Читать книгу The Barn at the End of the World - Mary Rose O'Reilley - Страница 22

Nature

BEN CAME IN this morning after being away since Friday to find one of the ram lambs dead—not the one we had been fussing over all weekend but one that had seemed perfectly healthy. We loaded it onto the pickup and Ben drove away to dispose of it at the medical waste facility, leaving me to feed the stock.

I double-check my work and tend to move slowly with the feeding, so by the time I was halfway down the barn the hungry old rams were in a snit. The biggest, whom we call Butthead, a three hundred fifty-pound ram with the face of a camel, managed to push through a wired gate and get out. I hurried to secure the doors so he wouldn’t head down a freeway, or worse, turn over our huge delectable tank of molasses—then tried to get him back in the pen. By then, the other big rams were making their way out. I stuck my knee into the wedge they were coming through and got a painful compression bruise out of it as a big vasectomized ram pushed through. He got out and among the young rams, where a butting contest ensued. Bloody and panting, the old ram, who has bad lungs, had to cede.

By this time, Butthead had his face in the corn and was hard to deflect. Finally I maneuvered him into an unoccupied pen.

Ben’s truck on the gravel. “Mary, can’t I leave you alone for a minute?”

With one sheep dead, I have become more than usually observant of the actions of the rest. One of the rams was hunched over, moving convulsively. “Ben! Is that ram sick?”

“He’s ejaculating, Mary.”

I think I spent too much time in graduate school.

Buddhist tradition tells of a monk bathing in a river, where he comes upon a drowning scorpion. Tenderly he lifts the scorpion out of the water and the scorpion stings him savagely. The cycle of rescue and attack repeats itself as the monk tries to get the scorpion to shore before it kills him. The other monks try to intervene but, “He is acting according to his dharma,” the monk tells them, “and so am I.” The word dharma here means a kind of internal wisdom: what Quakers call the Light, or sometimes the Inner Teacher. There is an old saying, “Live up to the Light that thou hast and more will be given.”

Last night when I checked the animals around dusk, two men were walking an unleashed husky near the pens. I hate huskies. Half the time a child or a small animal is attacked by a dog you’ll find a husky in it: this is part of the rural Minnesota belief system.

“Last year,” Ben told me, “a husky chased a ewe lamb straight to the end of the paddock, tore off her udder and ripped her vagina.”

The owner refused to accept any responsibility, saying, “It’s just her nature.”

Ben went on, “If I see that owner around here again I’m going to rip his ass. It’s my nature.”