After weeks of hearing me chatter non-stop about sheep, Eliyah got a bright idea: he called up our old friends Bonnie and Lowell in Naples, who raised sheep. Sure enough, they had a small ewe lamb that had been rejected by its own mother and was getting along in life by nursing other ewes when she could get away with it before she was butted away. It was a Corriedale Polypay cross. Corriedales were a breed I'd been interested in; I hadn't heard of Polypays before. At any rate, she was free, it was a ewe, and she was going to be mine! I was ecstatic. We drove up to Naples and got the lamb. I asked Lowell every conceivable question I could think of, including what sort of pen to build for her. Dad asked if we could tie her out- Lowell looked shocked and said she was much too young and small for that yet. I held Lamby in my lap as we drove home. She was so tiny, about the size of a cat. Her body was covered in tight white ringlets. I ran my hand lovingly over her wrinkled body and parted the tightly curled wool, and was appalled to discover that she was absolutely covered with ticks! There weren't just a few of them, there were probably hundreds. I started picking them off of her, but it was clearly a task that would take hours to complete.

Strangely enough, we hadn't thought of what to feed her or how to feed her until we got home. All we had was cow milk from the store and I didn't realize it then, but store milk will give lambs scours, especially if you don't know what you're doing. We didn't have a bottle, either, only a turkey baster. Dad told me she would have to learn to drink from a bowl, but despite my best efforts, she did not. I knew that the milk should be warmed for her, having read that cold milk causes scours. I wasn't very experienced with our Coleman camp stove and kept scalding the milk. I tried sucking the milk up into a turkey baster and feeding it to her that way. As soon as she felt the hard plastic tip of the baster in her mouth, she'd turn her head away abruptly and despondently. I wished we had a bottle, any kind of bottle, like the one we'd used for Cisco. Mom and Dad both said that when she got hungry enough, she'd eat, but it certainly didn't seem that way.

I struggled to get her to eat for the next several days. Mom said that I was neglecting her, because she needed to be fed every three hours, even at night, just like a human baby. The thing of it was, I could hardly get her to eat at all. Donna, who had a lot of experience with goat kids, came over and tried to help me. She held Lamby expertly and got a little bit of the milk into her mouth, but quickly informed us that the turkey baster just was not going to work. We needed the kind of black rubber nipple that fits over a glass pop bottle. They only cost .35 to .50, but Dad wouldn't buy one. He said she just wasn't hungry enough yet. Donna also mentioned that if we got a goat, maybe Lamby would nurse from the goat. If not, the goat milk would be better for her. Already she had developed the typical foul smelling yellow diarrhea that characterizes scours. Lamby's personality had gone downhill, too. She seemed lackluster and spiritless. Desperate, I went through the Nickel's Worth paper again, this time for dairy goats, because neither Della nor Penny were in milk. I found a Toggenburg doe with triplet doelings for $75. This was a fantastic deal, but Dad thought it was too much money, so we didn't get her.

Meanwhile, they didn't want her in the house during the day, and increasingly, not at night, either. I couldn't put her in with Della and Penny. Penny might be OK, but Della butted everything in sight- cats, dogs, it didn't matter. I knew that Lamby would not be safe with her. So I took the two large tractor tires in the pasture which we played with and laid them one atop the other, like two stacked doughnuts, lined it with straw, and set Lamby in there. At night I covered it with a sheet of plywood in case it rained, and to keep her safe. She didn't seem to mind being in there. I checked on her frequently during the day, picked ticks off of her. She didn't resist, just laid passively on her side. I didn't know what a bad sign this was...I thought she was just tame. When she was out of the tires, Dad made me tie her out like the goats. She didn't have enough energy to run around anyway, but insisted that maybe what my newborn lamb needed was to eat some grass.

She deteriorated pretty quickly, and I became more and more upset with the way things were turning out. I spent hours trying to get her to eat, but she wouldn't even hold her head up anymore, and everything I did get into her came right out again as yellow scoury diarrhea. Mom became angry and one day, as I sat there with tears runnign down my face, begging Lamby to eat, she said harshly, "I wish Lamby would just die so that Rebekah would spend more time doing her chores! All she thinks about is Lamby." Not much time passed before Mom got her wish. Lamby began having seizures. By the next day, she was gone. I was heartbroken, and I couldn't believe that Mom had wished for my beloved little lamb, that had never hurt anything, to die.