Lambs To Slaughter

Note the lack of the simile-creating "like" in the title:  I am being literal here.

When we lived in Lempster, NH,  we had a small flock of sheep.  Every fall I'd select out 4 or 5 ewes and have them bred (believe it or not, you can rent rams for this purpose--what a life!); in late February or early March, then, I'd be an ovine ob-gyn and assist as necessary in the birth of 8 or 10 lambs.  Come Fall, we'd sell a few, kill and freeze a few, and begin the process all over again.  I really liked the cyclical nature inherent there; I also made a little maple syrup then, and that along with the lambing made for a really nice, and organic, transition from winter into spring.

Since we moved to Acworth, it turns out I've gotten older, added more responsibilities, and haven't the same facilities as we did then.  Consequently, I buy my maple syrup (Acworth is the syrup capital of NH, after all) now, and I don't raise sheep "from scratch" anymore, but every spring I do buy two feeder lambs to raise for the freezer.

They're so cute when you get 'em, and the whole world is fresh and new:  the grass as green as it ever will be, wildflowers everywhere, everything seeming young, verdant, renewed, two little lambs gamboling about and, more importantly, fattening up. This year, the strangest thing happened: my friend Travis was helping me transport the new lambs from their moms and home (traumatic for all of us, isn't it?);  as we were unloading them from my truck into their new pasture, they were bleating pretty piteously.  Suddenly, a white-tailed deer doe appeared from the woods, ears erect, sniffing and blowing and bleating, also in apparent distress, evidently sure that those cries were coming from her own babies.  Had she left them in the woods nearby, and become confused?  Had hers already been killed and eaten by the coyotes that so freely roam our land?  Was she barren, with an overriding maternal instinct?  We'll obviously never know, but it was a fascinating tableau.  She paced the area for ten or fifteen minutes, then reluctantly left.

 Like all creatures, these annual lambs are born to die; unlike most, maybe, their deathday is pre-arranged and known in advance.  For this year's guys (and it's almost always guys, of course:  in the rest of the animal kingdom, females are the more important, so the expendable members are the ones with the extendable members), today was the day.  This morning, November 3, dawned cloudy, windy and cold--28 degrees, to be precise.  I started the tractor to warm it up--one hangs carcasses from a tractor bucket to aid in skinning and eviscerating in small-time operations like this--and sat on the porch to await the arrival of the Grim Reaper (I'll assist, but I'm not killing those things myself), he of the honed knives and skilled hands.  By that time, the sun had come out, and it was really quite pleasant to sit there in the rocker, watch the lambs--now 100-plus pounds of dirty, antagonistic (these are males in rut, remember) mattedly-bewooled balls of protein look for their morning serving of grain--and to think about the arc of a lifetime, however long, in whatever form.

Now, I imagine that, for many of you reading this, the whole idea must seem at least slightly barbaric, but it is nature; as Tennyson had it, "red in tooth and claw."  We are animals, after all; at or near the top of the food chain right now, cloaked in a veneer of "civilization," whatever that means at any point in our history, but animals, nonetheless.  I do not wish to engage in a debate with non-carnivores about whether humans are meant to eat meat:  I respect those who don't eat meat way more than I do those who do eat other creatures but are repulsed by the idea of hunting, or by the thought of slaughter.  You can't have that steak, veal, lamb, chicken or fish without it.

The act itself is a bit aback-taking:  one grabs a lamb, wrestles it to a sitting position, and slits its throat.  Once that is done, the major arteries severed, what happens is muscle-memory.  The brain has been deprived of blood, the animal feels nothing more, while the heart pumps out the blood coursing through the veins.  Lillian Hellman, in her memoir Pentimento (there's another term from the art world, Leonski), recounts a time when her husband, Dashiell Hammett, killed a large snapping turtle which inhabited a pond on their property.  The heart, removed from the body, beat on its own for more than 10 hours.  Hellman found that heroic; Hammett countered, correctly, I'm pretty sure, that it was just biology.  The muscle, the machine, works until it doesn't any longer.  It's just design, if, as Frost said,  "I use the word a'right."

Yes, there are death-throes--the animals flip and flop, not at all going gentle into that goodnight; no, the death is not heroic, instantaneous, antiseptic, with the animal's discrete parts suddenly appearing as specific cuts, sitting in styrofoam trays, wrapped in plastic, waiting to be selected and tossed thoughtlessly into a shopping cart.  There is violence (minimized, but, nonetheless...), and mud and blood and sweat and shit.  And then there is silence, and surgical slicing, and order.  And on to the freezer, and the oven, and the plate, and the septic tank.  'Twas always thus, and 'twill always be, in one way or another.  It's the circle and cycle of life and, like it or no, we're all riding on it, clinging tightly until we no longer are able.  The lucky ones get the kind, soft voice and the sharp, swift and sure blade at the end.  And that is figurative language.

Here are this week's songs:

Can't Stand To See The Slaughter                                            Tower Of Power
Slaughter                                                                                   Billy Preston
Blood Of The Lamb                                                                  Billy Bragg/Wilco
Poor Little Lamb                                                                       Tom Waits
Mary's Little Lamb                                                                    Otis Redding
The Lamb Ran Away With The Crown                                     Judee Sill
Mary Had A Little Lamb                                                           Stevie Ray Vaughn
Sacrificial Lambs                                                                       Warren Zevon
Closer To The Bone                                                                   Louis Prima
You're My Meat                                                                         Joe Jackson
It Ain't The Meat (It's The Motion)                                           Maria Muldaur
Pigmeat                                                                                      Ry Cooder
Red Meat                                                                                    Brad Upton
Mango Meat                                                                              Mandrill
Meat                                                                                           Phish
Ram On I & II                                                                            Paul McCartney
I'm A Ram                                                                                 Roy Buchanan

Hard Time Killin' Floor                                                             Geoff & Maria Muldaur
Killing Floor                                                                              Mike Bloomfield
Killing Me Softly                                                                       Jaco Pastorious Big Band
Life'll Kill Ya                                                                             Warren Zevon
Killin' The Blues                                                                        Chris Smither
Time To Kill                                                                               The Band
Death Don't Have No Mercy                                                      John Martyn
Death Sound Blues                                                                     Country Joe & The Fish
Keep The Circle Turning                                                            Lee Michaels
Will The Circle Be Unbroken                                                     Allman Bros.
Changes, Circles Spinning                                                         Moby Grape
Within You Without You                                                            Fabs
Wheel Within A Wheel                                                              New York Stories
Bloodlines                                                                                  Tanita Tikaram

When the kids were younger, I used to caution them to avoid getting attached to the lambies, 'cause they were food, not pets.  Mariah named the first pair "Shishka" and "Bob...."

See ya Tuesday, noon till two.