April 1st, 2010
On a warm spring morning, I hitched up our two dogs to go check on the new lambs and goat kids in the barn born the day before. I hadn’t seen them yet, so was curious as to what they looked like. Our sheep are Jacobs which are spotted black and white and all different, and the goats are unique too. When I went out to the barn with the dogs, I found the goat doe and her buckling kid. I took a couple of pictures of him, while looking into the next pen and asking the ewe where her baby, who weighed about five pounds, was. I started to get a little worried, looking around. I let the dogs go and was hoping they would help look but they didn’t, they just sniffed everything in sight. I started looking even farther away from the ewe, didn’t find her baby in with the other animals, who either had older babies or needed extra food. Looked all around and no lamb! I went back to the house, and knocked on the window of my daughter’s bedroom and hollered that I couldn’t find the new lamb. She said, “Well it was there the night before. “ I went back to the barn with the dogs, looked all over again, looking a little more thoroughly, but still no lamb. I went back to the house and my daughter got up sleepily, and came out with me to look. We started to move things, looking inside the tipped wheelbarrow, under a pallet, behind a board, in a couple of buckets on their side, but still no lamb. By this point, we were sure we were going to find a dead lamb somewhere. I asked Marie is she could have gotten out that little tiny place that was about two inches wide where the sun was shining into, and she said no. After looking another couple of minutes, I said to myself that that lamb is not in here, that I was going to go walk around the outside of the barn, just to make sure she wasn’t out there. As I went around the front side of the barn, where the sun was shining so nicely, there she was, basking in the sun, perfectly content, not knowing we had been frantically looking for her. She was playing hide and seek and she won!
