CV02. Counting Sheep Read online

  “Well,” she said, “this is an emergency too.”

  Snow White lay down in the straw and grunted even louder.

  I watched her closely. Why weren’t the front hooves coming out? Where was the nose? As I watched, out came a strange-looking woolly puff. I stared at it in horror. It was the tail. The lamb was trying to come out backward, and it was stuck.

  Mother took one look at my face and said, “Calpurnia, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s backward,” I muttered. “It’s what they call a breech birth.”

  “Is that bad? That’s bad, isn’t it?”

  Snow White grunted louder.

  I told myself, All right, Calpurnia, you think you’re so smart. What about all that reading you’ve been doing at Dr. Pritzker’s office? What good is it? Don’t just stand there, do something.

  “Oh,” said Mother, as if reading my thoughts, “somebody do something.”

  Travis had turned a faint greenish color, so no help there. Mother was back to wringing her hands again and looked like she might faint. So that left me. Okay.

  I washed my hands in the bucket and dried them with the towel.

  “What are you doing?” cried Mother.

  “I think I know how to do this,” I said, and climbed into the pen.

  “Lord help us,” Mother whispered.

  Please do, I thought. I need all the help I can get. Baby Snowball kept pushing himself in the way, nuzzling at his mother.

  “Travis,” I said, “get this lamb out of here.”

  “Uh, what do you want me to do?”

  “Just hold it,” I snapped. “I can’t do anything with it underfoot.”

  He reluctantly climbed in and pulled the lamb to the other side of the pen. Snowball started bleating. Louder and louder. It was amazing how much noise such a small organism could make.

  I struggled to shut out the noise and think. All right. I closed my eyes for a second and tried to call up the page about breech births. Yes. There it was. You had to turn the lamb around. And the only way to turn it around was to push it back in. And then pull it out headfirst. If you couldn’t turn it, it would never come out. And if it never came out, both mother and baby would die. And if they died, what was the use of all the studying I had done? What use was all the hard-won knowledge I was so proud of? Maybe I wasn’t such a smart girl after all.

  I gritted my teeth and pushed gently on the lamb.

  “Are you mad?” cried Mother. “You’ve got to pull it out.”

  “I’ve got to push it in first to turn it around.”

  “Are you sure?” said Travis.

  “How do you know?” said Mother.

  I ignored her and pushed again. Snow White pushed back. I pushed harder this time and felt the lamb move a few inches up the birth canal.

  “This can’t be right,” Mother said, fretting.

  I pushed again, and Snow White squealed in protest. Or maybe pain. But I couldn’t stop to think about that. The second lamb was now where I needed it.

  “Quick, Travis, hand me that bit of twine behind you.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Right behind you on the fence post. Hurry.”

  He fumbled it to me, all the while trying to keep Snowball away.

  I took the twine and made a loop in one end. Now came the tricky part. I pushed the length of twine past the lamb and tried to snag one of the front hooves with it. The books made it sound so easy. Ha! I got it on about the eighth try. Slowly pushing the hind end away from me and pulling the front hoof toward me with the twine, I felt the lamb turn to face me.

  Yes! Here it came, the front hooves followed by the nose. I took hold of the hooves and pulled, and a moment later the lamb flopped out onto the straw headfirst as it was supposed to. But it lay completely still. It looked completely dead.

  8

  “You did it,” shouted Travis.

  “Good heavens,” said Mother.

  “Oh no,” I said. Was it alive? Had I killed it with my clumsy doctoring? What made me think I could possibly—

  One ear twitched.

  “Look,” said Travis.

  A hind leg twitched.

  “It’s alive!” said Mother.

  “Quick, Travis, hand me the towel.”

  I took the rough towel and started rubbing the lamb all over to get the circulation going. I wiped the mucus from its nose and mouth, and it took a deep gasping breath. Snow White looked at it and started crooning again.

  A few minutes later, both lambs were up and nursing. Their mother munched happily on some fresh hay, turning every now and then to look with interest at these two new woolly bits of life.

  I washed my hands in the bucket. And then something really strange happened. Little black spots danced before my eyes, and horrible prickly hives raced over my skin. My legs turned all rubbery and wouldn’t hold me up. I sat down rather suddenly in the hay.

  Mother said, “Are you all right?”

  I took a few deep breaths. “Yes. At least … I think so.” The little black spots danced away, and I slowly got to my feet.

  Mother cleared her throat. “I think that’s quite enough excitement for one day, don’t you? Most … unexpected. I suppose that thanks are in order. So thank you, Calpurnia. That second lamb will be worth some extra money. Would you like to name it?”

  Within me an idea bloomed, speaking at first in a tiny voice.

  “No,” I said, “Travis can name it.”

  “Gee, thanks, Callie,” he said.

  The idea grew and spoke louder to me. But did I dare say it aloud?

  I did. I stared at my boots and said in a small voice, “I’d like to be paid.”

  Mother blinked at me. “What?”

  “Paid. For my work.”

  The two of them gawked at me as if I’d suddenly started spouting a foreign language.

  “Yes,” I said louder. “I saved the mother. I saved the twin.”

  “I really don’t understand where you get this idea of payment. Asking for cash is the height of unladylike behavior. I don’t know how any daughter of mine ever—”

  I couldn’t believe it. I had just saved her valuable livestock, and now she was going to lecture me on proper behavior. I fought to keep the anger out of my voice. “Then give me the twin. I saved it. I’ll raise it. It should be mine.”

  She hesitated.

  Travis said, “Yes, Mother, give her the lamb.” He turned the full force of his best sunny smile on her. “That only seems fair. Don’t you think so? Please?”

  Mother wavered and then crumbled in the face of Travis’s pleading.

  “All right,” she said. “I suppose you deserve it.”

  Ahh, the lamb was mine. I was getting paid; that lamb would grow up to be worth a nice sum.

  “What are you going to do with it?” said Travis. “You’re not going to … to…”

  “I think I’ll sell it at auction in the fall. But don’t worry, for wool, not for mutton.”

  “Oh, good,” he said. “That’s good. Can I still name it? Even though it’s yours?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “It should be called … Curly.”

  We looked at him in surprise. “Really?” I said.

  “Don’t you like it? It’s a good name. It’s a curly little lamb.”

  “I just thought you’d want to name it, oh, I don’t know, Snowdrop or Snowflake or something like that.”

  “Nope. Curly.”

  So Curly it was.

  Curly thrived, along with his brother, Snowball. His wool was every bit as fine as his mother’s. I ended up selling him at the fall auction for the grand sum of $6.75. A fortune! All my brothers except for Travis moaned about how unfair it was.

  And what did I do with the money? Why, I ordered a fine magnifying glass of my very own from the Sears Catalogue so that I wouldn’t have to keep borrowing Granddaddy’s (not that he seemed to mind, but still). It came two weeks later, a beautiful heavy circle of glass with
a bone handle packed snugly in its own leather box.

  Suddenly the miniature world grew huge as I studied everything through it. A tiny beetle turned into a ferocious dragon; a blade of grass became a whole forest; a tadpole turned into a sea monster.

  My brother Lamar, who had never before shown any interest in Nature, took one envious look at my magnifier and groused, “I could have done it. I could have birthed that lamb, and then that money would be mine.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t see you standing there ready to catch any kind of lamb, Lamar, regular or breech.”

  “You were just lucky, that’s all.”

  “Lucky? Ha! Granddaddy says you make your own luck. He says the more you know, the luckier you get. It’s not about sheer chance, you see. It’s about being ready.”

  Lamar, who had a nasty habit of pulling braids and giving fierce pinches when no one was looking, said, “Well, then, are you ready for this?” and sprang at me. But I’d been watching him, and I was prepared. I jumped sideways and took off for the woods at top speed, knowing I could outfox him any day of the week. Because I was smarter. And faster. And readier. And luckier.

  About the Author

  Jacqueline Kelly won the Newbery Honor for her first book, The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate. She was born in New Zealand and raised in Canada, in the dense rainforests of Vancouver Island. Her family then moved to El Paso, Texas, and Kelly attended college in El Paso, then went on to medical school in Galveston. After practicing medicine for many years, she went to law school at the University of Texas, and after several years of law practice, realized she wanted to write fiction. Her first story was published in the Mississippi Review in 2001. She now makes her home with her husband and various cats and dogs in Austin and Fentress, Texas. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Jacqueline Kelly

  Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Jennifer L. Meyer

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kelly, Jacqueline, author. | Meyer, Jennifer L., illustrator.

  Title: Counting sheep: Calpurnia Tate, girl vet / Jacqueline Kelly; illustrated by Jennifer L. Meyer.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2017. | Series: Calpurnia Tate, girl vet | Summary: In rural Texas in 1901, thirteen-year-old Callie nurses a butterfly with a broken wing and delivers a baby lamb, despite her mother’s disapproval of Callie’s “unladylike behavior.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016002104 (print) | LCCN 2016028637 (ebook) ISBN 9781627798709 (hardback) | ISBN 9781627798716 (Ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Veterinarians—Fiction. | Naturalists—Fiction. | Sex role—Fiction. | Family life—Texas—Fiction. | Texas—History—1846–1950—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Animals / General. | JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / United States / 20th Century.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.K296184 Co 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.K296184 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016002104

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  First Edition—2017

  eISBN 9781627798716

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  About the Author

  Copyright