The sheep are here! We headed out to Snohomish early yesterday morning taking the Edmonds-Kingston ferry and tackling the I-5. They've had a lot of rain in Snohomish this winter. A LOT. We drove in to the farm and saw a flock of mud caked sheep in a giant mud pit surrounding a muddy lake. We were told an irrigation ditch has been backed up causing the field to flood. Not to worry though, our sheep had been washed and were now in a huge barn living on a raised floor of hay bales.
I was speechless when I saw my boys. You arrive with an image in your mind of fluffy critters you'll be able to hug; the reality was quite different: they were Mudballs. Even after washing. Well, they are hair sheep and shedding so all this ugly hair will soon be gone, but we still had to help wrestle the stinky things into the back of the pickup. We'd been advised to bring rain gear for the operation and pulled off the loading easily enough with Michelle's help and went on our way after chatting awhile.
The sheep watched trees and cars and ocean race by for the next couple hours and did pretty well for their first ride. Getting them out of the truck was a bit tricky though. Bob had to climb in with all the piss-wet straw and poop to shove each one out into the pen.
The first one managed to squeeze out the gate under the truck but Hattie turned him around and herded him back into the pen from the other side of the truck. It was chaos for a while with terrified sheep and excited dogs and a couple of clueless people trying to gain control. I wanted to leave them alone to calm down and explore their new home but Bob thought they needed to be shown where water and hay were. He tried to get them into the shelter but they ended up wedged in a corner of the pen and protected by a couple large evergreen trees. They weren't moving. He wanted to try using Hattie to get them out but they were not cooperating. Hattie finally flushed one out but in frustration gripped the poor thing by the neck until it stopped in the shed. After that Hattie was put outside the pen. Bob climbed through the trees and pushed them out of their corner but they were still having nothing to do with him. We left them to figure things out themselves.
Within a few hours they were cautiously entering the barn, eating hay from the hay bags and drinking from the water bucket. This morning I opened the gate and let them into the pasture where they've been romping and eating all day. They are a delight to watch, even covered with mud.
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| Our muddy boys |
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| Bob working on fence |
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| The shed |
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| Hattie wanting sheep, settling for frisbee |
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| Tux, probably remembering the desert big horn sheep in AZ |
It's warming up a little and I'm getting back into clay.
