Shepherd: A Memoir

Chapter Three

47 CHAPTER THREE I helped de-worm and treat for foot rot 200 sheep. You’d be amazed how long three minutes takes when you are holding a struggling ewe in a trough of caustic liquid. —Letter to a friend I arrived one mild afternoon to tend our chickens at Willy’s and found my rolling hen house empty. Buff feathers littered the grass. Willy came out of his blue house. “A dog got in,” he said. “It went in over the top and busted through the wire.” He put his good hand on the wire portion of the roof, and I saw where he’d stapled the wire carefully back to a brace. Willy’s German shepherd slunk around the corner of his house, glanced at me, and disappeared beneath. Willy said, “I’m sure it was her. She’s a sneaky damn thing.” I stood staring at my silent pen. How could he have let this happen? He knew that everything in the world liked to eat chicken. And that dogs killed for sport. But he didn’t raise chickens anymore. Even as I felt my anger rise, I knew it was an owner’s endless duty to protect his own poultry . Wild predators—raccoons, opossums, foxes, bobcats, coyotes, snakes, minks, skunks, owls—owned the night. And in broad daylight, frenzied dogs might massacre your flock. I’d learned this in Indiana when we started Richard Gilbert 48 losing chickens. One morning I saw a dog at the henhouse, grabbed my shotgun, and slipped down there. The dog and I met in surprise at the corner of the coop. The stocky brown Chesapeake, a gorgeous animal, moved aggressively toward me. I fired into the ground at his feet and he fled. I’d just buried Tess and was grieving. Although I couldn’t bring myself to shoot the dog, I thought my shotgun blast had scared him off forever. But a dog that’s preyed on chickens, I’d learn, enjoys the experience too much to quit for long. One evening that summer I came home to find dead hens strewn across the lawn, and more mauled carcasses in weedy field borders and lodged in brush. Willy and I stood staring into the empty pen. I guessed he’d removed the carnage to spare my feelings. I gripped its wire top, feeling ill, now angry with myself. Who ever heard of moving chickens? My novel solution of boarding them had had tragedy written on it from the start. I was a guy who’d showed up at Willy’s with an odd contraption and a fistful of money. He’d been agreeable, but hadn’t changed his life for me. He was a poor, disabled man with a few unfenced acres. Willy’s mild, helpless attitude expressed his view: Stuff happens. You can’t fret about it, escape it, or cry when it does. But I wasn’t Willy. “If a lamb dies, just drag it out of the barn and leave it in the farmyard for me,” Mike Guthrie had said. Thus I was apprehensive, driving to his farm that rainy Saturday morning. Since talking to him at a pasture walk, I’d apprenticed myself to him to learn how to raise sheep. Or anyway, like Diana, he’d agreed to let me help him. Towering over me at my father’s height, six-foot-two, Mike wore his long reddish hair pulled back in a ponytail. His pale blue eyes peered at the world through the owlish lenses of gold-framed granny glasses. Mike despised mainstream agribusiness and had provided a welcome corrective as well to the Grassfarmer’s ambitions for me. About that periodical , my bible: “It has an agenda, selling its philosophy and its experts, pushing that ‘make a doctor’s income from grass dairying’ line. The editor makes easy money by selling books, workshops, and cassette tapes.” Shepherd 49 About full-time farming: “You can’t expect to make a living from farming. Every ‘full-time’ farmer I know has outside income or a hidden trust fund.” About my latest farming hero, Joel Salatin: “He’s a freak. The exception that proves the rule.” Farm-sitting while Mike and his wife took a quick trip to Delaware to see his mother at New Year’s, I felt unprepared. We’d done so little for his flock that I didn’t have the confidence I’d gained under Diana’s somewhat more gentle mentorship...