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Whoever said that sheep go quietly to the slaughter, never tried worming them. We picked the evening, the coolest part of a 104F day, to do the deed. I looked across the beautiful green pasture, so pastoral looking, an enormous apricot tree twisting from the earth in the middle of it. The sheep grazed contentedly, goats, ducks, bunnies and Llama all quiet and accepting. I felt domestic bliss as my children stood at my side and surveyed with me, this is the stuff memories are made of, I thought.

We entered the field, grease stick, syringes, vials, pill-popper and pills in hand and the sheep looked up, instinctively they knew that I wasn’t there to bury my dry hands in their lanolin infused wool.

"Alright guys." I said to my children."Grab a lamb!"

They tried sneaking up behind them, cornering them, trapping them, whoever said that sheep were dumb hadn’t tried to catch one. In fact I’ve pretty much decided that whoever came up with all those cute sheep sayings must have seen them grazing in the distance and been a poet.

"Grab a leg!" I yelled.

My Mutton Bust Champion, 6 year old Jacob caught the first one. I popped a pill in the red plunger and then eased a lamb mouth open with my leather-clad fingers. The last time I had wormed lambs I hadn’t known about the plunger or leather gloves and I learned that sweet, bottle-sucking lambs had teeth - sharp ones! Now, an experienced "shepherdess"... I had a plunger...which was too big for a lambs mouth. So I picked the pill up off the ground where the lamb had spat it out and shoved it, with the tip of my glove-clad finger down it’s throat, it spat it out. I did it again and held the mouth shut while the lamb chewed, lambs pull faces when they don’t like the taste of something and when you hold their mouths shut and happen to block off their noses at the same time, they urinate. Great, if you need a specimen. This time he got most of the pill, enough for the purpose, I surmised. Jacob held his quarry, Rachel marked his head with the green grease stick and Joseph handed me the vial and syringe for the C and D Toxoid shot.

"Let her go!" I puffed.

The first lamb bolted away and looking across the pasture of lambs, ewes, goats and so on, things looked a little less pastoral and a bit more spread out.

"Grab another lamb!" I called.

10 lambs later, it was time to catch the ewes, the plunger would work now I thought, looking at my leather gloves, the finger tips stretched out and sucked soggy.

The purpose of a guard Llama is to guard her flock, Sekwati does this very well. Us chasing the lambs was not too big of a deal for Sekwati but the ewes were a different story. Sekwati takes care of the ewes. They know that they can go to her for protection and we know that she knows how to spit. We called in reinforcements - my husband, Jim. We chased down one ewe after another, dodging Sekwati’s cloven feet and zig-zagging neck. She went to spit once but swallowed hard deciding that we weren’t threat enough to endure the foul taste in her mouth. I still had a hard time getting the plunger to work and found that holding a ewes jaws shut harder and found their chomping on my glove-clad fingers a bit more painful so I over-compensated. The ewes needed 3 pills, I shoved down four and so when they spat out some, I figured they’d got 3.

The last ewe, obviously the fastest, smartest one, stood by the ditch, we chased her behind the playhouse and David grabbed her by the hind leg, we got her down, started popping her pills and up she jumped dragging David and Johanna. David ended up under her rotund body with Johanna on top. The ewe was pinned. I filled the pill-popper, buckling with laughter because David was yelling with what little breath he had left, " Don’t plug her nose! Don’t plug her nose!"

She was marked and shoved off. We were exhausted, sweaty, smelling like lanolin but what a sense of accomplishment, the sheep and goats were wormed. We stood at the edge of the pasture and surveyed the flock feeding quietly, as gentle looking as you could imagine. We knew better. We would never forget. I was right this day would definitely be a memorable one.