By BOB BREIDENSTEIN | rural Ontario
March on the farm was lambing time, and nothing brought new lambs faster than a March blizzard. As a youngster, I saw my father many times come into the house carrying a newborn lamb, cold as ice and seeming to bedead.
The protocol was always the same. Immerse the lamb in a bucket of warm water to raise its temperature, give it a brisk rubdown with a gunny sack and then force its lips open and give it two tablespoons of brandy.
By that time, mother would have a baby bottle of cow’s milk sweetened with Karo Syrup. She then would put the nipple in the baby’s mouth, and voila — the near dead was alive!
Put the little one in a box behind the woodstove, and in a few days, the lamb was usually able to go back to the sheepfold. Occasionally the mother would refuse the infant; consequently, we always had an orphan or two to bottle feed.
Now picture this:
I am 8 years old, and mother puts two baby bottles in my clammy hands with instructions to go to the dairy barn and feed the orphan lambs.
There are two ways to get to the sheepfold. One is past the old house where my siblings and I played with abandon during the day. But at night, it became a dark and forbidding place. As if in agony, the old house creaked and groaned in agony. In the darkness, unseen hands seemed to reach out through the broken windows to grab the unwary.
Were the ghosts of long-departed relatives who had died in the house just waiting for me? The very thought sent shivers down my spine and made my young, knobby knees shake.
And so I chose the second option, a path through the willows, and who knew what dangers lurked there? With a bottle in each hand, I screwed up my courage and made the 100-yard dash to the sheepfold,arriving breathless and slamming the door behind me.
The orphans came running; each grabbed a nipple, and with their little tails wagging a thousand miles an hour, they quickly drained the bottle and begged for more.
I patted them on the head, slipped through the door, glanced nervously in all directions, and then galloped back through the willows and into the safety of mother’s warm kitchen.