Birth and mothering, separation and death were right out our picture window, on every walk to the barn or canyon, and in the meat on our nightly dinner table. In addition to what I learned from my mother and the mothers of Condon, I took in the lessons of the ranch.
Every year in midwinter, our herd of black cattle stood out against snow or frost or freezing fog. I knew what it meant when one cow was off by herself, back arched, tail raised. A calf on the way. I knew the slippery release that would follow after a time of hunching and hoof-stomping. The calf would fall to the ground, still wet and matted with blood and the birth sac that its mother would lick away with her rough tongue.
This knowing was in me from before I could remember learning it.
The cows nursed. The calves grew. Sometimes one cow would have a handful of calves around her while the others wandered and grazed. They seemed to hand off babysitting duty one to another, to give each other a break. But before the herd moved, mothers and calves found each other again through some call or scent or a bond that no one else could see.
For a few winters in a row Dad bought a handful of bummer lambs from a sheep rancher. Bummers were lambs that had been rejected by a ewe, or she’d had twins and she only allowed one to nurse, or the mother had died.
I was small: six, seven, eight. I helped Dad fill the glass bottles with water and powdered milk, topped them with long black nipples. Dad shook the bottles, and the foamy bubbles gave off a smell of licorice and dust.
We bundled up and went to the barn. Our breath made small clouds that led the way. Our shoes crunched frozen ground. Dad slid the barn door open and we went to the inner stall where the lambs gathered in the light of a single bulb. The nut scent of hay and the smell of horse and leather settled in my throat.
The lambs crowded around us, eager for the milk. I took off my gloves and touched them. Their coiled new wool felt like a million tiny circles. Lambs were my favorite baby animals of all.
Dad held a bottle in each hand but I could only manage one. The warm glass warmed my fingers. A lamb put its mouth on the long black nipple and drank. It bent its front legs low to tilt the bottle down, pushing, pushing. I sturdied my knees and planted my feet and held myself steady for that lamb. The bottle and I were as close to a mother as the lamb would get.
The milk was gone fast. The lambs stayed close when we moved to leave the barn.
On the way back to the house, Dad held my hand in his gloved hand. The leather was thick and warm against my thin knit gloves.
“Couldn’t we bring them to the house?” One freezing night the winter before, we’d had a newborn calf in a big cardboard box in the family room.
“No, babe,” Dad said. “They’ll be fine.” The empty bottles rattled in the crate he carried on his other side.
Cats sunned on our back porch and jumped on blowing grass in the front yard. They brought mice from the barn and toyed them slowly to death. They came running when Dad poured milk fresh from the cows into the pan by the back steps.
Over the course of spring and summer, I watched to see who was pregnant. When they slimmed down from birth and packed full milky nipples, I followed them.
One mother led me to her kittens nested in a manger. They curled around each other in a circle of hay softened by the mother’s fur. Their eyes weren’t yet open. I picked up each one and welcomed it with the touch of my hand and pressed my cheek against its milk-rounded belly.
One day I returned to the nest and found them a bloody mess. I felt sick in my stomach and scared. They were gone but still there. Pieces and parts. I ran to the house and brought Dad back to look.
His answer: “Well, babe, that happens sometimes. It might have been a tomcat. They don’t like to share.”
Now I watched the males on our land and tracked their difference. Toms wouldn’t share; bulls mounted but did nothing more when it came to birth and raising the young.