A Night To Remember

You're not going to believe this one. Even I don't and I was there. It started out all right. It was Sunday and the whole family was at the farm. Alessia and Naavah were enjoying the clean country air, Yael was busy about the house, and Dan was polyeuthethaning the barn ceiling. I spent a fair amount of time just watching the lambs. The two have really bonded. They appear together almost all the time. And they are usually hanging out with the brown ewe. Starlight's mother comes around occasionally and provides oversight but mostly its the lambs and the brown Mom.

Having spent a restful day with the sheep, I was pretty much sated with sheep by the evening. I hunkered down for a good read with an Agatha Christie and spent my time in the land of murder and mayhem. At 11:30 I turned out my light and rolled over to count sheep in my sleep. "Baa", I heard. Which would have been nice if I'd been asleep, but I wasn't. I sat up, puzzled, had the sheep moved up the hill, closer to my windows? I waited. Nothing. Back down to the pillows. "Baa". This time very close indeed. When I looked out my window I saw a driveway filled with sheep.

I pull on my parka over my nightgown, go downstairs to the garage and open a bay door. I see the rear end of a white ewe scampering down the driveway. I call Dan, don the wellies, and off we go to round up the sheep. It is very dark in the country at night. No street lights and the moon is obscured by fat clouds. So I am groping my way around and Dan has sped off down the hill to try to head the flock off before they reach the main road.

Yael comes out to see if she can help. While she is standing in the driveway, which is only lit by the lights from my upstairs window, she hears a rustling a few feet away. A mouse appears but before she can react with an appropriate "ugh", some raptor-like creature swoops down in a fiercesome dive and voila, the mouse is something's midnight snack.

Meanwhile, I am positioned at our driveway's decorative gates. We don't know how many sheep are loose, where they are or actually much of anything. So I am there to keep any other sheep from escaping. I hear my own rustling sounds and step down the verge to see if it's a sheep. I slip. I bang into a tree. I wish I could say that it was the tree's fault but it wasn't. Now I hear rustling and my head is bleeding. Turns out there is a sheep in the same paddock the cows escaped from a few days ago. Now I'm torn; do I go get a bandaid (known as a plaster here) and risk letting the sheep bound the fence and follow the herd or do I stay at my post. I opt for remaining on duty.

Yael gets the car and goes to join Dan searching for sheep. I stay within earshot of the kids but where I can thwart any Houdini escape efforts by the sheep. And I wait. And wait. And wait. It gets colder, and darker if possible. Finally here comes Yael running up the road. She is in great shape! Seems they were following the sheep and found them in Dave's yard. Dave is our other great neighbor. Well, the sheep seemed to want to follow the car's headlights (I guess they couldn't see any better than we could) so Dan was backing up Dave's drive, leading the sheep back to our road when he drove off the drive and down into a ditch. One rear wheel was sunk in the mud, the other was spinning free. So Yael was heading for a phone to call Dave for help - with the car and with the sheep.

It is now about 1am and I am positive Dave was awakened from a sound sleep but he sounded as pleasant and matter-of-fact as if it were 4pm. Out he went with his 4 wheel drive, pulled Dan out, helped send the sheep off his property and back he went - either to bed or to write a nasty letter to the New Zealand Times about letting crazy Americans buy property.

Yael calls to me that the sheep are coming so I run down the driveway to open the gate to the correct paddock. I have not run since 11th grade phys ed. That was 51 years ago. I am not good at it but I have a substantial lead on the sheep and have time to swing open the gate and shoo back the errant ewe who has found her way from the wrong paddock to the right one. Then I stand in front of the garage and wait for the sheep. They come. They stop. They stare at me for a while. Then the brown ewe, deciding that her baby has been out late enough, comes from the rear and leads the flock down the drive and through the gate. And they all join forces in the horse stalls.

Now all we have to do is get them out of the stalls so we can count them to make sure they are all there. Dan turns on the barn lights, out they come, obligingly single file - 10 sheep and 2 lambs are all present and accounted for. So at 1:30 in the morning, I end my evening as I started it - counting sheep.