Part 2
A donkey blew through her nose, close enough to stir Caleb awake.
He had slept sitting upright, with his coat pulled over his chest and the keys caught beneath one thigh. Cold had settled into his knees. Through the windshield, the fence was becoming visible one post at a time.
He climbed out and walked stiffly to the trailer.
The brown jenny regarded him through the slats. The gray had lifted her head, too, but she seemed to be looking beyond him, toward the empty road.
“Well, we made a poor night of it,” Caleb told them.
The gray’s ears turned toward his voice.
He drove the remaining miles slowly and backed up to the barn corral. The brown jenny came down the ramp first. Her halter had once been blue; weather had bleached it almost colorless. A small leather plate on the cheek strap carried a name burned in uneven letters.
June.
Caleb rubbed a thumb over the marks. Somebody had taken time to put them there.
The gray followed so closely that her nose bumped June’s hip as they descended. She had no halter, no tag, nothing to tell him what anyone had called her. Up close, her muzzle and forehead were nearly white.
“You need a name, too.”
He considered her a moment.
“Mamama.”
That was one of his family’s words for grandmother. He had used it for Basilio’s wife, a little woman who could give the old man an order from another room and expect it obeyed. She had directed the household, the dogs, and everything that went on the stove without ever seeming to hurry.
The jenny lifted one ear.
“All right, then.”
The bulletin said not to throw a new guard animal straight into a flock. Caleb put the pair in a small pasture adjoining the corral, where the ewes passed along the fence on their way to water. He would give them two weeks with wire between them.
June investigated every corner. She tested the posts with her nose, called loudly at the sheep, and made them gather in a suspicious knot.
Mamama followed her. If June stopped, she stopped. If June turned, she felt along the brown flank until she could turn with her.
Once, Caleb approached quietly from the left. Mamama startled so violently that her hind legs folded beneath her for a moment.
“Just me,” he said, backing off. “I’ll tell you next time.”
He assumed June was the leader. Some animals needed another animal to make their decisions.
By evening, Caleb had the gates fastened and the chores finished. Before the light failed, he often stood at the little pasture fence, leaning on the hook. He told the donkeys what the bank payment would be and where he had found the last coyote tracks.
June generally wandered off. Mamama stayed within reach, her ears attending to him while he talked.
On the ninth day, Russell stopped at the yard gate.
“My trapper starts Monday,” he said through the open window. “Devices every quarter mile on my side. Don’t let any dogs cross.”
“No dogs here.”
“Then watch your bargain livestock.”
He glanced past Caleb toward the water tank. June was drinking. Mamama came along behind her, missed the turn, and struck the steel side with her forehead.
The tank rang.
She backed away, shook her head, and tried the same direction again.
Russell slapped his steering wheel. “That’s your protection? Caleb, the poor thing’s blind.”
“She’s old.”
“My mother’s old. She doesn’t need two tries to find a stock tank.”
He drove away chuckling, repeating the price Caleb had paid.
Caleb stayed at the gate. Heat had climbed into his face. Russell had been talking about the donkey. There was no reason to take it any other way.
On October fifteenth, Caleb opened the pasture gate.
June went out with her head high, scattering a few ewes. Mamama remained at the opening, stretching her neck into the unfamiliar space. Her ears moved independently.
Only when June called from beyond the sheep did she cross. Then she hurried until she could touch June again.
That night, the donkeys brayed in the creek bottom. Caleb listened through the narrow opening of his bedroom window.
Twice during those first nights, he went onto the porch with a flashlight. He could make out the grass immediately below the steps. Raising the beam farther into the pasture gave him nothing he could use.
He stood there in his socks, remembering the lantern Russell had seen from his kitchen. Then he went back inside.
After the second night, he found the familiar notched print near the bend in the creek. The coyote had come within twenty feet of the donkeys, turned, and gone back toward the draw.
Caleb squatted beside those tracks until his legs began to ache. At last, he had followed a set that didn’t end at a dead lamb.
On the sixth morning, he found another tag.
The flock had bedded a mile upstream. The lamb had been taken there, with the split-pad prints pressed into the damp ground all around the scraps of wool.
Twenty-four.
Caleb closed his hand around the tag and walked back down the creek. June and Mamama were in the same bend where he had left them the evening before. They had stayed together. The sheep had gone on without them.
He looked at Mamama’s nose resting against June’s side.
Then he went to the house and called the veterinarian.
“My gray jenny keeps running into things,” he told the answering machine. “I’d like you to look at her.”
Edith Sloane arrived that afternoon in a canvas coat with worn elbows. She was sixty-six, broad through the shoulders, and had been treating the county’s livestock since before Caleb was born.
She took her box from the truck. “Show me your auction purchase.”
“Russell tell you?”
“Russell’s told people who don’t own livestock.”
They brought both jennies into the barn alley. Separating them wasn’t worth the struggle.
Edith spoke softly while she checked Mamama’s legs and mouth. She examined each eye with a small light, put it away, then moved her hand quickly toward the jenny’s face without touching her.
Mamama didn’t blink.
A clap beside her head brought both ears around.
“She hears,” Edith said. “Come over here.”
Caleb stood close to the gray face. Edith showed him the cloudiness inside each eye.
“Cataracts. Worse on this side, but neither eye’s doing much for her.”
“How much can she see?”
“She may tell bright light from shade. I wouldn’t count on more.”
“She gets to water.”
“June gets to water. This one gets to June.”
As though to demonstrate, the brown jenny reached across Mamama’s back and rested her head there.
Edith watched them. “She’s been blind a good while, Caleb.”
He made a short sound that should have been a laugh.
“Russell told me. I said she was just old.”
“Well, we can mark this as Russell’s correct observation for the year.”
Edith stroked the gray neck. “Somebody knew before she went through that pen.”
Caleb looked down the barn alley. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“You could send them back. The buyer will be there Saturday.” She nodded toward June. “But don’t expect that one to be useful without her friend. I’ve seldom seen two so attached.”
He rubbed a spot on the hook with his thumb.
“And pairs aren’t usually my first choice for guarding sheep,” Edith added. “They can decide they have all the company they need and pay no attention to the flock.”
“They’ve stayed down at the bend.”
“There you are.”
Mamama shifted closer to June. Edith watched her find the brown jenny’s shoulder.
“A bell might help her move more freely,” she said. “People use them on companions for blind horses. Put one where June wears it. Give this girl a sound to follow instead of a body to lean against.”
While they talked, the daylight had withdrawn from the barn doors. Edith held her little examination light out at Caleb’s left side.
“Take that, will you?”
He didn’t reach.
“Caleb.”
He turned until he found her hand and accepted the light. Edith’s eyes stayed on him, but she said nothing.
Outside, she put her veterinary box beside the truck while she opened the door. Caleb’s shin struck it. He stumbled forward, and Edith caught his arm before he fell.
Her fingers remained around his sleeve.
“When were you diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa?”
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