July 4, 1994 will long be remembered in Holt Family History as the Day of the Great Sheep Round-Up. Earlier in the week, George stopped by the Hopewell Feed and Seed store on his way home from work.  He went in to pick up a bag of horse feed,  and came out with  what he – and he only – considered fantastic news. The owner, bless his sweet heart, had an entire flock of sheep that we could buy!

Oy, vey — such a DEAL!!

Maybe you don’t know how badly we did not need a flock of sheep. But, not being disposed to naysay an agricultural opportunity, we got up bright and early on July 4, and with three sons,  and our tried and true friend (and 6th cousin once removed),  Barbara, we convoyed in three trucks pulling horse trailers from Powhatan down to Dinwiddie County.

I’d never met the owner of the feed store, but I pictured a courtly, white-haired Virginia gentleman — an old-style Cavalier, maybe, with a handlebar mustache,  who rose with the roosters to lovingly tend his flock.  We looked forward to the scenic drive and naively made plans for a late afternoon cook-out.

But, as I passed throught the living room on the way out the door, “Good Morning America” reported that famed author and veterinarian, James Herriot, had been hospitalized that very day after being attacked by — what else?  A flock of sheep.  We should have seen the handwriting on the wall.

George assured me that the owner would have the sheep penned up and ready to load when we got there, so it wouldn’t take very long.. (Just remember — sheep are DUMB. Sheep owners are sometimes dumbER.)

Just before eight o’clock, right on time, we three drivers bounced our trucks down a bumpy dirt road — but instead of a stately ante-bellum manor house at the end of the lane,  a compound of ante-bellum double-wides came into view. Peaceful and quiet it was not. The early morning silence was shattered by a chorus of frenzied howls coming from dozens of tormented canines; all of questionable breeding but obviously related. The owner, oblivious to the dogs, walked sleepily out the door nursing a cup of coffee, and to my great disappointment,  he didn’t  remotely resemble Robert E. Lee. Dressed in camouflage pants and a muscle shirt, with a torn olive drab bandanna around his shaggy head, he was the consummate representation of “Rambo meets Hulk Hogan.” Unfortunately for us, he had started on his Fifth for the Fourth on the Third, and had forgotten all about penning up the sheep. Not to worry, he assured us, we’d have ’em loaded in no time. Right.

We found the flock — 30 or so head of Suffolks –thin, skittish, and badly in need of shearing– in a VERY large pasture – about ten acres. And to the less-than-bucolic barks, howls and yips of dozens of inbred hounds, we began the hopeless process of trying to catch thirty terrified sheep. Enticing them with grain was totally unsuccessful — they’d never been fed, so even Purina’s best sheep pellets meant nothing to them.  One of the dogs had some sheepdog in his ancestry, but succeeded only in driving them farther and farther away from the trailers. Bryan and Chip tackled a straggler every now and then, but gave up after being dragged 30 or 40 feet.  And then, Rambo’s 10-year-old son, “Bubba” (no lie) revved up this huge John Deere tractor and chased the sheep around in circles, to no avail. They were in no mood to cooperate.

Rambo watched for a while, deep in thought, and came up with a brilliant solution. He figured he’d go get his paint stallion, Thunder, and round ’em up —  cowboy style.

But he wasn’t any more adept at catching Thunder than he was at herding sheep. We waited 45 minutes, learning to identify individual dogs by their distinctive yelps, while he caught the paint stallion, tacked him up, and rode him back up to the sheep field. Well, it soon became obvious to everyone except Rambo that sheep aren’t a whit intimidated by paint stallions.

Meanwhile, Rambo’s wife and 5-year old daughter, Maggie, came out to join the fun. Mrs. Rambo was outfitted for the occasion in a denim dress and straw hat accented by a black silk rose. A camera dangled from around her neck to complement the ensemble.  Maggie, somewhat of free spirit, was dressed – barely – in a frilly red negligee several sizes too big and many years too old for her.  It it hung by one strap from her shoulder — and she was barefooted.  In a field full of farm-animal excrement.  Barefooted.  A step or two away from a paint stallion.  Barefooted.

Mrs. Rambo, hands on hips, began coaching from sidelines. “Len, it’ll never work thataway!….yer not doin’ it right!….Shut up, Mud…Hush, Cisco!….”  She screamed…..and the dogs kept barking…and the sheep just went wherever they darn well pleased.  And did I mention that it was getting very hot and muggy?

So, capricious little  Maggie ran around the pasture, hiking up her negligee, picking up baby field mice, hollering at the dogs, and getting precariously close to the wheels of the big John Deere.  I’d had about enough, so the next time she got within arm’s reach,  I scooped her up, looked her in the eye, tossed her into the bed of an F-150, and said,

“If you  get  out of that pick-up truck I’ll break every bone in your body!”

That worked —for about 8 seconds, when she told me she didn’t “haf to!”

George and the boys, dripping with sweat,  kept walking patiently around the pasture, and every time it looked like the flock was finally cornered, the sheep would cut and run, stampeding in thirty different directions.

Rambo gave up on the paint stallion, took off the bridle and let him run loose in the field.

BIG mistake —we knew after a couple of equine trumpet calls that Thunder was interested only in doing What Stallions Do Best. Maggie yelled, “Daddy, yo’ stallion’s tryin’ to get to them mares.”

We looked, and sure enough, he was succeeding — through a wire fence. And the dogs kept barking, the wife kept screaming, the sheep kept running away, and I began to wonder if we had dropped into the Twilight Zone.

Eventually, George and the boys devised a way to herd the sheep into a corner and fence them in with unhooked pasture gates, and then they actually picked  ’em up, one at a time, and threw them  onto the trailer. Bryan grabbed one of the ewes by the head, wrestled her front feet into the rig, and the look of triumph on his face changed to pure disgust as a warm stream of sheep urine ran down his leg.

It took five hours — FIVE HOURS of our 4th of July —  to get the sheep loaded. That was the good news. The bad news was that the cream of the crop, the piece de resistance, the registered Suffolk ram, the one George REALLY wanted, was running loose out in the woods. Ignoring our impassioned pleas to “Forget the ram!!” George jumped into the car, and with a maniacal gleam in his eye, blazed a trail through the woods with my shiny new Suburban and horse trailer. At this point, I began to seriously question the sanity of the man I so naively married twenty years ago.

It only took Rambo and George about another hour to FIND the ram. Then they had to rope him, wrestle him to the ground, and coax him onto the trailer.  My beloved  Suburban finally reappeared from the woods, covered in mud, but the driver was jubilant. The rest of us were hot, tired, hungry, irritated, miserable, and desperately in need of indoor plumbing. Aggravated to the nines, we slammed the metal doors of the horse trailers, headed our convoy out the driveway and stopped at the double-wide to pay Rambo an outrageous sum of money. And when George, still giddy from his conquest, turned around to climb back into his pickup, one of those confound hounddogs ran up, attacked him, and took a bite out of his leg.

• And that’s the truth.

Copyright 1995, Elizabeth F. Holt