It should have been an easy delivery; she’d had triplets twice before. But this time things went bad from the start. With a hundred square feet of clear space in the sheep shed, Sophie fatefully dropped her first lamb in the north corner_right into the water tub. I walked into the shed to find the submerged form. Sophie was standing at a distance, the other two of her triplets by her.

I raised the body out of the water, saw it was too late to help, and turned to the other newborns. Sophie, always a good mother, had already had time enough to free them of their birth sacs and sing her chuckling welcome song in answer to their bleating. Now her lambs were standing on wobbly, stilt-like legs, starting to search around Sophe’s wool skirts for their first meal.

I picked up the two lambs. A protesting Sophie followed me to the shed’s south corner. There I erected around them the plywood walls of the birthing pen, got the heat lamp going, and fed the weary Sophie water, grain, and fresh hay. By the time I was finished, the larger surviving lamb had found what he had searched for and was nursing lustily, his tail quivering with satisfaction.

All went well in that pen till late Saturday. But when I went out to the shed in the evening, I found the larger lamb lying on its side, body twisted, gasping for air. My heart sank; I’d seen this before. The big ewe, shifting around in the stall, had stepped on her offspring. I kept watch with him into the night, giving him drops of warm milk from my finger, hoping he’d rally.

But during that watch I discovered more trouble. One side of Sophie’s udder had hardened and was turning an angry red. Mastitis. I tried to milk that teat; nothing. Likely that meant that the larger lamb, now crippled and dying, had been hogging the other teat, and the smaller lamb had had little nourishment or none at all.

The larger lamb died about three in the morning. By then I’d tried several times to get the little lamb’s mouth around the good teat. He seemed to get the idea, and so I staggered sadly off to bed.

Sunday morning was to have been the Cap Smith Hike for Anne, Blue, and me; but I had to send them off and stay with my charges. Sophie wasn’t well and, as they say, the little lamb still "looked poorly." Around here, there are far more experienced shepherds, and I got on the phone at once to Bill Fairhurst, who leads Friends Church, down in Unadilla. Though he’s pastoring a flock of Quakers now, Bill used to raise scores of sheep. I caught him just before he left for church.

"You’re right to worry about getting some of his mother’s milk into the little fellow," said Bill. "Without the colostrum in it, he’ll be in bad trouble. And if one side of Momma’s udder is hard and reddened, you’ve got to get some penicillin into her, too. Otherwise you could end up losing ewe and lamb both." Bill went off to tend his Quakers, and I mixed up a quick batch of milk replacement and powdered colostrum. It was nowhere near as good as Sophie’s milk, but better than nothing. After dosing the lamb with some of it, I sped into Cooperstown.

Matt and the Agway staff gave me kind sympathy, more advice, and a vial of penicillin. But Agway had no syringes, so I headed down Main Street to the CVS. Pharmacist Julie helped me read the penicillin label’s tiny print about dosage and then sold me the syringes I needed. [an error occurred while processing this directive]