Page 21 - SuperCowboyFlipBook

nothin’,” Old Mr. Brown said. “When his mother didn’t want him, I put him in the bum lamb pen, but he was out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Found his way out here before we could find a surrogate mother for him.” The sheepmen call the lambs that are rejected or orphaned “bum lambs.” I had watched the men try to get a ewe that had lost her lambs to feed an orphaned one by skinning out the ewe’s dead lamb and putting the skin on the bum lamb. If the men are lucky, the ewe will smell her lamb’s skin and think it is her own until she has accepted the new one. Then the dead lamb’s skin can be removed. There are usually more bum lambs than ewes to feed them, so many die. Sometimes the sheepmen try to bottle feed those they can. Once in a while, Old Mr. Brown lets me do that, which is a lot better than cleaning out stinkin’ sheep pens. “Yip,” Old Mr. Brown continued. “This little bummer decided we weren’t getting to him fast enough, so he took matters into his own hooves.” He chuckled at his own joke, then went on. “He just broke out of the bum lamb pen, though I can’t figure how, and he came out here to fend for himself.” I watched as the other little lambs that got out went crazy, racing around the pen, crying to get back in. Their mothers stood on the other side, frantically bleating to them. Meanwhile, the little bum lamb waited until everything had cleared, then went back in through the same hole and started looking for another ewe to steal a meal from. Mr. Brown caught the other two lambs and put them over the fence to their mothers. “It doesn’t matter how often I fix the holes in the fence; he finds another one. Not