The Wisdom of Sheep

June 17, 2024
In this idyllic ode to the pastoral life, Young (The Secret Life of Cows) reflects on the quirks and rewards of working her family’s organic farm in England. Drawn from Young’s diary entries, the episodic chapters capture the rhythms of her day-to-day life. She recounts chasing after rogue sheep, bottle-feeding lambs whose mothers can’t produce enough milk, and troubleshooting ways to prevent foxes from entering the turkey enclosure, among other activities. Animals “are as individual as we are,” she contends, describing how some mother cows are unperturbed if their calves don’t follow them into the barn for the night while others “go pretty mad” until they’re reunited. Elsewhere, Young describes how a particularly determined hen laid an egg in Young’s kitchen despite efforts to usher the chicken outside, how Young and her partner aided a cow struggling to give birth to twins, and how a herd of sheep once allowed a fox cub to take refuge in their shed during a storm. The meditative, low-stakes stories have a soothing effect, and the evocative prose finds beauty in Young’s workaday routines (“The rain-soaked fields create a percussive squelch under your feet and you can hear and feel a rhythmic harmony as you walk, picked up by the metronomic tap of your zipper pull”). It’s an appealing slice of country life.