Jeanne d'Agneau

I bought a new sheep for Blanche last week. After spending a month trying to find a sheep with black eyes, the breed of sheep that’s traditional in the eastern side of the departement, I finally gave up and purchased an all white six-month old lamb from a neighbor up the hill.

This lamb is very tiny in comparison to Blanche. But Madame Moulie, the woman who sold me the lamb said it’s because she’s sauvage . . . in other words, she wasn’t overfed as Blanche and Olympia were when they were lambs. Blanche must be three or four times the size of this new arrival and Blanche is only six months older.

Madame Moulie’s son delivered the new sheep in the back of his small van, scooped it into his arms, and set her down in my pasture. Blanche had run over to see what was going on and so she sniffed the lamb and didn’t seem interested. The lamb decided that Blanche wasn’t as interesting as the mother it had recently been stolen from and so it took off on a tear running towards a corner of the pasture.

Now unfortunately, the pasture is only fenced in on one side. The stream and a canal provide the barriers to escape on the other three sides. This was an inexpensive way to enclose Blanche and Olympia who only desired to stay near me. But this nervous lamb, who reminds me of Joan Crawford, was probably capable of breaching the moats. She certainly had the motivation: to get back to her mother. Joan disappeared into the bushes and over the embankment. I gave out a nervous chuckle and joked that I’ve thrown away money before, but that this was the first time I’d seen it literally run away.

A few minutes later I was relieved to see the lamb emerge from the brush, covered in brambles. Luckily for me, she had tried to cross over the creek. Sheep don’t like water. So she reluctantly came back. If she had attempted to cross the two other sides bordered by the dried-up canal, she could have winded her way up the hill to her former flock and into the loving hooves of her mother by nightfall.

Moulie the Younger left. As soon as he pulled out, Jeanne (that’s French for Joan) darted back into the bushes. And she didn’t come out. A college friend, Kathy Fogarty, was here visiting, and I turned to her and told her it would be a bit difficult to explain to my husband that not only did I get taken by the neighbor who overcharged me for the puny lamb, but now I had provided a 100 Euro meal to one of the neighbors.

We headed back to the house, where we sat at the kitchen table and I bemoaned my stupidity for not putting the lamb in the sheep house for a week or two so that she could become accustomed to me.

About two hours later, Kathy and I went out to get Blanche to go for a walk. I called Blanche and she emerged tentatively from under a large bush. She hides there to keep the flies off during the warmest part of the day. She didn’t eagerly run towards me as she usually did. But then, to my great delight, the little lamb stepped out and stood beside Blanche. The lamb held her neck up ramrod straight, giraffe-like, and looked around nervously, reminding me even more of Joan Crawford. We didn’t take Blanche for a walk, because I thought it was best to leave her behind to make the lamb feel at home. And, to tell the truth, Blanche didn’t express any eagerness to go with us.

It’s been a week, and Blanche and Jeanne are great friends now. Unfortunately, this means that Blanche has absolutely no interest in me. Just the week before Jeanne appeared on the scene, I had taken a two hour siesta with Blanche, the two of us stretched out on beach towels side by side. Now she has her little buddy who trails her every move and has absolutely no interest in me. If I call Blanche, she doesn’t come running to me any more, she just lets out a barely audible baaa, which I interpret to mean that she doesn’t care about answering me, but just does it because she feels guilty that she’s ignoring me. She used to let out very loud baaa’s when I called her. In fact, she wouldn’t stop baaing until I acknowledged her.

Previously, Blanche hung out in the corner of the pasture nearest the house. How I enjoyed catching a glimpse of her if I looked out a window or sat on the terrace; but now I rarely see the two sheep. They hide under the bushes all day, and when it cools off, they go out into the walnut grove and eat. I think that Blanche rejected me because she greatly enjoys the companionship of the lamb, and the lamb, being sauvage has communicated to Blanche that humans are not to be trusted. That’s one smart lamb to have figured that out so early in her life. She’ll make a great attorney or policewoman. So Blanche, to please her new companion, steers clear of me. She won’t even try to force her way through the gate when I walk through in order to follow me. I guess that the good news is that she seems to have given up any desire to escape from the pasture to eat geraniums.

I guess I’ll have to get a buck for the two of them and start my flock. I wasn’t going to breed Blanche because I didn’t want her to become so interested in her lambs that she would cease to be a pet sheep and cease being interested in me. Sheep are just like teenagers . . . they’re more interested in following the dictates of their peers than they are in staying with the parents who love them.