Six lambs in five hours gave me a harried day-setting up separate pens in the shed, drying off the newborns, hanging heat lamps, trimming umbilical cords, supplying the new mothers with warm water.

This was my first time facing all that without Anne's help since our marriage, but I got the jobs done. And despite a lot of rushing about, I still got to enjoy the mother's interaction with the newborns.

They sing to them. As soon are the lambs' faces clear of mucus, they begin to bleat. The mothers answer them with a soft, chuckling sound from the back of their throats.

That's a special sound, heard from them at no other time. What then develops is a lilting call-and-response between the newborns and their wooly dams. It's beautiful, and I'm fool enough to cry every time it happens.

The lambs are up on their long, unsteady legs within minutes of birth, fumbling around their mothers' sides, instinctively looking for their first meal.

They keep on bleating until they blunder into what they've searched for. Then they're quiet as they drink, tails wagging in pleasure. But the mother continues that soft chuckle, sometimes leaning around to lick a newborn's back.

The third of our ewes is young Tess, a last year's lamb. She has yet to deliver; and of course this will be her first time. She's been frightened and confused by all the sudden furor in the sheep shed; and maybe confused, too, by what's going on inside her. So Tess is skittish and given to sudden lunges toward the door and safety outside. But she's a flock creature, and after a time, she forces herself to come back in.

Two days after the births, I took down the bonding pens. The two new mothers now could rove the shed, with lambs crowding each one like tugs pushing against an ocean liner's sides. Tess doesn't know what to make of these small, antic creatures. It's clear that she doesn't find them cute.

Nature, sadly, doesn't much care that lambs are cute, either. She's benignly indifferent to their fates. The solitary white lamb I found dead on St. Patrick's evening; it had been lain on by its mother. And the next morning I found one of the second set triplets lying stiff and lifeless, no cause obvious. Two brief lives ended, after barely knowing light, warmth, smells, comforting sounds, and sweet drink.

Death is a fact of life for farmers, even amateurs like me. Over the dozen years I've been tending animals, I've faced it repeatedly, and often with the sheep. So far, the worst time involved bottle-feeding a newborn lamb rejected by its mother.

The feeding went on for days, every four hours. But despite the efforts, the feeble little ram steadily weakened and slipped into real distress. And so, after trying for days to continue that life, at the end I had to quench it. That was very bad, very hard.

I guess there was a lesson of some sort in seeing each of the St. Patrick's Day mothers tending her two survivors, already indifferent to the small corpse in the same pen. It set me recalling Robert Frost's "Out, Out..." (That title echoes Macbeth grieving life's frailty: "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow...")

The Frost poem used to shock my students, not so much because of its tragic subject, but because of its terse final lines. The plot is a simple one.

A young farm boy is in the back yard, cutting stove wood with a buzz saw. His sister calls him to supper, and, in his instant of distraction, the saw takes his hand.

They carry the boy in and lay him on the kitchen table. The country doctor "put him in the dark of ether." But "the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Little-less-nothing!-and that ended it."

Then come the final lines, the ones that first shock, then move one to nod sadly. "No more to build on there. And they, since they/ Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs."

That's the lesson of those two new mothers, turning their full attention to still-surviving lambs. The mothers were alive and had duties to the living. And so they turned to their affairs.

But it's harder for humans, isn't it.

Jim Atwell lives in and views life from Fly Creek. He can be found on the web at JimAtwell.com.