If suffering is the guiding principle on the farm, I failed badly to meet the demands of it the last few days. Yesterday I discovered that Jason the Icelandic ram was suffering badly from “flystrike,” an infestation — in his case horrific — of fly maggots. Flystike can happen anywhere on a sheep’s body, but is most common around the tail, especially undocked tails, due to the collection of feces, but also anywhere on a sheep there is an open wound, or where it is warm and moist and stinky. Jason’s infestation is around his horns and down the top of his neck. There were thousands of them, and they had spread over a large portion of his head and neck. The flies lay so many eggs and the larvae hatch so quickly and the maggots are so horrifically voracious that I have no idea how long he was being eaten alive by them. It could have been a week, or only a couple of days. I know only that it must have been utterly horrible for him to feel thousands of maggots squirming about burrowing ever deeper into his flesh, especially because it was in a place that he could not scratch.

About three days ago, I noticed that the wool around Jason’s neck had become soiled. He is white, and the wool around his neck had become brown. I didn’t really think anything of it. There is a wood pile in the paddock that I had seen him scratching his head in, and I assumed that maybe he had rubbed his head and neck in the ashes that were on the ground from the last time we burned the pile. Of course, he was desperately trying to scratch at the maggots, not just simply scratching an itch. And, of course, it wasn’t ashes that had made his neck wool dirty. It was blood and excrement — from the thousands of maggots devouring his flesh.

The day before yesterday, Jason wasn’t quite himself. He seemed a bit apathetic, but, still, I made no connection between the dirty neck wool and his condition. I just made a mental note to keep an eye on him. Throughout the day I saw him alternately up and grazing, but still a bit off. Yesterday morning while doing my round of chores before leaving for the farmers market, he was off laying by himself, well away from the rest of the flock. He was clearly in trouble. At first, because of the position of his body and how far away he was, I thought he was dead, but as I approached him, he raised his head, and then he lumbered to his feet and started to walk away. I walked after him and after a  few feet he stopped and I took a hold of his horns. There were a few green metallic flies buzzing about his head and a couple had alighted on the wool on the back of his head. There was a bit of blood between his horns. That is when, finally, it registered…flystrike. I didn’t take a closer look. There was nothing I could do about it as I had to get to the farmer’s market, and it wasn’t going to kill him in the next few hours, so I just let him go. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t want to know at that moment just how bad it was.

Over the past month of nearly non-stop rain, I have been worried about flystrike, but not in the Icelandics. I have been worried about the half of the Texel-Cheviot ewes that have undocked tails. Their rear ends are soiled with manure and a bunch of them have quite a few “dags,” clumps of manure and wool dangling from their back ends. That is the classic conditions for flystrike and the very reason that farmers dock the tails of long-tailed wool sheep. It is also the reason for the horrific practice of mulesing common in Australian merino sheep. Mulesing is the practice of cutting away the wool and skin of a sheep around its tail to prevent manure build up. To increase wool production, the naturally occurring folds of skin in Merino sheep have been increased through selective breeding practices. More folds means more surface area means more wool means more money — but it also means a higher incidence of flystrike. Mulesing is done without anesthetic and is a very bloody, and so obviously quite painful, practice. So far, the Texel-Cheviots have not been subject to flystrike, although now I feel the need to take a closer look to make sure.

Jason, as do all Icelandics, have naturally short tails, which is one of the reasons I chose Icelandics as I wanted to avoid tail docking. However, while Jason does not have a long tail, he has large curly horns that grow close to his head. As the wool on his head grew, it filled in the space between his skull and his horns. Then a month’s worth of nearly constant rain kept it constantly damp, and because the horns are a major site of heat exhange, those damp pockets were also nice and warm. It is likely that Jason scratched his head on the wood pile because the wet wool itched, and one of the sticks broke the skin causing an open wound right in an area that happens to be the absolutely perfect environment for fly maggots to live in, warm and damp. The environmental conditions in those pockets were so perfect that it is possible that Jason didn’t even need to have cut himself to start the strike. The flies might have chosen that site anyway.

Regardless, the strike started and I just twiddled my thumbs. My inexperience and shortcomings really shine when there is a problem. At this point I pick up on the fact that something is wrong, but I still just sit there, partly because I hope it will resolve itself, and partly because I am overwhelmed by the anxiety of ignorance and fear that I won’t have the skills to take care of whatever the problem is. The likelihood that all new farmers make similar mistakes and suffer the pains of traveling along the learning curve affords little comfort whenever the image of the writhing mass of maggots half buried in Jason’s flesh pops into my head.

On my way out the door to the farmers market I left my brother a note letting him know that Jason was not well and that we would need to take care of him when I got back. When I got back, I explained to him what I thought the problem was.

“Maggots? I don’t deal well with maggots,” Peter said sort of rhetorically as we walked down to the barn to get a lead rope. I didn’t respond. I needed to take care of the sheep and I needed Peter’s help, maggots or no.

As soon as I looped the lead rope around Jason’s neck, I could see the maggots beneath the wool. His skin was crawling with them. We led him out of the paddock and over to the barnyard where I had the shears set up. Peter held the lead rope while I sheared the wool off. At the first clear site of the maggots, I had to fight the urge to be sick. There is something about the site of a writhing mass of maggots that turns the stomach. It seems universal enough that it serves some purpose, perhaps making sure we don’t eat rotten meat, even if we are starving. Even a starving person loses their hunger when their stomach turns. When the wool fell away it released the stench of rotten flesh, and I think I even groaned as I held back the urge to throw up. Peter was struggling as bad as I was, but he stayed focused and held the rope. Luckily,  Jason is both very tame, and was feeling very sick, so he pretty much just stood there.

After a few minutes, I had sheared the area as best I could. The maggots went from his horns halfway down the back of his neck towards his shoulder. They were clearly worse on one side of his head than the other. Now that there was a writhing mass of exposed maggots, we needed to get them off of him. I wanted to kill them with an insecticide, but I didn’t know what I could use and if I had it, and I didn’t know if killing all of those maggots in place would make things worse. I called Jen, who was up at the house, from my cellphone and asked her to check it out on the internet. Meanwhile, I decided that Peter and I should get to work getting the maggots off of Jason. Peter held Jason while I went into the barn looking for appropriate tools. I found the perfect one, an old file the farrier had left behind. The end of the file is a long blunt point, a perfect probe to slide along the folds of Jason’s skin where the maggots were concentrated.

At first, the maggots fell off in great squirming clumps because there were so many of them. It took about an hour to get the majority of them off. Periodically, Peter or I would need to turn away, but after a while we became pretty desensitized. By the end, we were picking the stragglers off by hand.

Jen had found some information on the internet, but I decided to call Dave Gessert my sheep shearer for his opinion. Not only does he know a thing or two about sheep, his wife Mary is a vet. Dave said to shear the area really well, wash the maggots off with water, then follow up by cleaning the area with a mild detergent, and then, most importantly, get the area as completely dry as possible. The maggots thrive in the damp. They do not do well in dry conditions. Peter and I did the best we could with a hose to wash the maggots off. We got nearly all of the large maggots, but the next generation, the tiny ones that were only a couple of millimeters long, of which there were hundreds if not thousands, were well protected from the water in the nooks and crannies of Jason’s skin. After using just water, I mixed a tablespoon of povidone iodine solution with about a gallon of water, which turns out to have been a bit of overkill, but it didn’t bother Jason. I could have just used a mild hand detergent. Peter very carefully applied the solution with a sponge, being especially careful to keep it out of Jason’s eyes. A few minutes later, just as carefully, we rinsed it off.

Then, after about three hours of standing almost perfectly still and never once making any real effort to get away, Jason cried. “He’s had it,” I said. “We’ve got to finish. Go grab those towels so we can start to get him dried off.” As Peter walked away to get the towels, I sort of relaxed my hold on Jason’s horn, and as soon as he felt just that tiny bit of “personal” space, he peed. I am pretty sure he cried out of discomfort because he needed to pee and didn’t feel comfortable doing it while we were poking and prodding him and hosing him down. He peed for a long time, so we waited for him to finish, and then when he was finished, we started to towel him off. After toweling him off, we used a blow drier to get him completely dry. I had worried about what would happen when we turned a blow drier on right next to Jason’s head, but he just stood there perfectly still until we were finished.

Then, finally, after nearly four hours, we put Jason in a stall in the barn. I gave him some hay and he immediately started eating. Then I gave him some water. Peter and I watched him for a few minutes and then went up to the house at about 8pm. Luckily the pizza shop down in town was open even though it was the Fourth of July because I was beat and I sure as hell wasn’t cooking dinner. I checked on Jason at 9:30pm and then went to bed.

At about 11:15pm my father called to tell me that my 97-year old grandmother had died. Today we’ve got to take care of Jason, build a chicken coop, pick up 100 four week old meat chickens from a friend, feed and water the animals, finish the pig pasture fence, and then move a group of pigs a quarter of a mile to another field, and during all of that I’ve got to figure out how to open myself up enough to let my grandmother in at least a little bit because right now I’m shut down as tight as a ship in a storm and I can’t hardly feel anything, but over the years I have found that one purpose of funerals is to pry open even hard cases like me.