TRADING SHEEP FOR GOATS
When Greta was in college, a reputable university where she majored in geology, a little trio of the women decided to herd sheep for the summer while they thought through their final theses. Since they were in Montana and it was a few decades ago, it was pretty easy for the three to make contacts and acquire a contact. The hardest part was that they would have to agree to carry a rifle for coyotes. One of them “Teeny” was too small to handle the standard long gun; she just didn’t have long enough arms. But somehow they finessed that issue.
Ideally, the three of them would work an 8 hour shift each per day, with the sister of one of them coming to help in case there was a problem. June went fine. Instead of the classic old canvas covered wagon pulled by a horse, they drove an old 4X4 pickup and pulled a Scamp trailer, the smallest kind, so they could leave someone asleep or whatever, like make a run into town. They were all pretty good at camp cooking, but things run out.
By July they were having to take some double shifts because Angie got pregnant. Or rather, she got big enough to show and not be able to get around. She hadn’t bothered to tell the others. Then one night a grizz got into the sheep and Teeny had had enough. Coyotes she could at least shoot “near”, never hitting them, but a grizz had to be really killed. The menacing bellowing, the resulting gore and the general misery got to her.
So it was up to Greta to stick it out, which she did. But the experience forever curdled her opinion of human beings. By the end of August she didn’t much like sheep either. Men from Europe came to take over and brought their big white dogs. To her dismay, her own dogs were more bonded with the sheep than with her and once the big guard dogs stopped trying to kill her smaller shepherds, they stayed with the flock. She had to cast around for a source of new goat-herding dogs.
Despite her discouragement with people, Greta had loved the life of a shepherd, even when she was exhausted by sitting up all night with her rifle and napping in the grass with her herding dogs in charge. Then she hit upon a solution: goats. It took a while to adapt. Part of her strategy was learning to play an Irish penny whistle, which the goats liked and would follow. Also, she invested in a small portable electrical fence to deploy alongside her trailer, powered by a solar panel on top. This meant she could use a laptop and work after dark. She googled goat-herding dogs.
“Dogs can herd sheep and goats because the ruminants are herd animals that naturally travel in a flock — but they are not the only kind of animals that do this. … “You don’t want a herding dog; you want a chasing dog.” As with most breeds, it’s simply a matter of selecting a pup with the right temperament for the job.”
Unfortunately, one dog chased goats, so she shot it. Another one, a blue heeler, left for some reason. The remaining two were basically mongrels, “rez dogs” if you like, but once they realized that “head-butting” was meant to be playful, they adapted to the job. Just checked in with each other often and slept tightly alongside when the electric fence was on and its soft sizzle protected all inside it.
Her real work was a set of notebooks in which she noted what she saw there on the east slope of the Rockies, close to the Canadian border, from the landscape to the kind of rock outcroppings nearby. The flock was grazing near the volcanic extrusions that were along the Canadian border. That surveyor’s border was set at the 49th parallel because it was the farthest north the watershed formed for the first tendrils of the Missouri/Mississippi complex.
The glaciers of ten thousand years earlier had carried many things far out of their place of origin. One day she heard but could not see goats while she was sitting in the shade of a monster erratic boulder, tens of feet tall and about as big around. It was hard to believe that the ancient glacier was powerful enough to move something so massive. At first she was baffled until she realized that a dozen goats were up on top, having finally found a high place worth climbing. They were so pleased with themselves that it was hard to get them down. It didn’t help that she was laughing so hard.
One day ran into another, peacefully, while the journals grew thicker. The goats were more used to the names she gave them (with treats) so they responded to being called and nights were safe with the electricity turned on. They circulated around their nomadic path across the swelling land as they always had, stopping at the right places to drink, where things were in season, or where there was no competition.
Then one day it was time to visit the little spring at the back of the fake livery stable in he “Begin Again” movie town.
Years ago there was interest in “landscape” as a text that could be read. Partly it was from the ingenious science that investigated the magnetic poles preserved in igneous stone when it formed. Partly it was a reaction to the forces of plate tectonic, tumbling and shifting the continents at unbelievable scales until the evidence was reviewed. The results — former seas and measurable upraising of mountains. Written in remains of former ecosystems, the history was no longer anthropocentric. And the story of life was not one of surviving — sometimes fossils spoke of death.
Matching and exceeding the geography of the land surface is the architecture of the water underground. This is an example.
“Giant Springs is a large first magnitude spring located near Great Falls, Montana and is the central feature of Giant Springs State Park. Its water has a constant temperature of 54 °F (12 °C) and originates from snowmelt in the Little Belt Mountains, 60 miles (97 km) away. According to chlorofluorocarbon dating, the water takes about 3,000 years[2] to travel underground before returning to the surface at the springs.
“Giant Springs is formed by an opening in a part of the Madison aquifer, a vast aquifer underlying 5 U.S. States and 3 Canadian Provinces.[3] The conduit between the mountains and the spring is the geological stratum found in parts of the northwest United States called the Madison Limestone. Although some of the underground water from the Little Belt Mountains escapes to form Giant Springs, some stays underground and continues flowing, joining sources from losing streams in the Black Hills, Big Horn Mountains and other areas.”
The imaginary little spring behind the fake livery stable is one of sources of plot and implication in the story that could be written using all these elements. This is not a story and won’t be without a plot, but the plot will form itself. Greta allows the inclusion of information about the land and water. The springs bring her into contact with Clara.
