Domestic sheep

Domestic sheep are central to the farm’s seasonal routine and to Ray’s attempt to rebuild a life through work. Their lambing offers a vivid image of fresh beginnings, but Ray experiences it from the outside; later, she wraps fleeces for hundreds of ewes, caught up in their forceful movement through a crowded shearing barn. The animals are not merely a backdrop to her recovery: their bodies, behaviour and vulnerability set the pace and physical terms of the work.

Lambing and the Season’s Promise

With spring comes lambing in vast corrugated barns. Ray and the others watch hundreds of ewes for the signs of labour: restless animals searching for space, pawing the ground, lying on their sides and straining their necks. The account then turns to the arrival of wet, wriggling lambs, which makes the season feel like a time of excitement, hope and fresh starts.

That promise does not restore Ray’s sense of belonging. She sprays lambs’ navels with iodine to prevent infection and cleans and beds the mothering pens with fresh straw. The actions are familiar from a former life, yet she feels that she is only going through the motions, existing in someone else’s. The contrast gives the animals’ new life a significance beyond pastoral scenery: while the flock begins again, Ray is still confronting the loss of the life she and Moth had worked towards.

Shearing and Physical Labour

By summer, Ray is working as a wrapper for a shearing team contracted to remove the fleeces from more than eight hundred ewes. The day begins with a six o’clock pick-up in a truck towing a makeshift trailer. At the farm, the sheep fill more than half of a large barn, continue through the collecting yard and extend into a field. Gordon’s trailer arrangement guides them up a ramp into a narrow race, with three doors leading to the shearers’ platform.

Each shearer draws a ewe through a door and rolls her onto the platform. Powered shearing heads remove the wool in successive strokes, first along the belly and then around the head, neck, flanks and back. Once shorn, the ewe is released into a pen, where her newly bare body looks thin and white, with her head appearing huge by comparison. Ray’s task is to keep pace: she folds each fleece’s sides inward, rolls it tightly, tucks the rump end into the bundle and stuffs it into a woven sack. She clears loose wool from the platform while the shearers are already reaching for the next animal.

The work requires her to move between three shearers, with little room to spare. A kicking ewe, tangled wool or a delay in wrapping can obstruct the next animal. At first, everyone appears to be shearing at roughly the same speed and Ray runs from one station to the next; as the pace varies through the morning, she finds a rhythm. When a sack is full, she closes it with wooden pegs driven through its top, and a shearer helps drag it aside. The practical sequence makes the flock’s scale measurable not only in its numbers but in the repeated physical actions demanded of the people handling it.

The working day runs from the early departure through breaks at half past ten, one and four, and continues until seven. The last animals are muscular Texel rams, nearly as large as the smaller shearer when seated on their haunches. At day’s end, the clipped sheep and those still to be shorn are sorted into separate fields. Ray returns to the plastic shed after eight, tired but able to say she is all right. The season’s work has become a concrete source of income and a test of what she can manage.

Escape, Entanglement and Risk

The sheep do not move through the shearing system without resistance or disorder. At least five times a day, ewes press together in the race, each trying to escape. When one is pulled through a door, the animals behind her can force their way out too, leaping across the platform and into the pen of already shorn sheep. The escaped ewe then has to be separated from the clipped flock, costing time and disrupting the work.

One such rush becomes a collision between animal movement and the barn’s material conditions. As Gordon pulls a ewe through, two others burst out, their deep fleeces swirling into wet wool and green sludge. One leaps beside Ray’s head. She grabs its wool and hangs on, but the ewe runs, pulling her across a floor slick with lanolin and dung. Ray’s foot catches in broken concrete; both she and the animal roll into a puddle of slime. The incident turns the orderly procedure of shearing into a physical struggle, with the sheep’s strength and the hazardous floor determining what happens next.

Vulnerability and Narrative Significance

The flock’s vulnerability becomes especially clear at the end of the shearing season. In early July, ewes whose fleeces have not yet been removed are beginning to suffer from maggots. Flies lay eggs in dirty wool, commonly around the rear; the maggots work through the fleece towards the skin, causing it to lift and producing raw, infected sores. If the infestation advances beneath the skin and reaches the spinal area, it can kill the sheep. While dealing with the final fleece, Ray drops a handful of wool, skin and maggots onto the floor. The work ends not with an abstract seasonal marker but with an unpleasant, immediate reminder of what delayed shearing can mean for an animal.

Domestic sheep thus connect renewal, labour and exposure to harm. Lambing supplies the season’s image of fresh starts, while shearing converts the flock’s scale into repetitive work that helps Ray earn money. Escape and infestation, in turn, show that the animals are not passive units in that process: their behaviour can interrupt the work, and their health depends on the timing and conditions of human care. For Ray, tending and processing the flock brings back familiar actions without restoring her former life; the animals’ agricultural cycle continues, even as she tries to find a way forward within it.