Chapter 9: Father’s Day Lamb

One bale, thirty sheep. What could go wrong?

Due to the large gap in the fence, the neighbour’s sheep continued to roam freely on our block. I didn’t mind them, in fact I quite liked having them around, especially when there were tail-wiggling little lambs in tow. The downside was the mess they made of the dams, and of course, the Schultzy problem.

I rang Jim to talk about the fence. A phlegmatic chap, Jim spoke slowly, and finished every sentence with my name, like a rural Dale Carnegie, making me feel like he was really very interested in what I had to say. We had a nice long talk about how hard trap rock country is to dig fence post holes in, how the drought was bad, real bad, how low his dams were, how he’d had to let his foreman go. I tried to bring the conversation back to the fence. Jim said, ‘We could possibly do something, Kate’, then got back to talking about the drought. I finished the call asking him to please not shoot a little black dog if he saw it running after his sheep. He chuckled and said ‘Bye bye now, Kate’. I hoped his chuckle meant: ‘Alrighty, Kate. I’ll give the little fella a free pass’ and not ‘Yeah, nah. That’s not the way we do things around here, Kate.’

He was right about one thing: the drought was bad. When the sheep ran out of grass and water on Jim’s land, they pretty much moved in with us, so much so that Schultzy was overwhelmed with chasing opportunities and it all became a bit passe. He’d sit on his chair near the fire and watch them as they passed with his beady Schnauzer eyes, head rotating slowly like a suspicious security guard in front of a nightclub. Every now and then he might do some ‘herding’ to show them who was boss, then he’d jump back up onto his chair, looking pleased.

The lambs looked so skinny and frail, gambolling after their mums, bleating for milk. They started following our white ute when we drove past, perhaps thinking we were Jim, doling out hay. Their bleats sounded pitiful, which was what prompted Smash to ‘save’ them.

The next time we were at the hardware store in Stanthorpe, he bought a bale of lucerne hay. I had my doubts about this plan. One bale wasn’t going to last very long, and what then? Still, it was fun breaking off biscuits and seeing the sheep gobble the hay down so appreciatively. We started naming them: Greedy, Spotty, and Peter for one that looked spookily like the Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton. We gave them about a third of the bale then put the rest away. Schultzy, perhaps feeling left out, did some more herding and barked until they dispersed in a chaotic scramble. Job well done.

In the afternoon, the sheep came back – for dinner, I presumed. They seemed emboldened. While I was grilling eggplant slices on the Weber, they wriggled nearby, baaing every now and then. When one moved forward, three or four others followed, then the whole flock were edging closer. The baaing got louder, and quite diverse. All sorts of baas from high pitched squeaks to deep, grumpy growls. Peter baaed one low, but persistent and droning note, as if he was bored and thought everyone else was an idiot for being so passive. I drew Smash’s attention to their presence, and he gave them some more hay. My uneasiness grew.

Around five the next morning, before the sun had risen over the eastern hill, we were jolted awake by baaing. It sounded very close. Peter’s low, droning baa was loudest of all, perhaps he’d decided to take matters into his own hands. Smash blasphemed and kept his eyes determinedly shut. I got up to see what was going on. When I unzipped the tent, they stopped baaing for a second, then started up again, more urgently. They’d formed a posse around our camp and didn’t move off when I approached, just held their ground, staring, not exactly menacingly – it’s hard to be frightened by a sheep, but their insistence definitely triggered a response. Guilt, mainly.

‘See?’ I said.

Smash pretended to still be asleep.

One bale! That’s all it had taken to get those guys hooked. I decided tough love was the only way out. No more hay, just cold turkey. I went back to bed and put a pillow over my head. They moved off eventually and their baaing died down to the odd, hopeful mehhhh.

A week later, on Father’s Day, the boys came down to visit, as a surprise for Smash. We’d planned it all out. I was to get Smash up the hill on some pretence and the boys would park back from the camp, sneak in and hide in one of the tents. Then when Smash came back down from the hill, the boys would jump out of the tent and hopefully not give him a heart attack. It all went according to plan until the big reveal due to a snafu with the zipper. (One downside to second-hand tents – the zippers are often on the way out.) The sound of the zipper going forward, back, forward attracted Smash’s attention. He froze, arms out from his side in protection mode, ready to tackle whatever it was to the ground. The zipper moved along an inch or two, got stuck, went back, moved along a bit. Smash turned to me, lips pursed to say ‘WTF?’ and I tried to look confused and a bit fearful, but not too much in case he did something crazy, like hurl a concrete block at the tent. Finally, the zipper took off and whizzed around enough for the boys to burst out, shoving at each other to get through the tent door without tripping over the flap.

‘Surprise!’

It was so lame. We all started laughing, in a sort of embarrassed way, about nothing. Smash was thrilled to see them of course, but immediately started fretting there might not be enough food. There was. There always is.

In the morning, the boys went off for an explore on the postie bikes. Half an hour later, Henry came puttering down the hill uncharacteristically slowly. I wondered if he’d had a crash of some kind – like father like son. Then I noticed there was a lamb following him down the track, ears flapping, mouth opening and closing, its bleating drowned out by the motor bike. When Henry turned the bike off, the lamb stood by his leg and looked up at him, still bleating. Heartrending.

I gave Henry a, ‘What have you done?’ look.

The lamb had followed him, Henry assured me. It was starving, apparently.

We tried everything to get the flock to take that lamb back, but they were deaf to our bleats. I hid behind a bush with the lamb while Henry and Jack herded the sheep past. As they clattered along the rocks, I pushed the lamb in amongst them – tossed it really. The lamb got caught up in the flow for a few seconds, then the sheep all ran off down the hill, leaving the lamb standing alone, bleating. It reminded me of school, some cruel game the popular kids played. Poor ole unpopular Lambie. We waited until that kafuffle had all died down, then Henry approached the flock slowly with the lamb, placed it gently on the grass, as close as he could without scaring all of them off, then he walked slowly backwards. The lamb followed him, bleating ‘Wait for me, Hen’, tripping and wobbling along, time and time again.

I decided to ring Jim. It was his problem after all. I left a message on his answering machine that I later realised probably sounded a bit too urgent given the situation – more ‘000 Missing Person’ than ‘Rural Enquiry’. Jim never rang back. The lamb kept bleating and head butting everyone, clearly looking for something other than affection. Jackson decided he would make a feeding bottle out of a latex glove, water bottle and a cable tie. It worked well, and the lamb transferred its devotion to Jack. We named the lamb Kevvy – I can’t remember exactly why, but it had something to do with Kevin Costner. Goosie ignored him. Schultzy barked and wanted to chase him, but Kevvy stood his ground, even when Schultzy had little nibbles on his wool. Kevvy jumped, gambolled and wobbled around the camp site, and generally went overboard with the cuteness.

Like a lamb to the BBQ.

When he finally tired, he lay down inside Smash’s BBQ and fell asleep. There was some discussion about fate, and what the lamb was trying to tell us, and did anyone have any rosemary, but we all knew no one was going to be eating Kevvy. For starters there was very little meat on him. He seemed all bone and fluff.

I kept going back up the hill to ring Jim. Surely, he must be worried about the lamb. The call continued to go to message. That night we had a BBQ with Josh, his partner Ali, and their three boys. Kevin entertained us all - oh, so cute - then he fell asleep in Ali’s arms, wrapped in my lambswool jumper. We continued to feed him with Jackson’s makeshift bottle – Kevvy was insatiable. He did a lot of wees on my jumper, which made me think about other kinds of waste that might come out of him, and how cute that would be in a tent. After dinner we sat around the open fire, faces aglow nativity style, all looking in the direction of Kevvy’s adorable little baby Jesus head poking out of swaddling.

When it came time for Josh and his family to go, it was decided they would take Kevvy and keep him in a crate overnight, then Ali would contact a friend of hers who took in abandoned lambs. I was still thinking Jim would want his lamb back, but I came to realise his care factor for Kevvy was very low. When we met up with him months later, he had a good old laugh about how much attention the lamb had received and took the opportunity to remind me how bad the drought was that year. (Real bad, Kate.)

Jack and Kevvy.