Keep Watch: A Letter from the Lambing Barn

Every year, for a few weeks in late January and into February, a certain kind of silence settles over the high-plains ranches of western Wyoming. Not the silence of absence — but of concentration. Of something happening that requires your full attention, around the clock, in the coldest part of the year.

This episode is a letter from a third-generation sheep rancher in Sublette County, written late at night on the back of a feed store receipt, between barn checks. She is three weeks into lambing season. Outside it is minus eighteen degrees. She has maybe two weeks left. She has two hundred and ninety-seven live lambs on the ground. She has nine orphans in a box behind the woodstove, a border collie who watches the door even in her sleep, and a pot of coffee in her mother's old eight-cup pot. She is exhausted. She would not stop.

The letter covers the full texture of the season: how you pull a lamb in the cold when your fingers stop working, what happens when a ewe won't take her newborn, the particular arithmetic of hay prices and propane bills, the satellite phone call from her daughter at the university in Laramie, the smell of the barn at midnight, the 3 AM flashlight sweep. And one afternoon last week — maybe eight minutes — when the clouds broke from the west and the whole plain went white-gold, and she stopped moving, and even the dog sat down.

What she's doing in those eight-minute stretches between checking on her animals, at a kitchen table in the middle of the Wyoming winter, is one of the oldest things people do. Keep watch. This episode is for her, and for everyone who has ever kept watch over something fragile and alive in the middle of the night.