Almost Imbolg...Or 'The Coming Of The Ewes Into Milk'...

Some time ago we heard of an elderly farmer who had lamb triplets...the ewe refused to let each have a turn at her teats so the farmer was looking for someone daft enough to take on the third triplet and hand rear her...

I came home clutching this teeny little creature that was all legs and made her up a bottle of warm goats milk with a hefty dash of whiskey in it...she gobbled it down and went to sleep in front of the range in a cardboard box with a cat...

That little animal thrived. She began to grow and her coat thickened up and she bit the ends of the babies teats I'd been using and so I bought some proper big black teats from the farmers stores and she was grand with those...

She came with us when we walked the dogs...bleating furiously if she thought she was getting left behind and having to be carried over deep puddles and lifted bodily over gates and fences...she knew exactly which cupboard I kept her bottles in and would stand in front of it, bawling at the top of her voice when she was hungry...she kept growing...bigger and bigger...taller and taller...

In the evening she'd sit on the settee with us, having long out grown her cardboard box...her neat little black hooves hung over the edge of the cushions and she'd watch the television until we started to get ready for bed when she'd go to the back door waiting to go outside for a pee...

By now she wasn't so much big, as growing to be enormous...she'd go underneath the table to scratch her back and the entire table would lift up a foot in the air...bowls of fruit and my sewing tipped onto the floor...she was still having a bottle at bedtime, though by this time the milk was watered down and it didn't have any added whiskey...

Now when we went for walks she confidently steamed on ahead...looking back over her shoulder to make sure we were still there...but tame sheep don't breed very well and if ewes don't get into lamb they are susceptible to cancers of the reproductive organs...much the same with un-neutered dogs actually.

So Sheep had to be found a home with other sheep and a ram...it would have been cruel to have kept her solely as a pet, as well as impractical. As luck would have it, our son Luke lived alongside a sheep farmer who had already taken on several hand-reared sheep and knew what he was about in dealing with sheep who thought you were their Mummy and who bleated when you happened to go out of their sight...

Luke came to collect her one afternoon...we missed her terribly...though the settee was ours again because by the time she went, we'd been squashed up in one corner and the dogs were lying on the floor...

She settled in with the rest of the flock surprisingly quickly...had her fleece shorn and the following Spring had her own lamb to care for...