Awful Beauty

April 2005

You never know what you will find when you go to the barn.  Last week, I found a gestating ewe with a prolapsed vagina, which  looks like a big, pink sock half turned inside out.  I pushed it back in, past the dilated vaginal muscles, to let her urinate, after first pushing up my sleeve to keep it from getting wet.  Going further in her, I found nothing in the birth canal, she had aborted.  I pulled my hand from her and back out came the vagina.

I fed the flock grain.  One of the best determinants of sheep health is appetite; if a sheep won't eat, it is in distress and needs attention; this ewe went to the feeder and ate with the others.  But I had to get her prolapsed vagina back in so she could urinate on her own.  I found my prolapse 'spoon', a retainer designed to hold the vagina in.  It is a flat, plastic device with three arms, one is perpendicular to the axis of the others and that is to be inserted into the vagina, the other two are to be held flat to her rump with a harness that I make from sisal baling twine.  I loop the twine around her neck, cross it over her back and tie the ends to the eyelets of the external arms, pulling it firmly to keep the spoon inside her.  Then I loop another length of twine under her belly, just before the enlarged udder and tie it to the twine going over her back; this should keep the spoon from moving up or down, and coming out, as the ewe goes about her business.  Now trussed, I let her up to see how well she can move in my contraption; she will have the spoon in her until her vaginal muscles contract sufficiently to retain the prolapse, a week perhaps.

My concern was her appetite, but she was eating and my twine truss hadn't slipped, the spoon stayed in, she could urinate and seemed to be doing well.  Saturday morning at three, I went to the barn to feed the sheep before leaving for market and I found her dead.  Why, I don't know.  It was as cold as a morgue in the barn so I left her where she lay, went back to the house, loaded my coolers and headed for the city; I would try to determine the cause of death when back on Sunday.

Death is not commonplace on the farm, but not unusual either.  I haven't become inured to death but I've learned to see it differently from when I first had sheep; yet blessedly, it remains as incomprehensible now as it was then.  Death brings a shock of disappointment, felt for the sheep, for the flock, and felt even for myself; but there is no horror except a feeling of loss.  Death is hard to liken to anything else, it is real and unreal at once.  There is a spellbinding quality, if not beauty, to the stillness of it; but knowledge of this beauty is forbidden, we are turned away by it.  I don't know how sheep see the death of their own; the older ones seem to ignore it, but the lambs who haven't seen death before will go cautiously up to a body (seemingly with respect) to look closely at the stillness, then turn away to play again, perhaps knowing as much as we do of this awful beauty.