An Appreciation of Florence Fernald

Coyotes, Lambs and an Old California Adobe

By Frances Cooper Kroll Have you ever tried to raise thirteen orphan lambs on a bottle? Well, I did! It happened this way: My brother. Bill, and I had just said good-bye to Pablo, the Basque sheep-herder, standing between his two bright-eyed dogs, their raised pointed ears alert as always for a sudden command, when I noticed something move, ever so slightly, under a sack on the ground near the open flap of the tent.

“Lepe?” I asked.

Pablo nodded and went on to tell me in his soft voice, with its slurred Pyrenean accent, that the little lamb was dying—its mother had died two nights before. He had done everything he could to save it—but it was no use—it was too weak even to lift its head when an unwilling ewe, bereaved of her own offspring, was forcibly held above it, in an attempt to get it to nurse, And, he added, “I am very busy during the lambing season—it is difficult to give the time—” Bill, turning in his saddle, called to me to hurry—it was late. I gathered up my reins and started to press my heels against my horse’s sides, then stop ped. There had been something about that scarcely perceptible movement under the sack, that^—^“Hand me the lepe, Pablo!” I heard myself saying.

“I’ll take it back with me.”

The bearded herder looked up at me with his dark, melancholy eyes.

“But it will not live. Perhaps it is better so. It is so very small and weak. The Senorita has already eleven little ones down at the adobe.” He glanced toward my waiting brother. “And with the one the Patron has under his arm—to feed so many on the bottle takes much time.”

I thought of my adopted lepes waiting for me in their pen back of the wood-shed, their wet noses pressed through the wire fence—they must be terribly hungry.

“Come along, Fran!” Bill was really growing impatient.

I urged my horse closer to the tent. “Hurry, Pablo—hand it up to me!”

He raised his heavy shoulders in a slow, expressive shrug, and, stooping, lifted the sack. From nearby came the plaintive bleating of the ewes and lambs, already corraled for the night. I buttoned up my leather jacket, for it was growing colder. The two dogs, in this idle moment, tilted their dark heads as they watched Pablo—watched him gently strip from the limp little body the skin of the dead lamb he had tied over it, in the hope of deceiving the ewe who had lost hers. Then he lifted the lamb up to me. I saw that it had a black spot on one of its ears.

“If it does die,” I told myself, as I looked down at it, “It won’t be alone and under that filthy old sack.” Turning my horse, I joined my brother.

It had been a heavy storm. If followed by others it boded a fine, pros perous year. With the warm days that would come at intervals, later the range, now so dark and grim, would gradually turn young and green with renewed life. The importance of rain, so deeply ingrained into the fibre of our beings, was always with us.

I took the lead. The trail was not yet dangerously slippery, for we were following the rim of the canyon, and it was still level.

10