Requiem for a Sheep

Olympia died yesterday, June 19th, at around 1:15 pm. I went out to check on her in her house at 1:30, and she was laying on her side, feet straight out, but still warm. I think she was standing up when she died. The flies hadn't discovered her yet.

I walked over to Monsieur Besse's to tell him the sad news, and to ask if he would call the man who picks up the dead "beasts." Later, he drove over to my house to tell me that the beast man was over on the other side of the departement today and, even though he lived in the village closest to my house, maybe he wouldn't be able to pick up the sheep for two days.

I was disappointed. I didn't relish the thought of a large sheep rotting away next to my clothesline where I must hang out two loads sometime during the day. I rounded up Preston. We put on our gardening gloves with the intention of putting Olympia in the wheelbarrow and then storing her someplace where the dogs couldn't get her, with the hope that the removal man would arrive before she blew up from all the gas that was building in her body. I had originally intended to put her deep in the woods. When my father has a dead cow on his ranch, he just leaves it on the prairie for the coyotes to eat. But Roger pointed out that I didn't want to be encouraging the numerous stray dogs to eat Olympia because then they would get a taste for sheep and would be hunting down Blanche or Madame Moulie's flock. I need a pet coyote.

Why don't you bury the sheep you ask? Well, we don't have a backhoe. The ground is so rocky here that it takes three hours to dig a hole to plant a rose bush. Preston and I didn't want to spend a day digging in a rock quarry. I thought about calling a taxidermist but the neighbors think I'm strange enough. I don't want to reinforce their prejudices with a vivid reminder everytime they visit my house.

Unfortunately, we don't have a stick of dynamite. Once, my ex-husband, a sometimes backcountry outfitter, had a packhorse that died while he was in the mountains of Yellowstone Park. The law states that you must pack out everything you bring into the federal wilderness. The expedition couldn't figure out how to pack out the dead horse. (Getting rid of dead bodies is difficult, as Scott Peterson is well aware, and I have just discovered.) They had some dynamite, for what I don't know, but they used the stick of dynamite as you would a rectal thermometer and blew the horse to kingdomcome. American ingenuity at its best.

After deciding to put Olympia in the stone/brick outhouse, I roused Preston from his reading and wheeled the wheelbarrow to the sheep shed. We both positioned ourselves to grab two legs. I took the hind legs, and lifted her up a little. But then the blood started to percolate from her nose and truthfully, I was worried about what would percolate from the hind end I was dealing with once Preston lifted up his end.

Preston was grossed out by the percolating blood which surprised me because he's a crack deer/antelope hunter. He said he was unnerved by the fact that she was a pet, and that even though he had gutted many a deer, dealing with old blood didn't appeal to him. So we let her lie on her bed of straw hoping the man who takes away the dead beasts would arrive in the not too distant future as the ants and flies were moving in quickly on Olympia's corpse.

Meanwhile, Blanche was out in her pasture wailing. I talked Preston into going to the grocery store for me while I laid out in the pasture with her to calm her down. Ironically, I'm having a dinner tonight for the family headed by the British mutton-eater. I would always tease him that if my sheep disappeared I would know who's table they ended up on. I took some beach towels, and laid out in the pasture. Blanche wanted to be petted and have her stomach rubbed. Constantly. I ended up falling asleep, and when I woke up, she was sleeping beside me. I have to find another sheep, soon, to take my place.

I would have left Blanche out in the pasture all night, like a normal sheep, but dark clouds were threatening a storm. And so after debating where to put her . . . I would have liked to put her in the downstairs kitchen, some straw on the floor would actually make the room look neater, but if my husband found out he would have a jealous fit that I had let the sheep move into the house, I decided upon the outhouse.

There is shelter for her in the pasture, but she never goes back to it and so I was worried that if a storm came upon us, she would just stand there and then die of exposure because she wasn't accustomed to being out in the rain. So, I fixed up the outhouse, which has a floor cleaner than that of my kitchen because it's never used, and Preston and I tricked her into going in by holding out a geranium for her to follow.

The outhouse is rather large and chic. It's clean because whatever you deposit in there drops through a hole and falls into the canal, which happens to be running now, finding its way into the Count's basin. (For those of you who know our trials and tribulations with the Count you'll know how satisfying this bit of bathroom engineering is for us.) And it's clean, because, big talker that I am about the Count's basin, no one uses the outhouse. Blanche spent the night in there.

I put a heavy wooden box over the toilet hole hoping to prevent her from falling into it and breaking one of her legs. This morning at 6, she woke up and was bleating loudly. I went out and was thankful that she wasn't stuck in the hole. I walked her around the back way to her pasture, a route she had never taken, through a makeshift gate that will be completed on Monday, if the carpenter shows up as promised. I took her around to where she usually hangs out and left her as she loudly bleated for someone to keep her company.

Returning to the house, I put a kettle of water on the stove for tea, then went upstairs to retrieve my glasses. Blanche had stopped her bleating and all was calm. Perhaps we could have a quiet, normal day, despite the sheep rotting away in view of the house. I opened up the windows and shutters of a front bedroom, and there was Blanche on the terrace, devouring geraniums as quickly as her little teeth could nibble. I ran downstairs and chased her away from the geraniums. She quickly headed towards the roses. The trauma of losing her life-long companion has turned her into a head-strong delinquent.

After I run to the bakery to get bread for Preston and a tart for the Tomlin family tonight, Blanche and I will take a long walk in the woods, remembering Olympia who was always lagging behind us.