Like a marble tossed then lost by a child, the robin’s egg sits in the middle of the paddock in front of the hay barn. Just a few feet distance, the two cows and calf have dropped large soft pats as they gather at the feed trough. I stoop and pick up the egg. The smooth pale blue surface is intact. Here is a mystery: how did it migrate a hundred feet from the nearest nest in shrub or tree?

I move on through the double gates by the large white oak next to the small pond. The pond had gone completely dry—a first ever—during the flash drought of June and July. But the four inches of rain (three in one day) over the past seven days has filled the bottom. The yellow flag iris blooms in scattered clumps around the edge of the bog. Indeed, like a desert after a rain, unsuspected energies are now released across our farm. The landscape has greened overnight, and grass is growing with an intensity usually seen only in early spring.

The current on the electric fence pulses a healthy five-joule bursts according to my pocket meter, enough to keep curious sheep on one side of the line and the predators on the other. I climb the charged fence and over an old gate … carefully. Rusted through in spots, the gate is a much-prized condo for any number of red wasp colonies. The wasps can and do boil out of multiple exits and inflict intense pain on the unwary. Today, perhaps because I had emptied a can of wasp spray in their doorways a month back, or because they decided a truce was in order, they let me pass without dispute.

Above the small pond runs a swale too steep to safely operate machinery. To curb its inclination toward erosion, we have allowed it to fill in with a rampant growth of brush, bushes, and trees. Below the pond the swale becomes a large gully. It is a grazing and rooting ground for hogs and occasionally sheep. Above the pond the wooded area in the swale acts as a windbreak and shade for sheep or cattle—or, as has happened again this year, an easy launching point for a family of foxes looking to prey on our formerly free-ranged poultry.

With the arrival of the severe flash drought this summer, we had closed off the main pastures from the livestock. While rains returned this past week and pastures have greened, the damage done by the lack of moisture is still evident. Funny how a crisis can focus the mind. I bounce along doing things the same way, until I can’t. The lack of rain was the same. It forced us to question the farm’s grazing plans. We can always feed hay, but that is robbing Peter to pay Paul: hay today, gone tomorrow. My walk this evening is to look at the woodlots and liminal spaces between fields that are underused, and, oh yes, to find a missing lamb.

I have passed into the upper pasture on this walk, above the orchard and the grapevines, which in turn lie below the main hayfield. Before me, a long narrow rectangle of electric fence skirts both the edge of the hayfield, which runs north to south, and a large square of woods to the west. This is where I am looking for Crime.

Crime is an unfortunately named lamb that currently sports a bright blue Vet Wrap–bandaged splint on her right lower foreleg. Her hoof had knuckled under when a sudden illness of unknown cause left her lying around too long with feet tucked under. The splint helps keep the hoof extended. She is on the mend, but she still cannot keep up with the flock. Twice a day, after moving the rest of the sheep to and from this silvopasture, I pick her up and put her in the passenger seat of the farm truck. We make the drive of a few hundred yards together, mornings to the pasture and evenings back to the barn. She rides patiently, sweetly even, waiting until I heave her 85 pounds back to the ground.

But come time this evening to put the flock back in the barn paddock, Crime is missing. I call in reinforcements after a fruitless search. Cindy and I both scout the brush. A large area of the woods has been fenced so that the sheep can browse and help reduce some of the undergrowth, but it is still so thick in places it is impossible to see even a bright blue splint at ten paces. Plunging downhill into the thicket where no sheep have yet made an impact, I search, calling her ridiculous name.

Finally, where the woods begin to level out, near the fence of an unoccupied hog paddock, I find Crime grazing under a large tulip poplar. There is simply no way I am going to carry her a hundred yards uphill through the brush and brambles to the farm truck. Instead, I hoist her and then myself over a five-foot fence and then pick her up and carry her through the woods and out the gate of the hog paddock’s north end. Cindy is waiting with the truck and chauffeurs us both back to the barn.

The sun is setting with just a hint of red behind a curtain of light rain that has started to fall as we walk back to the house. Cindy gets our coffee, and we sit on the porch. The bluebirds who have been living in an ornamental birdhouse above our rocking chairs have fledged their second nest of the year and are noticeably absent. A mockingbird and a cardinal squabble in the branches of the large maple in the front yard. Out in the barn all is quiet. Crime is in her place.

……………………………………………………

Reading recently: Fall of Civilizations, stories of greatness and decline (P. Cooper). The author, Paul Cooper, has the excellent podcast of the same name. King Solomon’s Mines (R. Haggard). Port Williams: The Postwar Years (W. Berry). Happy days with this volume before me. This Fierce People, the untold story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South (A. Crawford). Not the first corrective to this story (read Walter Edgar’s wonderful Partisans & Redcoats for a generally kickass narrative). But always welcome to see a new history covering the Revolutionary War in the South.

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