Dellarobia moved to the kitchen windows to stare out in a new direction while she made hot chocolate for the kids. Despite the biological treachery of this snow, its beauty moved her. Even a field of mud and sheep droppings could be rewritten as a clean slate. She admired the white-edged bristle of the hedgerows along the pasture, and the way the trunks of the big trees were visibly cut off from the ground, so they appeared to be standing on top of the snow like elephant’s feet rather than rooted beneath it. The distant mountains had the fuzzy, off-white color of a plush toy that’s been around a while. For the whole of the morning she wondered if any butterfly could survive this. Now she also wondered, in a different manner from days past, with uncomplicated sadness, if Ovid was already climbing the mountain to find out. She had come to terms with the idea of Ovid and Juliet, not that she had a choice, given that they were having their marriage here on her back forty. Certain ramshackle aspects of Dellarobia had also gone undercover, it seemed, just like the snow-covered barns. Some defects lurked, but for now her way seemed clear. She’d made plans.
She stood watching the sheep, which seemed undismayed by the dazzling ground, maybe forearmed with ancestral memories of Iceland. Cub had made a brief early trudge to the barn to feed hay, and now they wandered out over the white land to chew their cuds. Their pointed feet broke through the crust, and they lurched along dragging broad, pregnant bellies, leaving the oddest imprint on the snow, like the trail of a dragged sandbag punctuated with holes. Their wool colors stood out sharply, the blacks and moorits especially. But even the white sheep against the blazing snow looked yellowish, the color of actual rather than commercial teeth. Most of the sheep were standing, she discerned, though their legs were invisible. But a few had knelt down into little snow-bowls to rest placidly in the glare of a new kind of day. Very high up on the hill, one coal-black ewe was lying down oddly, with her nose up. Like a seal balancing a ball: that color and that posture, her nose sticking straight up in the air.
“Cub!” Dellarobia called. “Come here a minute.”
Cub padded into the room in his socks, agreeable and in no hurry. He was watching cartoons with the kids. “What?”
“Take a look at that ewe up near the fence. That black one that keeps arching her neck. You see her?”
After a moment Cub did.
“I think she’s in labor.”
“It’s too early,” Cub said.
“I know it is. But she’s acting weird.” As they watched, she struggled to her feet and shook the snow off her wool, an impressive muscular shudder even from a distance. She turned several times in a small circle like a dog preparing to lie down, and then lay down. Once again her nose lifted in a great, arcing sweep like a circus seal. Like an exercise video for livestock. An unconventional move, by any standard.
“It’s too early,” Cub repeated. “And it’s colder than heck out there.”
Dellarobia blew out air through her lips. “I’m not asking if this is convenient.” She turned off the burner under the pan of milk, which had scalded while she wasn’t looking. “Fix the kids some hot chocolate and give them breakfast. I’m going up there.”
She rushed to pull on warm layers and waterproof layers and lace up her boots, noting that Cub had ignored instructions and gone back to watching The Backyardigans with a blanket pulled around everything but his face, just like the kids. Dellarobia stomped out the back door and was amazed once again by the made-over world. It was abnormally quiet outside, as if sound itself had been blanketed and extinguished. Some sound-absorbing property of the snow, she gathered. Under her boots it made a squeaky crunch. She took the hill at an angle because straight up was out of the question, she discovered, after slipping several times onto her knees. She set her feet perpendicular to the grade and made broad switchbacks up the pasture.
The black ewe, when Dellarobia attained her altitude, was lying in the same spot. From the looks of the wallow she’d made in the snow, she had been at this project for a while, whatever it might be. She looked glassy-eyed and bored, staring ahead, only mildly perturbed by Dellarobia’s sudden arrival.
“So what’s up, lady?”
The dark lady turned her nose away, checking out Dellarobia through the horizontal pupil of one pale amber eye. Her breath clouded the air in quick, visible puffs.
“You’re not making my day here, you know that?”
After two or three minutes Dellarobia felt ridiculous. The ewe uttered a low, productive belch and began to chew her second-time-around breakfast in the most normal fashion known to sheep. Dellarobia backed off ten paces down the hill, then ten more, in case the ewe was faking her out. She should have called Hester first, for a consult. The cold caught up to Dellarobia when she stood still, racking her with hard shivers that rattled her teeth. “You couldn’t do this in the barn, could you?” she asked.
The sheep did nothing helpful. She even stopped chewing. Dellarobia’s eyes wandered up the mountain to the flocked forest, the hummocks of branches and glittery, ice-enclosed twigs like glass straws. This was no country for insects. The real grief of this day came to her in waves, like dry heaves, throbbing against her initial good spirits. It couldn’t even be called a freak storm. Probably there was no such thing, in a freak new world of weather. Three days ago it had been fifty degrees. The springtime smell of mud was a clear memory. She’d been so sure this winter was over and they’d made it. Even Ovid thought so, with the end of diapause. Now, from her vantage point in the snowy field, she saw a trail of tracks leading from Ovid’s trailer up to the gate. So he was up there already, maybe both of them. His wife supporting him in grief. The High Road was now a shadowy lane, narrowed to a tunnel by snowy overhanging boughs.
Dellarobia also noticed the crisscrossed paths of animal tracks faintly traced over the hillside: deer, rabbit. Strange to think what a small fraction of the comings and goings out here they’d ever know about. The ewe called her attention back with a strange, high grunt and pointed her nose again. She was on the small side, this ewe, maybe a first-timer. Probably clueless and going into panic mode, just because it seemed a truck might have parked on her stomach and bladder. Dellarobia remembered the feeling. The ewe stood up, shuddered, took a couple of steps forward, and out dropped something from her backside. A dark liquid puddle, really it had poured out. Fluid or blood. Dellarobia felt a restriction of vessels in her chest as she scuttled back up the hill, scrambling to recall words from the vet book she and Preston had lately neglected. Amniotic sac, placenta. She dropped to her knees in the snow and bellowed to see a lamb. Black, strangely flat against the snow, unmoving inside its translucent sac: a tiny sheep child. The ewe walked away from it and nosed into the snow, looking for graze.