when a girl marries

Eleven below last night. Twin goats born yesterday afternoon. The first born froze to death. Or maybe she was a still born. Her mama is a new mother. Maybe she didn’t know to tend it proper. To lick it dry. To encourage her. Maybe her mama didn’t know what was happening to her, didn’t know what to do with this squishy thing that lay on the ground and the other one coming out of her. By the time we found her the one baby was dead and the other was trying to live. This morning another baby born, but it came head and leg first, the other leg bent backwards, jammed up inside the mama. The mama sat exhausted, defeated, for how long? Had this baby made its entrance in the early morning, while the night was ending, when the freezing temperatures were their harshest? The baby’s eyes are swollen, mouth clogged with dirt. It may make it.

I am sewing a quilt. Full of flowers and pinks. Tropical flamingos. Hope. Spring. It is the dead of winter with 4 months left to go. The baby runs around with the fabrics, tossing them over her head, laughing and tossing them again. I stitch rows of flowers and hope and warmth. My husband is in the barn coaxing the kids to life, nudging them to nurse, to stand, to snuggle their mamas. My baby rubs her eyes, she is tired, waking at dawn each morning to nurse. The sun’s rising is her greatest joy.

All news of cougars circles back to us. One killed down in the valley. Another killed in the tree while her two kittens looked on. Last night a particularly disturbing account from the foot of Miner’s Mountain. Around Christmas last month, a lady saw her out of town neighbor’s door to his airstream trailer open. She hopped over and shut it and went on her way.  When he came back in town he found a dead cougar in there. Dead from rat poison. The woman hadn’t looked in, did not know she was locking a lion to its death. We run into the trapper coming back from Miner’s Mountain. He was called for a cougar, but all he could track were two kittens, their mother’s tracks obscured. He had not the heart or mind to go off killing kittens that were troubling no one, just passing through.

The local guys are out shooting for sport. I find nothing sporting of treeing a mother with her young and shooting her. Perhaps if they were facing these beasts with knives and their wits I could condone such a confrontation. Lion blood is spilling all around us. We have escaped further losses so far, but the guard dog barks and circles most of the night, every night. We are being watched.

The cougar came a week before Christmas. It ate the small, jumpy churro. All the churros are small compared to the range sheep. This one was particularly timid and clung to her braver older sister- who the cougar ate 2 days later. Same corner of the corral. The little things were gleaning hay from the feeders late into evening, exposed during hunting time. Biddie’s body lay in a snare for a week waiting for the cougar to return. It returned, but it did not take the bait, it did not take anything but our false sense of security.

I did not want to call the trapper, to have the cougar hunted down with dogs, shot, safety restored to my barn yard. But seeing Biddie laying with her guts tumbling out in the same spot her sister died days before, I had to call. We had become a quick dinner stop for a lazy – or desperate- cougar. How desperate was this cougar? The tracker traced it up and down the hills and valleys, to a neighbor’s porch a few miles up the highway at the base of Boulder mountain. Yeah, they said, they’d seen it, sitting on their porch all evening while 50 guests drank and partied inside for the holidays. Not very timid, this cougar, who sat waiting for an easy snack to come teetering out.

The trapper is polite, gentle spoken. He comes every day. He leaves every day empty handed. At night the dogs bark. We look out the window, strain our eyes into the night. The moon is bright bouncing up and down on the snow. The dog is a large white dot on the snow. The cougar circles us but we do not see.

The postmistress says the boys from town killed a cougar in a tree. There were three cougars, they killed the big one. She doesn’t say it, but I know, it was a mama and her young.  Treed and scared, the mama shot dead in front of her young, taken off for trophy stuffing. The babes left to starve.

The trapper never gets our cougar. The cougar doesn’t get my husband, who walks nightly with his rifle around the perimeter, checking the baby goats are safe inside the corral. My husband cannot rest easy. We do not rest easy. Secretly, though, I am glad our cougar is not dead, no I am relieved, for now.

The baby goats arrive, two, then two more, then one, and on and on and on. The strong twins get frostbite on their ears. We knew better than to breed this early, birthing in December in snow. But the bucks got ahead of us and started this cycle before we could pen them. Now we have 20 babies running around, their mamas calling them as they slip in and out of the corral, jumping off the big rocks. Their legs are brand new. The sun warms them, sends them racing around together like a school of fish, turning and halting in unison. I resist taking notice of them individually, they will be gone in the fall. Some of the old girls will be gone in the fall. Our living depends on their dying. Right now they jump and play and kick their feet together, little creatures of pure joy. The baby laughs at them.

Halloween is here. My stubborn witch sleeps. The cows walk back and forth in the yard over. They are moving today to their feed lot for the winter. The neighbor pulled his trailer out for the season. My jade plant lies limp in its pot, I am a day too late to bring it inside. Winter is creeping down the mountain towards us. For now it is sunny.

The cows called all night. The storm was peaking over Boulder mountain, the rain slow and light. Four little boys slept in the cab of the semi. They were gone in the morning, presumably up the mountain with their folks to look for stray cattle. They drove the cows down the highway at dusk, not guessing it would be that late, hoping for little traffic. Cow shit piles dot the road, their hooves clomp clomp clomping. I couldn’t tell if it was their feet or dinner about to boil over, with the way the wind blew. The dog gave some pitiful barks, mostly to talk me into letting him inside, where he’d rather put up with the baby pulling his hair than suffer through the beginning of the storm.

My husband was late for dinner. It was dark now, the daylight disappearing dramatically more every day. I eyed the sky, the baby whined. I wrapped her up and got ready to go looking for him. Afraid maybe he fell off the tractor, or twisted an ankle loading the hay up. He was hauling hay by himself from the lower fields. Hunting season is full on though, and I didn’t know where the neighbors were posted up.

A friend of mine lost an uncle. He fell off the tractor, or the tractor rolled on him, or he had a heart attack. Something that kept him out all day, till his wife found him dead. She was a good woman. Stern, but really warmed to a good joke. She always served us cakes when we called in on her, but that is the way with the Swedes. I think of her a lot when I’m alone out here, waiting for my husband to come home.

He returned as we walked out the door.

This morning there were 18 sheep. We counted and recounted them. Eighteen. Staring at us and huddled close. There slight defensiveness I took for our own presence, though they seemed more spooked by us then normal. My husband set off along the fence line, I drove to the bottom gate to check the fences there, searching for the nineteenth. We did not find a tangled strangled sheep. With baby on back, I hiked up and he went down to the lowland swampy area. Thinking we’d find one of the old girls, probably laying dead from a heart attack. Twenty steps up a bright shiny red stuck out low on the black rocks. The ewe’s body blended with the tones and shadows of the rocks. Her stomach was swollen, dark colored organs and the bright red of her insides bubbled up. Another cavity clawed out under her arm. Her neck crooked back, unnatural like.

Whether it was coyotes scrounging on an already dead ewe from bloat or a cougar, we weren’t sure. My father-in-law came over to scour the ground with us. We looked together. He knew immediately as we had suspected that it was cougar, from the wound on the neck. A young cat. Grabbed her while she was bedded down. Bit into her neck, clawing with its hind legs at her body, puncturing her gut and under her arm by the heart. Must of been a young cat, scared off by our dog’s barking, not knowing enough to drag its dinner away with it. To hide the ewe till it could come back later and feast.

The magpie called from the tree. Speaking to my father-in-law. We stood listening. It spoke for a while. The baby babbled on my back. Of all my walks along these trails, it was the first magpie to come forth and not shy away at my approach. There was nothing else to do, but begin digging the hole for the ewe. My husband set off to finish the winter coral, a necessity now that the cougars had found us.

It is the middle of October. I walk barefoot across the grass. My mother-in-law has promised a wicked El Niño winter storm so horrible- so horrible indeed- that we will certainly freeze to death in our camper. The snow will come in unending waves off the mountain, piling high against our door. It would seem she is trying to frighten me into action. When in fact she is scared. She is scared we won’t find a home for the winter. She is scared of how we live- we live the way we want to. We live with faith that what we need will be provided. To a great extent this is true, but in her mind our success has been the exception to the ultimate disaster that is always ready to fall down upon our heads. The aspen are yellow and orange, creeping every day down the mountain, tip toeing between the dark green juniper and pinion.

Ole Mamma sheepa died under the apple tree in the orchard, the one with the tree house in it. Her lamb and her adopted lamb sat with her all day. They called for her in the morning, after she was buried.

We tied a bell on her collar about a month ago. She wandered away from the herd, trailing her two lambs behind. Pacing and pacing a senile path over the food. She rounded the pond continuously, not remembering where she’d been, not sure where she was going. We found her one afternoon home in the yard. Her real lamb had escaped with her. Her cud was a gooey mess on her lips. Her hip bones jutted out, her body concave. She could hardly take solids anymore.

The rest of the herd stayed below in pasture, including her adopted lamb who kept looking for her. The adopted lamb’s birth mother had suffered prolapse severely early in the season. We kept her alive as long as we could- but that is a sad tale for another day. Ole Mamma took that lamb under her wing, mothering it, comforting it, bedding down with it at night. Her mothering was strong, for her own and for lambs lost in the herd. She adopted a lamb and nursed it with her own the season before.

We locked her and her birth lamb in the hay storage. She could eat all day if she wanted, but she paced and paced, nervous, her bell ringing all day long. Enough to drive me mad. She was a good ole sheep. I was relieved it didn’t come to shooting her.

The men are on the hunt. The moon is full, setting behind me. The sun already showing behind Miner’s mountain. Are there any deer left? Have the muzzle rifles scared them all off? Will we have meat for the winter?

The baby sleeps, she is busy growing teeth, whimpering in her sleep. She plunged head first off the bed hitting the ledge on the way. When I found her she was kneeled down gasping, flailing for something solid to pull herself up on. It is her habit to descend head first. Arms stretched out supporting her, lowering herself to the ground, then swinging her body around. She goes up and down steps this way. It is fearless, because until her fall she had no reason to fear. Every time she plunged she succeeded.

She climbed up the stairs, 6 of them, until she looked behind her. She let out a whimper as she realized that she had to go back down them. She has learned fear.