Dolly and Linda

Dolly and Linda

I am not a sheep person, but I love my friend Linda and she loves her sheep Dolly, so I feel a connection when I see one. 

Small flocks of twenty-five or fifty sheep find plenty to eat on the grassy, boulder-studded hills near our home in the country. Baby lambs alternate between grazing and playing hide-and-seek around the outcroppings of moss covered rocks and old oak trees. Soon after the new lambs appear in the spring, bright yellow mustard shoots up, blanketing the low hills along Highway 1 from Petaluma to the coast in Sonoma County, California.  

Artisan cheesemakers often keep small herds of sheep in pastures behind their farmhouses around here. Tourists and locals make weekend treks to cheesemakers the way wine aficionados go wine tasting for the day in nearby Sonoma and Napa Valleys. The experience comes with a warning, though. It took me many months to get over finding a lamb roasting on the spit at the annual Basque Easter buffet in Occidental after visiting a favorite sheep farm where the yearlings always pushed their soft noses through the fence to be petted when visitors arrived. 

Dolly’s life as a lovable yearling was far behind her, but fortunately she had Linda who raised her as a pet. I’ve seen pictures of the two of them together when the wooly lamb was no bigger than my cat. Dolly’s mother and her twin both died when she was born, so Linda hand-fed the lamb day and night until she could graze in the pasture with the herd.

Although Linda kept a small flock of black-faced sheep in the pasture to milk for cheese, solidly white Dolly was family. Linda taught Dolly to follow her when she worked in the garden, and she always carried a pocketful of corn or hay for her as a treat. 

Linda often brought Dolly with her when she visited me in Twisted Creek. Some of the neighbors liked to borrow Linda's good-natured sheep to eat the tall grass in their yards for an afternoon. Dolly did a better job than a weed whacker could ever do in mowing down the weeds and reducing the risk of a fire starting in the dry fields near their homes. And sometimes Beth the artist would enlist Dolly as a patient model for her plein air painting classes.

When Dolly was seven, she caught a persistent parasite. Over and over that winter, Linda coaxed Dolly into the truck and rushed her to the veterinarian who flushed her with fluids and prescribed a course of antibiotics. Dolly's latest health scare was even more difficult. This time the antibiotics weren’t enough and the vet had to remove a section of Dolly’s large intestine. The poor animal had to spend four days at the hospital before she could go home. The vet told Linda that Dolly would not make it through another bout like this one. When Linda took her sheep home to recover and dropped the tailgate of her truck, Dolly jumped out and trotted across the field to join the noisy herd of black-faced sheep. Dolly was still a little wobbly, but she was overjoyed to be back in her familiar surroundings.

One afternoon not long after that, Linda drove to my house for lunch. We hadn’t seen each other for almost a month and we had a lot to talk about. We started off with the basics, like updates on our families and the latest news about local fishing conditions. When I asked about Dolly, Linda told me she was getting better, but she still needed more time to get her strength back. For the time being, Linda had made a closed-in pen for her on the back porch.

As we talked, the sky turned dark and heavy rain began to pound the roof. This was an El Nino year and all winter long, heavy storms had been creating small lakes that covered the roads and sent us on detours miles out of our way.

I turned on the weather report just in time for a special report warning of flooding and landslides in the area. We had lived in the area long enough to know we should take the warning seriously, so Linda gathered up her coat and keys to go home. She promised to call to let me know she was OK when she got there.

It took her a long time, but Linda finally did call. She sounded exhausted. 

She said that when she reached her driveway and stopped to open the gate, she saw Dolly lying in a puddle with her hooves in the air. Dolly must have gotten scared and broken through the fence of the corral Linda had made for her. Linda said she was sure her pet sheep was dead, but when she got closer, she saw that Dolly was breathing and bleating softly. Linda could see the terror in her eyes. Dolly’s thick coat of wool was waterlogged and heavy. The intense wind had knocked the sheep down and she couldn’t stand up because she was still weak from her surgery. Linda couldn’t budge her. The thought flashed through her mind that she could lose her pet at any moment.

Despite the rain, Linda sat down next to Dolly in the cold, muddy pasture to keep the frightened animal calm. That’s when the idea came to her. She ran back to the house and called Aaron the sheep sheerer. Linda explained the problem and he agreed to rush right over to give Dolly an emergency sheering. 

The plan was a success. Working with a lantern and a portable generator, the expert shearer freed Dolly from her drenched wool coat in less than 15 minutes. As soon as he finished, Dolly stood up and shook off the water that had nearly drowned her. Linda hugged Aaron and pushed Dolly into the truck. Aaron climbed in his own truck and headed down the road to go back home. Then the two old friends, Dolly and Linda, drove back to the house to rest with a cup of hot tea and a bucket of dry hay. 

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