Laura Gilpin’s “Navajo Shepherd Boy”

We watched them come

           up the ridge all day,

the little Dine boy behind

           his herd of sheep, all day

across the undulating

           red, great masses

of cloud threatening

           hard, quick rain or

lightning, neither of which

he could take cover from.

The sheep walked and grazed.

           We watched

their soft gray mouths

           tear at the silver grass,

dark dirt quickly drying

into red as the sheep

moved on, fine dust

kicked up

into the boy’s face,

as he smiled

at us in passing,

and I thought

of what the rancher told us,

yesterday,

that to truly see the sheep

was to forget

our notions of it:

there is no weakness

to a hunger that must be

bottomless to keep itself alive.

Something

the boy must know,

who trails his herd

eight miles in a day

to find it pasture

on land that shrinks

and desiccates

           from the herd’s need:

the sheep reshape this land

the boy can never hope

will be expanded

for himself, given

already the gift of sheep

from the government.

The boy must walk, the boy

must feed

what forever hungers,

           then stand, sickened,

alongside his father later

to watch him shoot

half these ewes according

to federal

conservation; dead left

to rot and blanch

in the wash: too much flesh

to eat or sell.

The boy walks.

He does not have a hat.

He does not have a horse.

He carries his own food

in a pocket as he walks

noiselessly through the wash,

looking, for the moment,

so like the rancher

in his sense of purpose,

from her body,

           followed by the next,

as the rancher tore

           the silver caul

of mucus from their mouths.

           When a ewe gives birth

to two lambs she chooses

which to keep

by waiting. She watches

until the first one stands,

then comes to it

and begins licking,

roughing the blood up

 into the surface

of its skin. Sometimes

the other dies.

Sometimes

the herder saves it,

and its marble eye trains

ceaselessly upon him.

That day, the other

lamb died. We watched

the ewe circle in her stone pen,

rubbing and rubbing

           against it till the living

lamb scrabbled up

to follow through the gate.

           We watched

as it stumbled after

           through the wash,

its strangely

           furrowed face a knob

of bone, a bit

           of its mother’s wool

still clinging to the stone.