THE SUMMER I WAS FOURTEEN my parents sent me to boot camp on a farm. It was one of those action-adventures for troubled kids, you know, get up at four A.M. to do the milking and how much trouble can youreally get into? (The answer, if you’re interested: score pot off the ranch hands. Get stoned. Tip cows.)Anyway, one day I was assigned to Moses Patrol, or that’s what we called the poor son of a bitch who pulledherding duty with the lambs. I had to follow about a hundred sheep around a pasture that didn’t have onegoddamned tree to provide even a sliver of shade.

To say a sheep is the dumbest fucking animal on earth is probably an understatement. They get caught infences. They get lost in four-foot-square pens. They forget where to find their food, although it’s been in thesame place for a thousand days straight. And they’re not the little puffy darlings you picture when you go tosleep, either. They stink. They bleat. They’re annoying as hell.

Anyway, the day I was stuck with the sheep, I had filched a copy of Tropic of Cancer and I was folding downthe pages that came closest to good porn, when I heard someone scream. I was perfectly sure, mind you, thatit wasn’t an animal, because I’d never heard anything like this in my life. I ran toward the sound, sure I wasgoing to find someone thrown from a horse with their leg twisted like a pretzel or some yoho who’d emptiedhis revolver by accident into his own guts. But lying on the side of the creek, with a bevy of ewes inattendance, was a sheep giving birth.

I wasn’t a vet or anything, but I knew enough to realize that when any living creature makes a racket likethat, things aren’t going according to plan. Sure enough, this poor sheep had two little hooves dangling out ofher privates. She lay on her side, panting. She rolled one flat black eye toward me, then just gave up.

Well, nothing was dying on my patrol, if only because I knew that the Nazis who ran the camp would makeme bury the damn animal. So I shoved the other sheep out of the way. I got down on my knees and grabbedthe knotty slick hooves and yanked while the ewe screamed like any mother whose child is ripped away fromher.

The lamb came out, its limbs folded like the parts of a Swiss Army knife. Over its head was a silver sac thatfelt like the inside of your cheek when you run your tongue around it. It wasn’t breathing.

I sure as shit wasn’t going to put my mouth over a sheep and do artificial respiration, but I used myfingernails to rip apart the skin sac, to yank it down from the neck of the lamb. And it turned out, that was allit needed. A minute later it unbent its clothespin legs and started whickering for its mother.

There were, I think, twenty lambs born during that summer session. Every time I passed the pen I could pickmine out from a crowd. He looked like all the others, except that he moved with a little more spring; healways seemed to have the sun shining off the oil in its wool. And if you happened to get him calm enough tolook you in the eye, the pupils had gone milky white, a sure sign that he’d walked on the other side longenough to remember what he was missing.

I tell you this now because when Kate finally stirs in that hospit............