Our Terry
Once, when my brothers, sisters and I were still very young, Terry came into our lives. Now, he was very different from anyone else we knew. He was only a baby when first he came to us one morning, I can't remember the exact time of year, but I believe it was early fall. You see, Terry was an orphan. His mom had died giving him life. There was no one else to care for him, so he became one of us. We all came to love him very much and we all cared for him as best we could cause we were all very young. My dad built a wooden crate for him and put it behind the kitchen stove, half-filled with warm, dry hay. My mom and we children fed him bottles of warm milk so that he would grow strong. There was a great fear among us that he might not make it on his own. Every night our mom would wrap him in a blanket and place another over the top of the crate to keep him warm. There was no heat in our house once the fire went out. Every morning he greeted us from his little bed behind the stove and one of us would give him his morning bottle of milk because mom was busy getting breakfast for us. We all loved him very much and we all wanted him to grow strong. You see, Terry wasn't like us, he was a tiny little lamb with no mom to care for him. My brother and I had saved some money we earned berrypicking, selling chafe for 10 cents a bag and helping other people with their gardens or hay. We each bought a lamb from some people our parents knew. I bought a black one because they were different and rare. We put our initials on them with red paint before we let them loose with grandfather's flock. So the lambs grew into adult sheep and had babies of their own. Mine was okay, but my brother's wasn't and died soon after her lamb was born. My sheep wouldn't have anything to do with the other lamb. So we ended up trying to save him ourselves. Don't know why we called him Terry, it was a name someone suggested and we all agreed. In the end we did manage to save him and he became part of our family. When he grew strong in the spring, dad put him in the barn and made a special stall just for him. Every morning when dad went to the barn to check on the horse, Terry was inside the door waiting for him. Lots of times dad would let him come to the house for a warm bottle of milk and a slice of homemade toast with butter. He still loved his bottle of milk even though he was eating table scraps and hay by now. We would all give him a hug or otherwise greet him when he came into the kitchen before we all left for school. In the evening he was always waiting on his little perch in the yard when we came home. We let him join in with us and our friends when we played games outdoors. Everyone in the neighbourhood got to know him like we did. As he got older, he played tag with us. He loved to butt you in the rear with his head - when Terry tagged you, there was no denying it. If you bent over for any reason, he would run at you and butt you in the rear. We made a game of it. One time my mom's friend next door needed to use our clothesline because hers had fallen down and her husband was too busy at work to fix it. So as she was taking some we clothes out of her basket, Terry spotted her. Yes, you guessed it. He took a run for her and butted her in the rear. The poor woman went head-over-heels and landed on the ground, more shocked than hurt. When she told her husband what happened that evening, he laughed but he fixed the clothesline right away. Several people who were in the sheep business at the time offered to buy Terry, but we were having none of that. He was after all one of us, a very important part of our young lives back then. But the time would come when we would have to work together to save him once more, like we did when he was young in his crate behind the kitchen stove. It would be a terrible ordeal for all of us. There came to be, around this time, a bad disease which attached sheep, and many perished eaten alive by larvae - maggots. The old people called it the "blue bottle fly" plague. They called it that because flies - which were big like common fish flies, except their bodies were a bright blue colour - would pitch on the sheep and lay eggs in small clusters in the wool. We kids called them "fly spits" because they looked like the tiny bubbles you see at the top of the dishwater in the kitchen sink. When these eggs would hatch into larvae or maggots, these maggots would bore into the sheep and live off the flesh until they eventually killed the animal. It was a slow and agonizing way to die. We would check the few sheep we had every day to see if any fly spits were on them. We did this by running our fingers through their woolly coats. If we found any, our dad would mix up some liquid and put it on. As with many human diseases, like cancer, the treatment often hurt more than the disease it was trying to cure. Many people had herds of sheep that roamed free in the spring, summer and early fall. We kept Terry close to home because, like I said, he was one of us and we could tell he didn't like hanging around with the other sheep. We checked him every day, mom, dad and all of us, because we didn't want anything to happen to him. But he wasn't to be spared, flies did pitch on him and they did lay their eggs. The eggs hatched into larvae and the long, slow ordeal started. Just as we did when he was young in the crate behind the stove, we all pitched in to save him. It was heartbreaking to watch the maggots eat into him. We took turns holding him steady as dad or mom applied the liquid to his open wounds. Many a tear was shed for our little friend. But as luck would have it, we did manage to save him once again. There was a great sense of relief and also a desire to not have to go through that again. Most people got rid of their flocks - it was too costly to save them. It was a sad day for all of us when Terry was sold. We all thought the same thing - that the butcher's knife was a better way to go that to be slowly eaten alive. We all still remember him with love. Cyril Griffin New Perlican Submitted By: NULL
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