The day before yesterday I returned to Struan Farm in the late afternoon from a day trip to New Plymouth and went down to feed the "gang of five" pet lambs in the paddock behind the Cottage, near the Wool Shed. Only four lambs showed up for bottles: Peaches, Fig, Pickle and Chalk. Cheese was nowhere to be seen or heard.
So I fed the four their bottles and went off with bottle in hand, calling out for Cheese. I figured she'd gone with the mob into the front Pet Paddock, or had gotten through a fence and into another paddock, maybe all the way even down to the river. But after wandering and calling for awhile I couldn't find her. When John got home he hopped on the quad bike and did the same thing, looking in the bush areas as well.
No Cheese. It was really odd. And she didn't turn up for breakfast this morning either.
Later today Mike found her, dead under the trees near the Tree Hut. We won't know if she ate something she shouldn't have or what happened. The other four lambs know something's a bit different, but otherwise are happy and healthy. The Big Three are fine too. Farmer John and I had a chat, and he tells me these things do happen.
Life goes on for everyone else, but still. I'm overtired and lamenting a lamb. A lamb named Cheese, one who liked to figure out her way through holes in fences and tiptoe over cattle stops, with her twin sister Chalk tagging along.
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