Silence of the Lambs

[Originally Published June 12, 2020]

In July, they started to die. Koko was first, a soft black lamb the girls bottlefed after her mother rejected her, the smallest of triplets. The children told me she was lying in a field, and when I went to check on her, she couldn’t stand by herself. I’d lift her onto all fours, and she’d balance for a minute before her back legs collapsed and she was prone again. We carried her into the barn and Livvy fed her tender leaves of forsythia, the sheep’s favorite food. But over the next two days she got weaker, and smaller, and she died early in the morning, in my arms, while I tried to cajole her to take some water through a children's Tylenol dropper.

When plague comes, the first deaths aren't understood as harbingers. They feel unusual, perhaps preventable. Perhaps you erred. It's a one-off thing. Perhaps now that the weak one is gone, the others will thrive. Daniel Defoe wrote of plague that as “the Distemper intermitted often at first; so they were as it were, allarm'd and unallarmed again.” I fear, and then I allay my fear. I feel I must do something, and then I must do nothing.

Koko and Livvy, the first day we had her.

The morning she died Kevin came to shear our other 6 sheep. In spring, we had introduced 5 new lambs to our microscopic flock. Four were from a lovely farm I’d worked with before. One was a wild card from a new farm, a Cotswold with soft floppy ears. When my friend brought him over, my gut wanted to put him back on the truck and send him away. He looked wormy, with watery eyes. But he was here. He needed a home. I am a mother. I took him on.

But first, quarantine. When you introduce a new animal to a farm, best practice dictates you separate the newcomer for a few weeks. The Cotswold was put in a separate pen. But after 3 days he was so noisy, baa-ing baa-ing baa-ing that I gave in and put Koko, our bottle-fed lamb, into the pen with him. She quieted him down-- sheep can't bear to be solo-- as herd animals they won't sleep well if they're not taking turns keeping an eye open for predators. But three weeks later, Koko was dead.

John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, and his monkey. Or, the reason I became an Early Modernist.

Defoe called 1665 “this Surprising Time.” In 1665 London was socially destabilized by the restoration of a now-Frenchified monarch, Charles II, He With The Most Illustrious Curls, a monarch whose enthronement ushered in an era of glorious excess and debauchery. It was estimated, Defoe writes, that “no less than a thousand riband-weavers” lived in the city in 1665. Ribbon weavers-- the makers of the fripperiest fripperies. Lords carried pet monkeys around. Everything was “Satyrical”. The Puritans were out, and the theater was back, but this time with ladies, real live ladies on the stage, ladies reading impossibly raunchy scripts that feel closer to Amy Schumer than Ben Jonson . The era was ripe for some cosmic come-uppance. And after the plague, the Great Fire of 1666 would tear through the city, burning a quarter of it to the ground.

Kevin came to shear the sheep. He felt the new lambs, snipped their long fleece away with sharp blades,. They felt thin. He asked if I'd ever heard of Johnes disease. It was a wasting disease, and it could be spread by deer, deer whose population was exploding, due to suburban expansion creating more edge-land, that mixture of trees and grass the animal finds most sustaining. I hadn't heard of it, but I soon became an unwilling expert. One third of American cattle carry the paratuberculosis bacteria that causes Johnes. Its was exploding in our deer population. There was no real treatment. If this was the cause, there was no cure.

The Great Comet of 1665

Defoe writes that at the Beginning of “the Surprising Time, while the fears of the people were young” their fears were increased by “several odd accidents, which put together, it really was a wonder the whole body of people did not rise as one Man, and abandon their dwellings.” The fist of these “odd accidents” was that a “blazing star” or comet appeared for many months prior to the plague, and the comet was “faint, dull, and languid, and its motion heavy, solid, and slow.” In retrospect, the comet's motions were understood as plague-like-- the gradual wasting of its light, then weakening, then death. H.F. contrasts this first comet with the second that followed next year, and thought to presage the Great Fire: that second comet was “as sudden, swift, and fiery as the Conflagration.” H.F. at once wishes heaven’s signs had been read properly, but also understands that prognostication is always more convincing after the fact. Defoe's other “odd accidents” which increased foreboding were less spectacular, though no less cosmic. Several almanacs and fortunetellers predicted negativity from discomfort to trouble to calamity. But that was their trade. But the true fear began, Defoe noted, when the first Bills of Death were posted in St. Giles.

St. Giles was one of the poorest sections of the city. Known later for its “rookeries”-- squalid buildings where hundreds people squished into rooms made to accommodate only a few, the 1665 plague hit there first, injuring the poorest in the community, as disease will.

I had no augers to portend my farm's small plague. But I did have blue eyed Kevin, clear-eyed Kevin, the wise peripatetic sheep shearer who visited us twice a year. Kevin is snowy-haired, tall, thin, and flexible. He wraps himself around each sheep and they lay calmly for him as he carefully removes their thick fleece. They enjoy the lightness that comes after shearing. Kevin enjoys shearing because it allows him to live lightly, to do no harm. He was a modern dancer in a former life, and reads nonfiction and is learning to tune pianos. He pauses before he answers questions, he calls me a month in advance and tell me exactly when he will arrive. He was my Tiresias.

Kevin shears my sheep and tells the future.

Defoe writes that “Next to these public Things, were the Dreams of Old Women.” Women who saw apparitions in the air, women who read the clouds for shapes and figures, for “Representations and Appearances, which had nothing in them but Air and Vapour”. But we have now learned to fear air and vapor.

In July, I was only beginning to learn about zoonotic disease. The lines between animal and human thin when you live in the woods. Bears visit the patio. You learn your local crows. You tell time by frog-song. That thinness was one reason I preferred it. But animal husbandry is so named because of that closeness— you have significant relationships. But so do other creatures. The paratuberolosis bacteria jump from animal to earth and back again, shed in waste, they crawl up blades of grass to be reingested. July was only a whiff, a vapor of what was to come.

One of our final Leicester Longwool Lambs.