Monday morning fog

Monday morning fog. The trees fade into the distance and disappear. The bottle lambs do not appear. They're not out back; they're not in the barn. I set the bottles into a lambing pen and there are the bottle lambs, still in the pen into which we dropped them as they finished feeding last night to make feeding less insane. No wonder there are three ewes in the barn maaing for their babies.

When we finish feeding all eight lambs Dave takes a bucket of water to the rams and I feed and water Amy who lambed yesterday morning. The bottle lambs swirl around my ankles. I know from experience that they will follow me right to the pasture gate and that two of them are still small enough to fit through the wire grid on the gate.  Instead of the straight forward path, I sneak out the people door of the barn and run for the gate.

No baas of bottle lambs in pursuit. I climb the gate and walk the driveway toward Dave who is feeding the rams. He grins and gesture. Lamb number 76 has followed me through the gate after all. I return the lamb to the pasture and tie a hog panel across the gate with baling twine. The wire grid of the hog panels blocks the openings in the wire grid of the gate, but it also keeps me from climbing the gate.

I climb an interior fence to the feed area and then climb the stile, hoping to lose or at least confuse the lamb. She follows me into the feed area and stands at the bottom of our perimeter fence staring at me standing at the top of the ladder like stile. If I descend and start across the yard, the lamb will follow me because our perimeter fences have an even bigger wire grid than our gate.

I stand at the top of the stile hoping that the lamb will lose interest and wander off before I lose patience. "Go back through the barn." Dave shouts. Duh! Talk about early morning fog. I climb back down the stile, walk through the barn, leave by the people door, run across the barnyard, climb over the stile and am out of sight before number 76 stops looking for me in the barn. As long as  Dave is smarter than the lambs, we can still outwit them. The sun burns the fog away before our next feeding.