Poor Baby

[Above photo: Poor Baby, complete with diaper, relaxing in the living room of our cabin. Ironically, she’s chosen a spot beneath an oil painting of a Border Collie looking down at, I imagine, a loch in Scotland.]

18 June 2025

I’m alone in our cabin. Michael, the caretaker, and Robin, the college-age son of one of the other owners, are in two cabins at the other end of the island. It rained overnight and continues to drizzle.

As I look through a window down the meadow, the 12 sheep are peacefully grazing and lying in the wet grass. They are enclosed in an expansive electric fence which provides  them with adequate forage for a week or two.  There is a plastic watering trough with 15 gallons of rainwater in it, although they drink from it only occasionally. They are used to getting their moisture from seaweed and grass. Unlike Gemsbok (or Oryx), those showy elk-sized herbivores in Southern Africa and the Arabian peninsula, the sheep don’t excrete uric acid pellets.  Oryx don’t drink water at all. They are so constructed that they get all their water from desert plants and then conserve it fiercely. Maybe when Elon Musk moves to Mars he’ll be able to do the same.

I didn’t think we’d be able to fence the sheep. Ari and I walked and plotted their routes, constructed elaborate chutes of fencing, and otherwise hypothesized the many ways to succeed in our quest. But the woolies never cooperated, always one page ahead of us.

We attempted several times to move them around the beach and into a pen behind the barn. “We” included Ari, her sheep-partner Suzanne, and Suzanne’s daughter, Rosie. Rosie is a bit of a magician with animals but wasn’t able to advance time and training for Ari’s puppy, Storm, in order for her to assist us. Pearl, Jon’s border collie, is a gorgeous, affectionate animal, a showdog, really, who is afraid of sheep. When Ari first brought a few sheep to her spread on land, Pearl was terrified, jumping into her arms!

Finally, Ari gathered a group of friends, including two of Suzanne’s sons, both of whom are competitive runners. 10-strong, we tried to move and enclose them one morning but at the last moment the sheep darted into the dense undergrowth and escaped. We retreated to our cabin where Poki had made a wonderful lunch. Rested and enjoying the cool of late afternoon, we tried again.   We moved the sheep from their preferred beach, Bare Ass or BA Beach (named in my mother’s day for evening swimming exploits), around half the island’s circumference to Harbor Beach, below the barn pen. There they broke, leaping up the bank where half of them ran into the pen which we then closed. Ari ran 15 miles that day, according to her pedometer. The boys likely ran 20. It all was exhausting, if exciting and fun.

There was gratification but still some anxiety, since 6 were on the loose and we had to return four of our group to Buck’s Harbor, leaving a smaller number to herd. 

The next morning we tried again. The tides had cooperated, being dead low early in the morning, which gave the sheep a greater incentive—sense of security, really—to stay on the beach rather than ducking into the thick forest for cover. This time they broke at the last moment up the bank and our hearts sank, knowing they had gone to an area where the fence was secured. Then one at a time, as in a hypnogogic state, they hopped over the fence to flock with their, we prefer to think, better halves.

At this point, enclosed in a double fence and no longer being pursued, they responded like a distraught infant to swaddling, and relaxed, grazing and gamboling as sheep are wont to do.

Exhilerated, under Ari’s newly-achieved expert guidance, we moved them into the hard pen. Sheep can easily run through or over an electric fence if frightened. But the hard-sided pen, with metal posts, welded wire fencing, and hog-panels for gates, was small enough that they couldn’t get enough of a run to hop out and was sturdy enough to withstand their pushing against it.

Then the shearing began. Ari and Suzanne each grabbed a sheep by one back leg, dragging it, struggling, over to the 4×8 plywood sheet salvaged  from the beach, gripping its head to force it down, and then flipping it onto its back. In that position the sheep were calm, dissociated, I think, from the trauma of being overpowered and their helplessness to resist.

Ari loved it and has worked hard to get a lot of shearing practice subsequent to her week-long course at UC Davis this Spring. She shears for a couple of older Maine shepherds she has befriended. She has done this on Richmond Island (“Gross and bloody, they were all covered with engorged ticks.”), on Metinic Island (“The most fun I’ve had since summer camp in 8^th grade.”), and in Machiasport this weekend.

She, with a fancy battery-pack electric clipper, and Suzanne, with hand shears, gathered 4 huge bags of wool to be processed and spun and another for garden compost. For the sheep, it was like a child’s first haircut: terror, followed by relief and a bit of braggadocio.

All the sheep are now contentedly munching away, their pasture and water changed once per week. It would be better for them, the island, and Ari, if, after shearing, they could run wild. More fun for islanders, as well, especially the children. But for the harmony of the community, she’ll manage them this way through the summer.

Toward the end of summer we’ll build a shelter out of driftwood for them in a secluded area at the top of the meadow. Next December, we’ll select a stretch of good weather and run the 12 miles in our boat to deliver a ram so there will be lambs in the spring, sheep gestation being about 5 months. And so the cycle continues.

There are so many life lessons in all of this. First about community, that of the sheep and that of the shepherds. Did I mention that one of the three rams in Ari’s barn was particularly aggressive, butting the other two and slamming Suzanne hard in the crotch? Ari jumped into the pen and wrestled the animal to the ground. Suzanne dispatched it with a captive-bolt stunner to the head, and they skinned, butchered, and placed it in the freezer, all before 10 in the morning. No Little Bo Peeps, these shepherds!

“But what about Poor Baby?“ you ask. Poor Baby was the second of twins of a Merino mother who couldn’t feature two babies simultaneously and rejected her. Put in diapers (upside down they snugly fit a lamb), she is being bottle-fed until she can graze. She is imprinted on Rosie and follows her like a puppy.  Poor Baby is incredibly cute, jet-black with a white skull-cap, more Amish than yarmulke.  She terrifies Pearl, sniffing around her, and is totally immune to fear of Storm, growling in her cage like a ravening wolf.

There are many Poor Baby’s in the world. I’d imagine all of us have felt like a Poor Baby at times in our lives. Especially Donald Trump, whose early life must have been void of love and strong values, other than greed and the acquisition of power. I suspect he was bottle-fed. My sympathy wanes when I imagine how many people he is hurting and killing from his policies, how he is making America and the world so much weaker, more dangerous, and crude. 

The monomania of these billionaires to acquire and control is an illness. It expresses the same degree of salience for them as heroin or crystal meth grips an addict. It is their primary and most reliable pleasure. They are all mentally ill, although their diagnosis is not well defined in the DSM-5 or well-managed with our current treatments.

How can his Base not appreciate this?  The Dems have certainly not helped, with their tacit supports of Big Business and their wimpy half-measures for the working men and women of our country.

Don is certainly the perfect moniker for DT. But the No Kings protests demonstrate how others can prevail. Poor Babies all.

I’ll never whine about the price of a woolen sweater again. And if I question Ari’s judgment, I’ve suggested she just say to me, “Remember the sheep.” A certain genius there.