Flight Behavior

The ewes pushed urgently into the larger stall, crowding to get to the feeding shelf where Hester poured out a ten-foot line of grain. These cunning Icelandics worked hard to find forage even in the dead of winter, stripping bark from fence posts and dead leaves from trees. She and Cub also threw out some hay every morning, bales purchased out of Oklahoma for a harrowing price because this farm’s meager hay crop had molded, along with all other hay within a hundred miles. Their cattle-raising neighbors were losing a fortune on hay this winter, with little choice but to start selling off calves for nothing. Dellarobia knew it had been Hester’s decision many years ago, over Bear’s objections, to switch over from cattle to this self-reliant breed, and finally the men were seeing the wisdom in it. These ewes only got extra minerals and a grain ration because they were near lambing, and plainly today they wanted that something extra, a craving Dellarobia knew from her own pregnancies. The winter she’d carried Preston she’d been possessed of such strange hungers she sometimes felt like chewing on wet laundry.

The sheep murmured and belched and shoved, arranging themselves by an order of dominance that Hester told her ran in family lines. Bossy brownies, she called the four moorits who’d been last to come in, now first at the trough. Hester pointed out the mother and three daughters, all from different years, who were now the leaders. The others knew to get out of their way. Hester sifted through the big metal toolbox she used for carrying supplies, picking out the necessary needles and vials for the booster shots they would give today. Dellarobia liked being with the sheep in close quarters. She was fascinated by the color lines and horn configurations and the odd tuft of wool on the top of each head, the sole body part that was never shorn. When she walked among these girls they parted slowly like heavy water and looked up at her with an outlandish composure, their amber eyes eerily divided by dark horizontal pupils.

Hester ordered Charlie to stay by the barn door, and Dellarobia to close all the sheep into one stall while she drew off a bottle of vaccine into her auto-repeat syringe. Administered this late in pregnancy, the vaccine would cross the womb and protect the newborn lambs from all the dire things that waited in the new world to greet them. Dellarobia’s lack of fondness for needles was average, but she’d argued for keeping the ewes here with the insistence that she could handle problems, so she knew it was time to show her mettle, if mettle she had. They’d already gone over the emergency kit Hester had organized for her in a plastic pail, and hung it on a nail on one of the barn’s upright timbers. Dellarobia was unnerved by Hester’s hasty accounting of iodine and towels and arm-length plastic gloves, things that might be needed for pulling a stuck lamb. Hester’s trust astonished her. Every night Preston and Dellarobia read from the manual about nourishing pregnant ewes, working their way up to milk fever and breech twins, the many things that could go wrong. Preston seemed steadied by the mass of information. But his mother’s imagination was poised to grab each new mention of danger and fly off with it, to worry and pick apart, like a crow on carrion.

Hester handed over a bright orange grease crayon the size of sidewalk chalk, with which Dellarobia was to mark each ewe after it was immunized. Hester handled the syringe, squeezing its V-shaped grip to land each shot through wool into skin behind the shoulder. The sheep hardly reacted to the needle, seeming more offended by Dellarobia’s swipe at their hindquarters as she marked them off. The bright, waxy orange streak across rough wool reminded her of crayon accidents on her living room carpet. Sometimes she missed on the first try and had to pursue one anonymous fuzzy rump as it swam among so many like it. Soon she and Hester both were wading through the woolly mass of orange-streaked bodies, chasing after the unmarked.

They stepped outside the barn when Hester needed to refill the syringe and have a smoke. Dellarobia quickly shook her head when Hester offered the pack. She studied the orange electrical cord looped neatly on a hook, and the perfect rectangle of very dead grass where the trailer usually sat. He’d been leaving on the weekends. He’d mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer’s absence as if she too had been unplugged and unmoored, deprived of her charge.

“You ought to start keeping a close watch on them in the middle of March,” Hester said suddenly, pinching out her cigarette and taking the syringe from its holster. “Sometimes one will surprise you and bring her lambs early.”

“How close?” Dellarobia asked. “Should I sleep out here in the barn?”

Hester kept her eye on the glass vial as she drew in the fluid. She wore a red bandanna on her hair and an old denim coat that looked stiff as cardboard. “You could. Your other job’s winding down right then, you said. So you’ll start you a new one.”

“Minus the thirteen dollars an hour,” Dellarobia said quietly.

Hester glanced up, a brief flash of surprise, then looked back to her business. So Cub hadn’t told her. That Dellarobia was tops in the family, wage-wise.

Over the next hour the sharp chill receded and the stall filled steadily with orange-striped backs. Hester asked her to get some of them out of the way so she could see what she was doing. Dellarobia opened the stall door and guarded it like a valve, shoving in or scuttling out ewes as needed, grabbing horns low near the skull, as she’d seen Hester do. Most of these girls outweighed Dellarobia, but she managed to sort out a few dozen of the moderately willing. They waited in a nervous clump near the stall door, still inside the open barn. Charlie remained at his post in the bright open square of its doorway, his tranquil gaze fixed, his body immobile, like a bronze statue of all dog virtues.

“That’ll do, Charlie,” Dellarobia called, again in imitation of Hester. She felt an odd thrill of power as Charlie came to her side and the ewes moved like magnets on an opposing pole, skirting the opposite side of the barn to flee out the doorway as Charlie left it. Move the dog, move the sheep, a ton of body weight at her command. She hoped Hester would not catch her childish flush of pride.

Only the flock’s shyest members now remained, nervous, flighty girls that Hester had to grab left-handed by a horn while she swung the syringe with her right. Rebelliousness ran in families too, Hester told her. Everything ran in the genes, to be culled or preserved at will. “It’s no good to complain about your flock,” she advised. “A flock is nothing but the put-together of all your past choices.” She told Dellarobia she never kept polled ewes, born without horn buds, preferring the convenience of sheep with handles. Likewise she culled lambs with short-stapled fleeces or puny dispositions. A big white ewe with a freckled nose, Hanky by name, was one of the last holdouts against today’s vaccination program, and Hester declared her a misjudgment. There are always a few, she said, that you wish had gone in the deep freeze.