Lippincotts Magazine, October 1885 | Page 7

as a sailor or one in conversation's straits. His terror is the long, cold storm which covers the grass with a hopeless coating of ice. The weakened ewe cannot graze, and the norther comes down with a bitter sweep to devastate the starved flock.
The camp is pitched within easy reach of the bed-grounds of two ewe-flocks, each of twelve hundred, who absorb all the attention of the superintendent and his numerous aids. Each flock goes out on the range at daybreak under the charge of two herders. The ewes that have dropped lambs over-night are retained in the corral with their offspring for about six hours, or till afternoon, when the lamb should be in possession of sufficient strength to move about; then the ewes go forth slowly to graze, followed by their chiquitas. The unnatural mothers who deny their children are caught, with a lariat by a Mexican, with a crook by a Yankee, and confined in separate little pens alone with their lambs. If necessary to compel them to acknowledge their maternal responsibilities, they are kept in solitary confinement two days, without food. If still obdurate at the end of these two days, mother and child, marked with red chalk or tagged alike with bright cloth, are turned out, the herder in charge of the solitaries "roping" the ewe for the convenience of the lamb whenever the latter indicates a desire for nourishment.
The flock grazing out on the range will have gone by noon perhaps a mile from the bed-ground. Here a little corral is made, and the lambs born in the vicinity, with their mothers, are penned here over-night, one of the two herders sleeping with them. In the afternoon the remaining herder takes the flock grazing back to the bed-ground. The next day, with many more to follow, repeats the routine of this and its incidents. The lambs and good mothers of a period of twenty-four hours are bunched together and placed a little remote from the bed-ground, with a little pen and a herder to themselves: they constitute a so-called "baby-flock." After five days the lambs lose their tails and have their ears punched and marked; on the sixth day they are still farther removed from their native spot, placed in charge of a strange herder, and become the nucleus of a so-called "lamb-flock," which, fed from many sources, grows till it includes six hundred ewes, with their lambs, when it is a full flock, and is in its turn removed and the formation of a new lamb-flock begun. During the six days' novitiate of a baby-flock five other such flocks have been formed: so that, somewhat remotely round about the main pen at the bed-ground of each flock, there are six baby-flocks, with their pens and herders and several little prison-pens for unnatural mothers, with other little pens in which mothers bereft by death of their proper children are confined with the extra twin lambs of prolific ewes, clad in the lost ones' skins, in the sure hope that they will adopt them. The ruse may be said never to fail. The solitary-confinement pens are in the charge of still another herder, a much perplexed and irritated man, on whose part considerable swearing--Mexican for small ills, English for serious occasions--is to be excused. A superintendent of two lambing ewe-flocks, it will thus be seen, has to oversee eighteen herders or so, with their charges, besides the growing lamb-flock, all more or less distant from each other. He is a busy man. His head-quarters, like those of General Pope, may be said to be in the saddle. His note-book is in constant use. It contains a record of each day's births and deaths, of the twins (which are tagged or marked alike for easy identification) and the still-born, that each bereft mother may be provided with a foster-child, and the daily count of the daily-changing flocks.
The first lamb born starts the refrain, to be taken up as the season waxes by thousands of others scattered over the range, and swollen into a roaring, shrieking chorus, as though an enormous public school had just turned its urchins into the play-ground. A listener standing in the hall of the Stock Exchange gets some faint idea of it when there has been a serious break in Lake Shore, say, or when C.C.C.&I. has "gone off" a considerable number of points. Out of these thousands of voices, not to be differentiated by the human ear, the ewe knows the note of her little one with very remarkable certainty, and the lamb the answering cry of its dam. With this sound ringing in his ears, and daily becoming more and more insufferable from monotony and increase, the sheep-man rides out in the morning among his Mexicans, and returns to camp