CREATIVE NONFICTION
MICHELLE NICOLAYSEN
ALL THAT WE DON'T CONTROL
Late February is shearing season on our central Wyoming ranch. Every year, as we wait for a call from Chase, the contractor for a crew making their way down the Rocky Mountain West, my husband, Kem, repeats the aphorism he learned from his dad: “Man proposes, God disposes.” Whatever shearing date we’ve penciled on the calendar is, like a baby’s due date, only a rough approximation. Storms, equipment failures, crew conflicts all throw planning into flux. In our seventeen years ranching, shearing has never landed on schedule.
Some years we have mishaps, some years disaster. Kem’s dad, Jon would talk of a blizzard that hit in the middle of shearing, when they lost hundreds of sheep, shorn ones from the shock and cold, and unshorn ones from suffocation, and broken spines under the weight of drifts collecting in their fleeces. Neighboring ranches experienced similar losses and Jon appeared resigned to such tragedies, telling the story with an ain’t-life-a-bitch-sometimes laugh, but he’s helped us move the shearing date a month earlier to miss the wet, heavy spring storms. We learned from Jon, the way he learned from his father, who learned from his father.
Before Covid, the shearing crew consisted of New Zealanders and Australians from deep-rooted sheep cultures. They made their living shearing around the world, and in their off time, honed their skills through competitions. In 2021, Covid travel bans and quarantines limited the entry of migrant labor, and Chase’s hastily assembled crew of American shearers provided a clear contrast to previous years. One wiry, heavily tattooed man handled the sheep with ease; Chase knew what he was doing. The inexperience of the rest became obvious as they struggled to control kicking sheep legs. Because they were young, fit men, they got the job done, muscling the animals into position, but they worked slowly to avoid cutting the sheep. More delays, more complications.
I’d always thought of myself as a laid-back, go-with-the-flow person, but it took living on a ranch to learn true flexibility. It’s one thing to be amenable about going to either the 3 o’clock or the 5 o’clock movie, or whether we have Thai or Greek food. When we had a job to do, I wanted to prepare; I wanted a plan. Over the years I’ve come to trust that even if it gets messy, the work will somehow get done because, really, there’s no other choice.
*
I live in two worlds: one ruled by weather and the necessities of the job and the other organized by calendars and scheduled activities. There’s no balance to strike, only tradeoffs. That Covid year, shearing began on a Monday while I drove a group of masked third graders to their first field trip of the year. Two weeks earlier, I’d put it on the calendar, thinking even with the usual delays, shearing would be done, but a record-breaking storm had brought a complication I couldn’t anticipate. Missing the first day of shearing was a submission to reality, choosing the commitment I’d scheduled over the place I’d rather be.
On the morning of the second day, after getting my older two off to school, I had a few hours at the shearing barn, my five-year-old shadowing me as I walked next to the sheep alley shaking a rattle-paddle to keep them moving into the trailer. With a schedule to keep, I had to go, but more snow and an equipment break-down the work to a halt anyways.
Finally, on Wednesday, we took the kids to the shearing barn, school be damned—actually, I announced their absence in a politely worded e-mail. My nine-year-old climbed into a pen of unshorn sheep, and began chasing them around, trying to jump on the backs of the sturdier ewes and rams. By the end of the day, she had a ram broke to ride. She’d stirred up the sheep and they were harder to get down the alley, but everyone let her do it because we hope that if the kids love sheep, one day they’ll want to carry on this work.
The younger two played in the barn, freeing me to sort wool. A panel on the trailer folded down into a high shelf, so it felt like waiting for an order at a food truck. The shearer kicked a ten-pound fleece towards me, the tips grey from weather and prairie dirt, underneath a creamy white wool with a tight crimp that would make ‘80s girls jealous. It had a nice long staple length, probably close to four inches, with fineness, measured in microns, less than 20, next-to-skin quality.
I rolled it with a quick shake tossing out the second cuts, small bits of wool made when the clippers run over the same place twice. I pulled out pieces of vegetable matter and dead bugs, removed the tags—shit-formed dreads that cling around the tail—throwing them into a separate bag, work that will earn us a better clean-wool score.
I can’t get it all. There’s a tradeoff between a pristine fleece and getting the job done. After a cursory sort, I put it into a large, trash compactor-like machine that stuffs the fleeces into tight, 400-to-500-pound bales. It’s filthy work, but I love it.
*
I sort dirty fleeces. Owl pellets speckle the barn floor, along with fur from its prey. We catch whiffs of the skunks that living in the barn, avoid the pack rat nests in the corner. With no running water, there’s no washing our hands before eating the sandwiches and cookies I’ve set out for our ranch crew.
Surrounded by lambing ewes on a muddy April day ten years ago, pregnant with my first child, I’d joked about raising her in a barn. At the time, I imagined myself some pioneer mother with a baby in the front pack, doing all the same ranch work I’d done before, but parenting literature told me I needed to make schedules, sleep train, give the child a sense of security.
My oldest refused to submit to the sleep schedule but had no patience for the front pack either. She gave me about a half hour to work before demanding freedom and space to roll around. As she grew older, I began to worry that if I didn’t follow the example I saw on mom-blogs and social media, and enroll her in tumbling, music, sports, she’d be relegated to spending her life mucking shit out of a barn. The over-scheduling gives us a sense of control over our kids’ future, but the idea that opting out will protect them from the competitiveness of it all is just as false. The world isn’t going to spare them.
Now, so much of my life is a schedule preparing my children for relentless modern life, but for our mental health, we need these breaks away from clean, sanitized spaces to the dirty ones on our ranch where chaos ignites their imagination. Bits of broken glass are gems; the owl nest in the rafters becomes a monster’s lair. We live by society’s dehumanizing grind, but in these wild, messy places we can feel like something alive in this world.
*
Religions remind us of the inextricable link between destruction and creation, life and death. Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, recreates. We also find the lesson buried deep in the Bible. Before Augustine imposed Original Sin onto Adam and Eve eating fruit in the garden, the story answered the question of life and death, posing two possible realities. In the first, immortal humans live in a pristine, unchanging garden. There’s no childbirth to upset the balance. In the second reality, mortal humans birth young to replace them, a creation occurring through labor pains and sustained from the sweat of our brow. Rather than punishments, pain and toil are the bargain we made to live in a world of possibilities. The story says we chose this reality, which, of course, we didn’t, but really, would we have it any other way?
The Christianity I grew up with taught that by attaining enough purity and orderliness on earth, I would achieve eternal life in heaven, a restored Eden. Trying to unspool the idea of forever kept me awake late into the night, hollowed in my guts until my mind spun itself into exhaustion. I preferred death’s finality to something without end, which I thought was my own failing. I now understand that, like Eve, I crave a world that moves and changes, a world that’s alive.
Covid forced a sealing-off I found difficult. It demanded we become germaphobes, attempting to keep out the messy and chaotic world, creating an illusion of control. Ruach, the Hebrew word for “spirit,” also means “breath,” specifically wet breath, what God blew into dirt, giving life to Adam, and the Covid-spreading breath we contained behind masks. While we absolutely needed to protect our communities, we didn’t want to acknowledge that masking-up put us at odds with our humanity. Beneath the anti-masking vitriol lay a fear that we wouldn’t get it back.
*
As commercial producers, we select against the recessive gene for black wool. White takes any color of dye, making it more versatile and marketable, and so we sell any black-spotted lambs for meat. Yet, years ago, when we had an all-black ewe lamb, only a white diamond on her forehead and bit of white at the hooves, I had to keep her. I put a nylon coat on her like my pets wore. It covered her back, secured with loops around each hind leg, keeping the fleece clean and protecting the color. The exposed wool on her head and around her tail bleached tawny at the tips, but under the coat it stayed a dark-chocolate brown—true black only occurs with dyes.
Beneath the surface of our pure white breeding herd, there’s a recessive gene wanting to express itself. Now most years we have at least one black lamb, a bit of white on the head, chest or legs, less choice wool anyways. We once had a set of triplets, two black and one white. The white one died—twins are hard, triplets harder—but we kept the two black lambs that lived.
We have half a dozen black sheep this year, including the original ewe, though she’s going a silver-grey. There are hand spinners who value the natural colors, even the way the sun-bleached tips create unique variegation. Their wool would contaminate the white fleeces, so we hold the black sheep back and shear them when we’ve finished baling the rest.
“I love having these black sheep,” one of the ranch hands said. “It’s like having a white or a red calf running around out there with all the black ones. It’s good to see something different.”
Sometimes I think we have our commercial herds, carefully bred for marketability, to support the oddities, the misfits.
*
When I explain our ranch to anyone outside of agriculture, they confuse it with a farm. It’s different. On a farm, the relationship between animal and human is much more intimate; the livestock handled nearly every day become accustomed to the farmer’s presence. Of course, animals are still animals, and occasionally they’ll remind the farmer that there’s still a bit of their wild ancestors in them.
Ranching, however, takes place in a sparse environment and the livestock forage like the antelope and deer sharing their pastures. Their grazing rotation mimics the natural migration of wildlife, but a few times a year, we have to handle them like the domesticated animals they are. To work them efficiently, we use their natural pressure points.
During my first shearing, Kelly, a stocky, soft-spoken ranch hand, taught me how to work the sheep.
“You walk towards them and they’ll run past you,” he said.
I followed him down the narrow walkway between the alley and barn, making the sheep lunge forward, pushing the front up towards the shearing trailer.
“They’re opposite from cows,” he said.
He’s one of the rare people who can move both animals well. I’ll take his word for it. I’ve never learned how to move cows. I like working sheep, an animal I better understand and my kids have been doing this with me since birth, first in the front pack, then toddling after me. Now they walk the alleys on their own, understanding the sheep instinctively the way they understand other kids on the playground.
*
In the hands of a good shearer, it looks as if the sheep is docile, a trick he pulls off by keeping the animal’s balance in his legs, shifting it with small, precise steps while moving his clippers over the entire body. As much as possible, he holds the sheep’s legs and head out of the way with his elbows, leaving one hand free to smooth the skin in front of the blade. He must move carefully. The wicked-looking wide teeth of the comb and the sharp blade on the hand piece glide easily through the thick wool and can just as easily glide through his thigh.
The comb enters the fleece at the top of the belly and he works carefully around the udder, using smooth downward strokes called blows. He removes the belly in one single piece, kicking it towards the sorters. It’s shorter, finer and dirtier than the rest of the fleece.
The shearer clears the wool off the inside of the legs before moving to the main fleece. By sliding his foot back he rolls the sheep onto one haunch and beginning with the one facing him, he shears up the hip toward the spine, clearing the fleece with long, even blows. His steps lay the sheep onto one side. Then he turns the head back into the body, and begins on the other side, each small step rolling the sheep onto the sheared haunch.
The entire process takes only a few minutes. Chase’s personal best is 272 sheep in one day, but some of his New Zealanders shear 300. They don’t achieve those numbers through brute strength, but by an intimate knowledge of the animal that comes through work.
*
Most years, we hope for five shearers and a good sorter. Usually we get four, and, occasionally, make do with three. Years ago, between acts of both God and man, we wound up with two: the woman who contracted for us and a retired shearer, her former boss, who’d come to help when her crew walked off the job. I had a baby in the front pack and a toddler to watch, so the ranch hands stepped in to sort wool.
In a tough year, shearing can take three full days. That year, on the fifth morning, we counted the sheep left and figured, at the rate we’d been going, it would take at least another day and a half. Running out of ideas to feed our ranch hands, I planned on hitting the McDonalds drive through that afternoon and wondered what new low I’d sink to the next day.
The shearers, as sick of the job as we were, began working like experienced, young New Zealanders. The ranch hands took turns watching them from the door of the shearing trailer, admiring the grace and skill of a woman and an aging man. They finished by the end of the day.
I posted the ordeal on Facebook, saying it was a reminder of the Islamic concept of Inshallah, a phrase Muslims attach to every stated plan: “My niece will attend university this fall, inshallah.” It means, “God willing,” a recognition of all that we don’t control. The phrase signals a submission to God’s will because, really, there’s no other choice.
We thought we’d put the chaos behind us and could laugh about the year shearing went horribly wrong, but one evening, more than two months later, just as we were about to start a Netflix, the phone rang. Kem held it to his ear and paced around the house.
“The shit’s going to hit the fan tomorrow,” he said as he hung up.
A spokesperson for the Wyoming Woolgrowers Association had called to warn that an animal rights activist with a button camera had joined the crew that sheared our sheep. There was a possibility that footage from our ranch would appear on an exposé PETA planned to release the next morning. I immediately thought of my children caught on hidden camera and a burning rush of blood hit my cheeks, my stomach hollowed out.
The next morning, I got up before anyone else and watched the video on YouTube. The images are familiar to anyone who’s been around shearing, fleeces bloodied by nicks to the hide, a sheep with a severe cut getting stitched up, all more gruesome in close zoom and grainy video quality. The ranchers and shearers had their faces blacked out, making them look like sleazy perps.
None of the footage came from our ranch, and we hadn’t expected it. Our problem had been lack of crew. The two who’d sheared our sheep, we could assume, weren’t PETA operatives. Still, with its images of sheep in chutes, wool on the sorting table, the video presented our lifestyle as something barbaric. It was such a jarring contrast to my own pictures: cheerful selfies with a pink-cheeked five-month-old in the front pack; snapshots of my older daughter on her grandfather’s shoulders as he walked the alleyways.
I don’t edit out sheep with bloody nicks more visible on the bright white of their newly shorn, goat-like bodies. It’s just a difference in focus, knowing a sheep’s entire life cycle and understanding the context of a single day; the difference between a wide-lens and the myopic button camera.
The video ended, with the words, “There is no cruelty-free wool.” That’s absolutely true. There’s no cruelty-free world. PETA’s propaganda implies that by abstaining from animal products, meat, leather, wool, we’ll remain pure from cruel forms of agriculture.
“We have to farm to eat,” James Rebanks writes in Pastoral Song, “and we have to kill (or displace life, which amounts to the same thing) to farm. Being human is a rough business.”
There’s no way around it; taking wool off sheep will always involve blood. It’s messy, but what would take its place? Synthetic fibers, made from petrochemicals? At least with shearing, we see in front of us the blood required for the life we have.
Of course, we don’t need to add unnecessary cruelty. In one of the shots, the shearer, whom I recognized under the black strip covering his face, struggles with a ewe, twisting her neck until finally she drops.
“I think I might’ve killed that one,” he says with only a hint of regret.
It’s the only bit in the entire video that’s above and beyond the regular gore of the job and it’s hard to watch. I’ve seen him, tired and overwhelmed, get too rough with the sheep, but this is much worse.
The ranch hands joke about when the Bad Man comes out, when, in the course of a routine job, an animal inexplicably goes crazy. In the middle of the night in the calving barn, a cow won’t go into the head catch and her near-dead calf needs a suck of milk. The ranch hand, who’s dodged her charges one-too many times, gets creative with his obscenities and breaks rattle paddles, putting away empathy to get the job done.
Because PETA doesn’t give us the whole picture, there’s no way of knowing what made the shearer’s Bad Man come out. It doesn’t make it better, but at least we’d contend with something human.
*
Wool gave me an entry into ranch work. In our early days, I raised lambs that had lost their mother, a useless job by today’s economic standards. Their milk replacer costs more than they’ll fetch at market, but I used the wool as an excuse to keep them as pets. Kem had always loved the sheep, but my newfound interest gave us both a direction. We began to rebuild the herd that Jon had nearly sold off when the sheep industry collapsed in the ‘90s. He couldn’t stand to sell his breeding stock, the sheep carrying the genetics he’d put a lifetime into. When Kem and I moved back in 2006, the ranch ran fewer than 500 sheep. We built on Jon’s work and this year, we sheared a thousand.
It should be a success story, but every time I sit down to write about the sheep industry, I feel like I’m writing a eulogy. It’s been in decline for a century, and we didn’t know if it could survive the most recent catastrophes. Covid put the market in flux, first closing plants, leaving producers scrambling to sell lambs, then increasing demand as adventurous home cooks tried new recipes.
Kem’s great-grandparents built our shearing barn in the 1930s, when sheep were still a staple for both food and textiles. The old chute Kem recalls from childhood shearing seasons has gone unused for decades, except for the owls and skunks who now make it their home. The roof is a patchwork of tin panels and flimsier fiberglass ones. Every year before shearing, we need to patch up winter’s damage, but in 2021, with the roof in tatters, it seemed beyond repair. Kem’s brother, Peter, spent the few days before shearing piecing it back together, and with each shearing break, he’d climb back up on the roof, securing it with more nails. It held together for another year.
Some years we have mishaps, some years disaster. Kem’s dad, Jon would talk of a blizzard that hit in the middle of shearing, when they lost hundreds of sheep, shorn ones from the shock and cold, and unshorn ones from suffocation, and broken spines under the weight of drifts collecting in their fleeces. Neighboring ranches experienced similar losses and Jon appeared resigned to such tragedies, telling the story with an ain’t-life-a-bitch-sometimes laugh, but he’s helped us move the shearing date a month earlier to miss the wet, heavy spring storms. We learned from Jon, the way he learned from his father, who learned from his father.
Before Covid, the shearing crew consisted of New Zealanders and Australians from deep-rooted sheep cultures. They made their living shearing around the world, and in their off time, honed their skills through competitions. In 2021, Covid travel bans and quarantines limited the entry of migrant labor, and Chase’s hastily assembled crew of American shearers provided a clear contrast to previous years. One wiry, heavily tattooed man handled the sheep with ease; Chase knew what he was doing. The inexperience of the rest became obvious as they struggled to control kicking sheep legs. Because they were young, fit men, they got the job done, muscling the animals into position, but they worked slowly to avoid cutting the sheep. More delays, more complications.
I’d always thought of myself as a laid-back, go-with-the-flow person, but it took living on a ranch to learn true flexibility. It’s one thing to be amenable about going to either the 3 o’clock or the 5 o’clock movie, or whether we have Thai or Greek food. When we had a job to do, I wanted to prepare; I wanted a plan. Over the years I’ve come to trust that even if it gets messy, the work will somehow get done because, really, there’s no other choice.
*
I live in two worlds: one ruled by weather and the necessities of the job and the other organized by calendars and scheduled activities. There’s no balance to strike, only tradeoffs. That Covid year, shearing began on a Monday while I drove a group of masked third graders to their first field trip of the year. Two weeks earlier, I’d put it on the calendar, thinking even with the usual delays, shearing would be done, but a record-breaking storm had brought a complication I couldn’t anticipate. Missing the first day of shearing was a submission to reality, choosing the commitment I’d scheduled over the place I’d rather be.
On the morning of the second day, after getting my older two off to school, I had a few hours at the shearing barn, my five-year-old shadowing me as I walked next to the sheep alley shaking a rattle-paddle to keep them moving into the trailer. With a schedule to keep, I had to go, but more snow and an equipment break-down the work to a halt anyways.
Finally, on Wednesday, we took the kids to the shearing barn, school be damned—actually, I announced their absence in a politely worded e-mail. My nine-year-old climbed into a pen of unshorn sheep, and began chasing them around, trying to jump on the backs of the sturdier ewes and rams. By the end of the day, she had a ram broke to ride. She’d stirred up the sheep and they were harder to get down the alley, but everyone let her do it because we hope that if the kids love sheep, one day they’ll want to carry on this work.
The younger two played in the barn, freeing me to sort wool. A panel on the trailer folded down into a high shelf, so it felt like waiting for an order at a food truck. The shearer kicked a ten-pound fleece towards me, the tips grey from weather and prairie dirt, underneath a creamy white wool with a tight crimp that would make ‘80s girls jealous. It had a nice long staple length, probably close to four inches, with fineness, measured in microns, less than 20, next-to-skin quality.
I rolled it with a quick shake tossing out the second cuts, small bits of wool made when the clippers run over the same place twice. I pulled out pieces of vegetable matter and dead bugs, removed the tags—shit-formed dreads that cling around the tail—throwing them into a separate bag, work that will earn us a better clean-wool score.
I can’t get it all. There’s a tradeoff between a pristine fleece and getting the job done. After a cursory sort, I put it into a large, trash compactor-like machine that stuffs the fleeces into tight, 400-to-500-pound bales. It’s filthy work, but I love it.
*
I sort dirty fleeces. Owl pellets speckle the barn floor, along with fur from its prey. We catch whiffs of the skunks that living in the barn, avoid the pack rat nests in the corner. With no running water, there’s no washing our hands before eating the sandwiches and cookies I’ve set out for our ranch crew.
Surrounded by lambing ewes on a muddy April day ten years ago, pregnant with my first child, I’d joked about raising her in a barn. At the time, I imagined myself some pioneer mother with a baby in the front pack, doing all the same ranch work I’d done before, but parenting literature told me I needed to make schedules, sleep train, give the child a sense of security.
My oldest refused to submit to the sleep schedule but had no patience for the front pack either. She gave me about a half hour to work before demanding freedom and space to roll around. As she grew older, I began to worry that if I didn’t follow the example I saw on mom-blogs and social media, and enroll her in tumbling, music, sports, she’d be relegated to spending her life mucking shit out of a barn. The over-scheduling gives us a sense of control over our kids’ future, but the idea that opting out will protect them from the competitiveness of it all is just as false. The world isn’t going to spare them.
Now, so much of my life is a schedule preparing my children for relentless modern life, but for our mental health, we need these breaks away from clean, sanitized spaces to the dirty ones on our ranch where chaos ignites their imagination. Bits of broken glass are gems; the owl nest in the rafters becomes a monster’s lair. We live by society’s dehumanizing grind, but in these wild, messy places we can feel like something alive in this world.
*
Religions remind us of the inextricable link between destruction and creation, life and death. Shiva, Destroyer of Worlds, recreates. We also find the lesson buried deep in the Bible. Before Augustine imposed Original Sin onto Adam and Eve eating fruit in the garden, the story answered the question of life and death, posing two possible realities. In the first, immortal humans live in a pristine, unchanging garden. There’s no childbirth to upset the balance. In the second reality, mortal humans birth young to replace them, a creation occurring through labor pains and sustained from the sweat of our brow. Rather than punishments, pain and toil are the bargain we made to live in a world of possibilities. The story says we chose this reality, which, of course, we didn’t, but really, would we have it any other way?
The Christianity I grew up with taught that by attaining enough purity and orderliness on earth, I would achieve eternal life in heaven, a restored Eden. Trying to unspool the idea of forever kept me awake late into the night, hollowed in my guts until my mind spun itself into exhaustion. I preferred death’s finality to something without end, which I thought was my own failing. I now understand that, like Eve, I crave a world that moves and changes, a world that’s alive.
Covid forced a sealing-off I found difficult. It demanded we become germaphobes, attempting to keep out the messy and chaotic world, creating an illusion of control. Ruach, the Hebrew word for “spirit,” also means “breath,” specifically wet breath, what God blew into dirt, giving life to Adam, and the Covid-spreading breath we contained behind masks. While we absolutely needed to protect our communities, we didn’t want to acknowledge that masking-up put us at odds with our humanity. Beneath the anti-masking vitriol lay a fear that we wouldn’t get it back.
*
As commercial producers, we select against the recessive gene for black wool. White takes any color of dye, making it more versatile and marketable, and so we sell any black-spotted lambs for meat. Yet, years ago, when we had an all-black ewe lamb, only a white diamond on her forehead and bit of white at the hooves, I had to keep her. I put a nylon coat on her like my pets wore. It covered her back, secured with loops around each hind leg, keeping the fleece clean and protecting the color. The exposed wool on her head and around her tail bleached tawny at the tips, but under the coat it stayed a dark-chocolate brown—true black only occurs with dyes.
Beneath the surface of our pure white breeding herd, there’s a recessive gene wanting to express itself. Now most years we have at least one black lamb, a bit of white on the head, chest or legs, less choice wool anyways. We once had a set of triplets, two black and one white. The white one died—twins are hard, triplets harder—but we kept the two black lambs that lived.
We have half a dozen black sheep this year, including the original ewe, though she’s going a silver-grey. There are hand spinners who value the natural colors, even the way the sun-bleached tips create unique variegation. Their wool would contaminate the white fleeces, so we hold the black sheep back and shear them when we’ve finished baling the rest.
“I love having these black sheep,” one of the ranch hands said. “It’s like having a white or a red calf running around out there with all the black ones. It’s good to see something different.”
Sometimes I think we have our commercial herds, carefully bred for marketability, to support the oddities, the misfits.
*
When I explain our ranch to anyone outside of agriculture, they confuse it with a farm. It’s different. On a farm, the relationship between animal and human is much more intimate; the livestock handled nearly every day become accustomed to the farmer’s presence. Of course, animals are still animals, and occasionally they’ll remind the farmer that there’s still a bit of their wild ancestors in them.
Ranching, however, takes place in a sparse environment and the livestock forage like the antelope and deer sharing their pastures. Their grazing rotation mimics the natural migration of wildlife, but a few times a year, we have to handle them like the domesticated animals they are. To work them efficiently, we use their natural pressure points.
During my first shearing, Kelly, a stocky, soft-spoken ranch hand, taught me how to work the sheep.
“You walk towards them and they’ll run past you,” he said.
I followed him down the narrow walkway between the alley and barn, making the sheep lunge forward, pushing the front up towards the shearing trailer.
“They’re opposite from cows,” he said.
He’s one of the rare people who can move both animals well. I’ll take his word for it. I’ve never learned how to move cows. I like working sheep, an animal I better understand and my kids have been doing this with me since birth, first in the front pack, then toddling after me. Now they walk the alleys on their own, understanding the sheep instinctively the way they understand other kids on the playground.
*
In the hands of a good shearer, it looks as if the sheep is docile, a trick he pulls off by keeping the animal’s balance in his legs, shifting it with small, precise steps while moving his clippers over the entire body. As much as possible, he holds the sheep’s legs and head out of the way with his elbows, leaving one hand free to smooth the skin in front of the blade. He must move carefully. The wicked-looking wide teeth of the comb and the sharp blade on the hand piece glide easily through the thick wool and can just as easily glide through his thigh.
The comb enters the fleece at the top of the belly and he works carefully around the udder, using smooth downward strokes called blows. He removes the belly in one single piece, kicking it towards the sorters. It’s shorter, finer and dirtier than the rest of the fleece.
The shearer clears the wool off the inside of the legs before moving to the main fleece. By sliding his foot back he rolls the sheep onto one haunch and beginning with the one facing him, he shears up the hip toward the spine, clearing the fleece with long, even blows. His steps lay the sheep onto one side. Then he turns the head back into the body, and begins on the other side, each small step rolling the sheep onto the sheared haunch.
The entire process takes only a few minutes. Chase’s personal best is 272 sheep in one day, but some of his New Zealanders shear 300. They don’t achieve those numbers through brute strength, but by an intimate knowledge of the animal that comes through work.
*
Most years, we hope for five shearers and a good sorter. Usually we get four, and, occasionally, make do with three. Years ago, between acts of both God and man, we wound up with two: the woman who contracted for us and a retired shearer, her former boss, who’d come to help when her crew walked off the job. I had a baby in the front pack and a toddler to watch, so the ranch hands stepped in to sort wool.
In a tough year, shearing can take three full days. That year, on the fifth morning, we counted the sheep left and figured, at the rate we’d been going, it would take at least another day and a half. Running out of ideas to feed our ranch hands, I planned on hitting the McDonalds drive through that afternoon and wondered what new low I’d sink to the next day.
The shearers, as sick of the job as we were, began working like experienced, young New Zealanders. The ranch hands took turns watching them from the door of the shearing trailer, admiring the grace and skill of a woman and an aging man. They finished by the end of the day.
I posted the ordeal on Facebook, saying it was a reminder of the Islamic concept of Inshallah, a phrase Muslims attach to every stated plan: “My niece will attend university this fall, inshallah.” It means, “God willing,” a recognition of all that we don’t control. The phrase signals a submission to God’s will because, really, there’s no other choice.
We thought we’d put the chaos behind us and could laugh about the year shearing went horribly wrong, but one evening, more than two months later, just as we were about to start a Netflix, the phone rang. Kem held it to his ear and paced around the house.
“The shit’s going to hit the fan tomorrow,” he said as he hung up.
A spokesperson for the Wyoming Woolgrowers Association had called to warn that an animal rights activist with a button camera had joined the crew that sheared our sheep. There was a possibility that footage from our ranch would appear on an exposé PETA planned to release the next morning. I immediately thought of my children caught on hidden camera and a burning rush of blood hit my cheeks, my stomach hollowed out.
The next morning, I got up before anyone else and watched the video on YouTube. The images are familiar to anyone who’s been around shearing, fleeces bloodied by nicks to the hide, a sheep with a severe cut getting stitched up, all more gruesome in close zoom and grainy video quality. The ranchers and shearers had their faces blacked out, making them look like sleazy perps.
None of the footage came from our ranch, and we hadn’t expected it. Our problem had been lack of crew. The two who’d sheared our sheep, we could assume, weren’t PETA operatives. Still, with its images of sheep in chutes, wool on the sorting table, the video presented our lifestyle as something barbaric. It was such a jarring contrast to my own pictures: cheerful selfies with a pink-cheeked five-month-old in the front pack; snapshots of my older daughter on her grandfather’s shoulders as he walked the alleyways.
I don’t edit out sheep with bloody nicks more visible on the bright white of their newly shorn, goat-like bodies. It’s just a difference in focus, knowing a sheep’s entire life cycle and understanding the context of a single day; the difference between a wide-lens and the myopic button camera.
The video ended, with the words, “There is no cruelty-free wool.” That’s absolutely true. There’s no cruelty-free world. PETA’s propaganda implies that by abstaining from animal products, meat, leather, wool, we’ll remain pure from cruel forms of agriculture.
“We have to farm to eat,” James Rebanks writes in Pastoral Song, “and we have to kill (or displace life, which amounts to the same thing) to farm. Being human is a rough business.”
There’s no way around it; taking wool off sheep will always involve blood. It’s messy, but what would take its place? Synthetic fibers, made from petrochemicals? At least with shearing, we see in front of us the blood required for the life we have.
Of course, we don’t need to add unnecessary cruelty. In one of the shots, the shearer, whom I recognized under the black strip covering his face, struggles with a ewe, twisting her neck until finally she drops.
“I think I might’ve killed that one,” he says with only a hint of regret.
It’s the only bit in the entire video that’s above and beyond the regular gore of the job and it’s hard to watch. I’ve seen him, tired and overwhelmed, get too rough with the sheep, but this is much worse.
The ranch hands joke about when the Bad Man comes out, when, in the course of a routine job, an animal inexplicably goes crazy. In the middle of the night in the calving barn, a cow won’t go into the head catch and her near-dead calf needs a suck of milk. The ranch hand, who’s dodged her charges one-too many times, gets creative with his obscenities and breaks rattle paddles, putting away empathy to get the job done.
Because PETA doesn’t give us the whole picture, there’s no way of knowing what made the shearer’s Bad Man come out. It doesn’t make it better, but at least we’d contend with something human.
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Wool gave me an entry into ranch work. In our early days, I raised lambs that had lost their mother, a useless job by today’s economic standards. Their milk replacer costs more than they’ll fetch at market, but I used the wool as an excuse to keep them as pets. Kem had always loved the sheep, but my newfound interest gave us both a direction. We began to rebuild the herd that Jon had nearly sold off when the sheep industry collapsed in the ‘90s. He couldn’t stand to sell his breeding stock, the sheep carrying the genetics he’d put a lifetime into. When Kem and I moved back in 2006, the ranch ran fewer than 500 sheep. We built on Jon’s work and this year, we sheared a thousand.
It should be a success story, but every time I sit down to write about the sheep industry, I feel like I’m writing a eulogy. It’s been in decline for a century, and we didn’t know if it could survive the most recent catastrophes. Covid put the market in flux, first closing plants, leaving producers scrambling to sell lambs, then increasing demand as adventurous home cooks tried new recipes.
Kem’s great-grandparents built our shearing barn in the 1930s, when sheep were still a staple for both food and textiles. The old chute Kem recalls from childhood shearing seasons has gone unused for decades, except for the owls and skunks who now make it their home. The roof is a patchwork of tin panels and flimsier fiberglass ones. Every year before shearing, we need to patch up winter’s damage, but in 2021, with the roof in tatters, it seemed beyond repair. Kem’s brother, Peter, spent the few days before shearing piecing it back together, and with each shearing break, he’d climb back up on the roof, securing it with more nails. It held together for another year.
Michelle Nicolaysen has an MA in Religious Studies from Arizona State University. She now lives on a sheep and cattle ranch in Central Wyoming with her husband and their three kids. Her work has appeared in Sad Girl Diaries, The Examined Life Journal, Wild Roof Journal and elsewhere.