Tales from the Bark Side

By Keith Ross | The Daily Journal

Published Saturday, February 16, 2008

Welcome back to the bark side of life here in Ottertail where the winds have died down, the sun has come out, and the dog days of winter are numbered, but there is terribly fierce weather still ahead and (as Robert Frost so eloquently put it) miles to go before we sleep; and promises to keep.

I promise to share a tale this week from Mel Hodnefield of Vergas, that might tickle your imagination a wee bit. So far, we haven't discussed sheep in all of my columns. Here is a tale from a great guy and a former contributor of mine.

“I don't know how this story fits into your format for this year's tales but I will let you decide if it belongs and if so where. When I was about 12 years old, my dad was a sheepshearer in this area.

This story begins when dad and my older brother went to shear a large herd of sheep at the B bar B Ranch near Felton. When they were moving sheep from one pen to another they spotted a small and starving lamb; it must have lost its mother.

The owner said my brother could take it home, so home it came. We fed her and kept her warm and we named her Tiny, as her growth had been stunted from lack of food as a baby. She never did get very big.

At this same time we had a very large male Chesapeake dog named King. You may know or not know that a dog is a natural predator of sheep. At first they just tolerated each other, mainly because we stood there and made sure no one got hurt, but soon they became best of buddies.

As we had no pen for either of them, they could go anywhere in the area around our home at old-town Clitherall; sometimes up to 1/2 mile away but always together. They would meet me almost every day as I got off the school bus.

As Tiny got older we had her bred and one fine sunny day in May in our front yard she gave birth to a lamb. We named him Tim, so now we have Tiny and Tim.

Now as you remember, Tiny and King had been best buddies for the best part of two years. Now King, not knowing what this little thing on the ground was all about, came to smell of it. The mother's instinct of Tiny took over and to protect her lamb from a natural enemy, a dog, she butted him with all she could; knocking him for roll.

The poor dog stood 20 some feet away and tried to figure out what happened. His best friend just hit him and did not want anything to do with him. In about a week they made up, and instead of just the two of them wandering the area it became three. The three of them always met me at the bus when I came home from school. I got off the bus many times to the tune, thanks to the other kids on the bus, of “Melvin has a little lamb.”

We can see here that Tiny's instinct took over at first to protect her young, but then reasoning took over as she knew King was a friend and not an enemy and would not hurt her lamb.

Their longtime friendship prevailed in the end. They were friends for many years after, but after that we had more sheep so Tiny was kept in a pen with the other sheep and King was not, so the situation never came up again.”

Thanks, Mel, for a really good story. They say politics makes strange bed fellows? I believe that given time and lots of love, most animals can cohabitate together and not try to kill each other. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule of mine (I just don't know what they are yet).

If you have a tale that you would like to share that fits into the “Logic vs. Instinct” contest, you can e-mail me at info@rosswoodkennels.com or write to me at Keith Alan Ross Richville, MN 56576, or phone me at 218-495-2195.

Keith Alan Ross writes from his home in New York Mills.