Helga, and she is a young, first time mother.

I had her “due date” written down for her first lamb this Tuesday.

She had other plans.

We found her peeking out around the corner of the shelter yesterday morning, crying.

Many times, soon-to-be mothers will cry out for their own mothers when they are laboring because they are scared and confused. So,we thought that might have been the cause of her distress.

Well, that wasn't the case this time: we soon discovered that she was crying for her lamb.

On the ground we found a large black grey ewe lamb, lifeless, and lovingly cleaned up by her mother.

Helga was frantically going back and forth checking the other lambs in the pasture, and then returning back to hers. Her back end showed signs of a hard, and probably long labor, and we were not only dismayed by the death of a lamb, but also for poor Helga's sake: she had nothing to show for her hard work and love.

Her sister gave birth to twins eight days previously: a black spotted ram lamb, and a white ewe lamb we affectionately named “Heidi.”

It didn't take us long to notice that poor Heidi wasn't as loved as her brother, for she was small and always seemed to be hunched and gaunt looking (a sign of hunger and sometimes hypothermia from being cold due to an empty belly). Her mother was bashing her away when she would approach from the front to nurse, so she became quite skilled at taking snippets here and there from the back when her brother would nurse and it went unnoticed.

Even then, however, she was still never able to get enough to fill her little tummy full of enough milk to keep her healthy and content, as every new little lamb should be.

So, Heidi was always still hungry, and began trying her luck and sneaking snacks from other distracted mother ewes. And, even though she would come at them with her “from the back” style that she had nervously developed from nursing her own mother, she never got much before they noticed and turned her away as well.

We went out with bottles of warm milk, but alas, Heidi was not interested and still decided that she wanted a real mother, no matter if she went hungry.

Soon, Heidi's once white, curly fleece transformed into a yellow stained mess on her head and shoulders, a result from being the unfortunate victim of emptying bladders, because she became too timid and accustomed to nursing from behind.

On the eighth day of Heidi's life, her belly was filled for the first time.

Noticing Helga’s frantic and sorrowful crying that morning for her “lost” lamb, and hungry enough to take a chance, she tried her luck on her Aunt Helga, and surprisingly, she wasn't as aggressively rejected as she had come to expect.

A light bulb went on in our heads, and a glimmer of hope appeared.

We rushed out and rubbed poor Heidi with the afterbirth from the deceased lamb, and shoved her towards Helga.

Helga was more than happy to accept Heidi, although, she was still leery every once in a while because there was such a stark difference between a white lamb and her black lamb.

Heidi's biological mother, would also still “call out” to Heidi every once in a while, which would just confuse matters further. Heidi began to want to be with her and her twin brother in the pasture rather than Helga, even if it meant going hungry again.

So, we did the age-old trick : we took the dead lamb and skinned it, and tied it’s little skin around Heidi with some cut up blankets and twine.

That certainly did it!

Heidi no longer looked, or smelled, like Heidi, so her mother bashed her away one last time and stopped pretending to care.

Helga’s eyes twinkled all the more excitedly when she really began to smell her “lamb” on Heidi when she came to nurse!

And, for the first time in the short eight days of her life, Heidi wasn’t frightened to approach her now-mother for milk from the front like all of the rest of the lambs.

I wish that I had a great moral to this story, and, I’m sure I could make up something “deep” and very fantastical, but, I’ve been careful not to.

Sometimes farming has so many lessons and take-aways that it would spoil the magic to try to list, categorize, or neaten them up.

For me, it’s just sacrificial love: between a farmer and their animals, a willing mother and a lamb, and the grace that seems to have settled over our family and our farm.