Terry: No danger of my ever being a shepherd

I don’t care much for sheep. I get it from my mother who really hates the creatures.

The sweater-wearing varmints were not blessed with a great amount of intelligence. God knew this and that’s why he created shepherds. Shepherds know what a flock of sheep will do several hours before the sheep know themselves. A good shepherd is more in tune to things around him than anyone in the world. That probably explains why they were the first to find the baby Jesus.

My mistrust of sheep goes back to a time when I was 10 and still living on the farm. We knew folks that raised sheep. I had been around them to some extent and hadn’t formed a real opinion of the beasts at that point in my life. I think it was the same with my mother. That all changed one Saturday when my dad backed a trailer up to the old dairy lot on our place and unloaded a whole trailer full of ewes.

In the weeks and months after that fateful day it has been speculated by the family that the whole damn flock was blind. It didn’t take a lamb judge from the county fair to tell that they certainly had some age on them, though. Mom and I suspect just that one lead ewe was probably the only blind one though.

Dad had practically stolen those ewes at the sale barn that morning. This investment would be a no-brainer. He unhooked from the trailer and went about his day tending one of several places he was farming back then.

Not long after being unloaded and pretty quick after dad had left the home place that blind lead ewe tested the hot wire and kept going west. We first noticed the escaped flock nearly half a mile away in the neighbor’s field.

Mom and I and little brother set out across the plowed ground in pursuit. We chased them from one end of the field to the other and a couple of times when we had smaller bunches close to home they would take off again.

I’m not sure if we had any of those stupid animals penned by the time dad got home that evening but I do know my mother had used lots of interesting new words during the day and she repeated them all very rapidly to my father when he came back on the scene.

Several hours after dark we had secured most of the sheep. At my mother’s implicit request that bunch was off the place by auction time the next Saturday. I think my mother may have even given away a wool sweater or two by that time as well.

Later, living in Colorado in sheep country, I got to witness first-hand the Basque and Mexican sheepherders living in the wilderness in those funny little wagons with just their dogs, a horse and their sheep. I marveled at how one man and his dogs could take care of and move such large flocks.

I think you have to be called to the life of a shepherd. The day I was called, the wool got pulled over my eyes.

Karl Terry writes for Clovis Media Inc. Contact him at:

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