A Longhorn's Guide to Counting Sheep

In which we round up 300 of 'em, give or take

Hook ‘em!

It’s tricky, counting sheep. A farmer friend of mine had 300 or so to sell over the recent holiday weekend, and kindly invited us and the kids to help his family get them ready for the truck. When we arrived mid-morning, half the flock was already in the pen. Half by his reckoning, anyhow. To my eye there were, like, a thousand, or maybe 87? Like a school of fish they were, churning around the pen, one step ahead of a very pleased sheep dog.

Do they have names? my son asked.

Nope, the farmer said.

Do they have numbers?

You can give them one, if you want.

That’s the old trick to fall asleep, right? Count imaginary livestock too boring to name.

Actual farming ain’t so sleepy: the farmer’s phone rang and the whole day changed. The sheep were bound for Christchurch, on the South Island, and the truck had been bumped up to the early ferry. Could he have them ready by lunch?

We’d planned a picnic but now it was go time. The farmer’s wife put all the kids on the quad bike and buzzed off to round up the shipment’s second half. As they returned with the flock, one sheep escaped—they can hop a fence pretty good, when they want to—and wandered off down by the river. No time to give chase. When the rest were secured, the farmer counted again.

He did not point, spoke no numbers, took no notes. He just strolled through the flock as the animals parted around him, his eyes flickering back and forth, his lips moving in silent prayer. After a minute the spell broke and he returned to earth.

Huh, he said. I’m sure it was 314 yesterday. Now I get 315.

There’s an art to counting sheep, the farmer explained. Tournaments, even. Everyone does it their own way. His own method was to count by threes. When the sheep are running, he said, you can’t pick out just one. Three at once, that your eyes can do. Eleven groups of three gets him to 33, and after three 33’s he’ll tally one lone animal to make a hundred. Each hundred he throws out another finger on his right hand. In the pen, then, he’d run to three fingers and five threes: 315.

I have no equivalent system. When was the last time most of us counted three hundred of anything at all? I haven’t kept a penny jar in years. Excel numbers its rows and columns. At the grocery store I just toss the mandarins in a sack.

And sheep—that’s an uncountable noun right there. On paper the word is both singular and plural; up close in a crowded pen it’s more a substance, like moss or wheat or money. There’s a great NZ sheep poem—I’m just getting started on the genre—in which the British-Kiwi poet Peter Bland imagines an early settler who sees the animal as pure industrial commodity: “I’m / turning their bones into grass. Later / I’ll turn grass back into sheep.” By poem’s end, sheep products—not the sheep themselves—become the nation itself: “The land becomes / my meat and tallow.” 

Bevo XV, via the Austin American-Statesman

So why isn’t the sheep itself more of an icon, instead of the punchline of jokes too blue and numerous to recount here? Back home in Texas, another settler livestock empire, my family calls themselves Longhorns, after their alma mater and hometown team. (Kiwis: that’s a cow. With big horns.) University of Texas football games open with an enormous live longhorn—Bevo XV has a name and a number—running around the stadium at no small safety risk. Dozens of the state’s high school teams have similar mascots. Go Shorthorns!

No team in sport-mad NZ calls itself the Sheep. A native flightless bird steals all the tourism merch, not that the t-shirt companies haven’t tried. But sheep, by definition, cannot make you cool. In the final scene of Flight of the Conchords, when our heroes have failed in New York and slunk back home to what might be Ohakune, Jemaine just throws a sheep in the air and walks away.

And it never comes down.

My farmer friend might often wish he could do the same. Instead, as the truck barreled our way, he was crammed with his charges in a narrow metal chute, trimming the clumped green poo from three hundred wooly backsides one by one.

Gums up the works, he said, as a freshly cleaned sheep ran off to join its crew.

The Works was given no further elaboration, out of deference to the kids and, I think, the sheep. The animals were right there, nervous and breathing fast. In the crowded pen each animal’s inhale pressed its flank into the flank of its neighbor; each exhale gave back that same space. Together the flock vibrated on one shared frequency, a single mass of sentient life. I remembered our commutes in Shanghai, when the metro packed up tight for the stretch under the Huangpu River and my puffer jacket was all that separated me from the beating hearts of strangers. 

Here, I suppose, the office towers of Pudong would stand in for The Works. A crowded commute makes anyone feel like a sheep. But in the crush under that river each morning I felt weirdly, warmly alive.

In the pen my son was helping to herd the sheep toward the shearing chute, or rather the farmer’s wife and the dog herded while my son stood transfixed in wonder. Up close sheep are beautiful and strange: their thick coats like gaudy furniture left out in the rain, their golden eyes like lumps of Tiger’s Eye in a museum gift shop. 

My son looked at the animals. They looked right back. He stepped this way, then that, watching each step for their reaction. The sheep mirrored him—this way, then that.

And then at all once he stepped this way, and their shared radar clicked, and the sheep jogged off to join their mates in the shearing chute. Count ‘em, move ‘em, or just hop in the pen and see ‘em: you’re all one heap of life, breathing in the mud.

Then the livestock agent arrived. Not the truck, but guy who arranged the sale: shiny Lexus, muddy boots, notebook in hand. After the required small talk he took his own mumble through the pens.

What’s up with your counting, mate? he called to the farmer. I get 309.

Huh, the farmer said. 

I can’t read Kiwi man talk. Too dry, too coded. Still, I caught the tension. The farmer and agent had known each other for years, but there was money on the table here.

The agent re-checked his notes: I count 199 ewe lambs and 120 males.

Check your math, mate, the farmer said, and I could hear the win in his voice. That’s 319.

The agent shook his head, chuckling at his own mistake. I wanted those four sheep to raise a hoof and say, Thank you! We feel seen! But they and a hundred others still had backslides to be cleaned before they crossed the Cook Strait.

The agent tapped on his calculator app and then held out the results for inspection. The farmer didn’t notice. He was already leaning over the next sheep in line, clippers moving fast, the fragrant slush of green and white piling up at his feet.

So the agent bent down, too. Without a word he crouched down to the farmer’s line of sight—the sheep’s line of sight—and presented the tiny screen for approval. A single nod. No numbers spoken. The clippers buzzed on.

We couldn’t wait for the truck; my son had a playdate to meet. As we drove out of the farm we passed the sheep who’d escaped standing in a field of new winter forage. Uncounted 320 wasn’t eating, or doing much at all. He just stood there and watched us pass, unsure of his freedom and utterly alone.

Move ‘em out