The lamb hung from the tree by a little rope. Bare branches black against an overcast sky lit like a frosted lamp. The shepherdess worked quick in the fading light, running a sharp knife round the lamb’s neck. The boy watched her tug at the loose skin, the ball of her foot digging into the soft earth. Strands of tissue tore in silence, revealing bloodless blue-grey muscle. 

It comes off easy, see?

The boy nodded but his eyes never left the lamb. Its head – outsized on the skinned carcass – twisted left and right as the branch bounced. It appeared to be smiling, happier in death than that fleeting life. He thought of the birth: the ewe spread leisurely on the wet grass, ignored by the other sheep as her lamb slipped silently into the world. 

The shepherdess stopped pulling when the lamb’s skin hung from its hind legs like discarded pyjamas. She used the knife to free the pelt and only then the boy saw dark blood on her hands and the dull metal blade.

Remind me to bury it. Come on, she said.

They had tried to save the lamb but it was doomed from birth. It wouldn’t feed from the ewe and just lay by the brambles, limp and exhausted. The shepherdess lifted the lamb onto her lap, rubbing its body – wet with slime and dew – to inspire life. She put her finger in the lamb’s mouth and after a while it began to suck. She replaced her finger with the teat from a milk bottle and the lamb drank greedily, cradled in her arms. The shepherdess looked up at the boy with the start of smile but the lamb coughed and the precious milk flowed from its nostrils and out from thin lips. 

Through flat dark pupils the ewe watched her lamb breathe a final time before the humans took him away.

The important bits are the belly button and its bottom, the shepherdess said, carefully turning the skin inside out. That’s what the mother smells.

The boy watched her fit the hind legs of a living lamb, abandoned at birth, into the sheaths of the dead lamb’s. Then she draped the rest of the coat around the reject and placed it into the pen with the mourning ewe. The skin of the front legs hung over the lamb’s shoulders and it bandied about the pen like some six-limbed mythical beast. The ewe curious and blue in the dusk, padded over to the confused lamb to sniff and lick the bloodied fleece. 

During the night he woke and sat upright. He went to his bedroom window to look for the tree and the forgotten lamb but it was still dark and wind and rain battered the glass. He imagined it out there hanging from the branch, blown about sodden. He got into bed and tried to sleep but every howl of wind felt like an angry scream from dark lips.

Out in the night the rain softened and in the cold air chimney smoke from smouldering wood. Under a moon almost full he walked the dirt path in welly boots, past the old church graveyard and the barns of corrugated iron where dark beasts slumbered.

Beyond rusted farm machinery forever idle.

In the field surrounded by bramble the flock lay like outsized maggots under the light of the yellow moon. Among them the bereaved ewe slept as the adopted lamb, still draped in the plundered pelt, drained her udders.

From the tree on the hill gently swung the little lamb. The boy climbed the tree and cut the lamb from the branches and buried it in a shallow grave. He swept the earth into the hole, covering the skinned carcass and its grinning mouth and the eyes that caught the moon like little marbles.

In the morning he ate cold porridge with his father and thought how much he missed his mother’s breakfasts. Silence at the table; only the clinking of spoons in bowls and the wet sounds his father made when he ate.

‘Sheila’s coming over tonight.’

The boy examined the dirt under his finger nails. The room darkened, it looked like rain outside. He thought of the sheep, bodies steaming in the autumn. The little reject stealing milk.

‘I said she can stay over. That you’d like it if she did.’  

The shepherdess had said the ewe wasn’t stupid. That she was not deceived by the new lamb but was simply afraid of a double death. The crafted attachment, the adoption, would increase the rejected lamb’s chances of survival.

His father, clearing up their bowls, said:

‘I’d like you to call her ‘mum’ sometimes. Would you do that for me?’

From his bedroom window he looked for the tree on the hill and saw the dark shape dangling. With his father’s binoculars he glassed over the old church and the black headstones with names engraved in gold; over the iron roofs where cows chewed and broke wind; over the skeletal tractor and the brambles and the field of sheep; onto the tree and the lamb hanging from it.

October 2020