Gibbon's Decline and Fall Read Online Free PDF Page B

possibility,
Ready or not, here I come!
Well, now that the word had been dragged out, use could be made of it.
    â€œChiaroscuro,” she said to the watchful young ewe who stood pressed against the rough boards of the pen. “A good name for a black-and-white lamb, Mama. First lamb of the new century and first lamb for you. We’ll call her Chiaro, for short.”
    The ewe’s amber eyes remained fixed, the oblong pupils glaring. She raised one forefoot and stamped, thrusting her body as far from Carolyn as the pen would permit. Pressed between her mother and the timbers, the lamb protested weakly. The ewe only pressed the harder as it stamped again.
    Carolyn drew a deep breath, caught suddenly between laughter and tears. The ewe was threatening her, warning her away. Sixty pounds or so of fangless, hornless sheep, incapable of any real defense, and still she stamped, still she protected, still those yellow eyes glared a primordial defiance. Behind her the lamb complained once more, a fretful baa while the mother stamped: Live or die, this lamb is mine!
    It was so uncomplicated for sheep! “All right, Mama,” Carolyn murmured. “That’s all right. I’ll look at your baby tomorrow.”
    The lamb had been licked dry, it had nursed, it had crouched to pee as female sheep and goats did and as rams and bucks did not. So much sufficed to tell Carolyn that all parts were female and functioning. No need to take this one up to the nursery box in the kitchen; no need for bottle feeding. Except for the shawl of white around the bony little shoulders, it was inky black. Chiaroscuro. A fancy name for a wee ewe-sheep.
    Clutching at the top rail of the pen, Carolyn rose, pulling herself slowly upright, waiting for bones and muscles to accept the change of position. Not as easy to get up as it had once been, not as easy to get down. Things changed. Bodies changed. People changed. Thank God for sheep, who seemed always the same. Hal had taught her to love the timelessness of them, and lately she had lost the count of years in the slow movement of sheep grazing; in the incurious but watchful gaze of yellow eyes; in this annual ritual of birth, she and Hal making a fuss over the first lamb while the ewes stared and munched, muttering among themselves, “Lambs. Lambs. Me, too.” They’d all have babies by the end of April, mostly twins: lambs to skip and race the pasture boundaries, black and gray, brown and white, playing lamb games. One could discover centuries in lamb games, so Hal said. One could discover aeons in the foolhardy and joyous, in life abundant and wasteful, running for the sake of life itself, no matter what fanged demons lurked beyond the fences.
    There would be foolhardy life itself until there was no more grass, no more room for games. A year ago there hadbeen scant room. This year there was none. All these lambs would have to go—to someone else, or to the slaughterer. There was no more pasture here.
    She left the pen laggingly, conscious of pain in her right arm where she’d bruised it over the weekend shifting hay. At their ages neither she nor Hal should be shifting hay! Hal kept urging her to hire someone to live on the place, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. When Carlos’s family had got too big for the little house and moved away, the resultant tranquillity had been wonderful. She had heard birds she’d never heard before, seen little animals she hadn’t known lived there. Having anyone else around night and day seemed an intrusion on the quiet she treasured. Carlos came five days a week. That was enough.
    She shut the gate firmly, double-checking the latch, assuring the protection of wood and wire between the vulnerable ewes and the wild dogs that roamed the river bottom, onetime partners in the primordial covenant, betrayed and abandoned to their own history, now become creatures contemptuous of man and all his works.
    Hal had been