May 24, 2022

So many hikers on the trail today. I know we have little to fear from them. Still, I worry. As my grandbaabaa in Trout River warned, “There’s a black sheep in every family.”

They must have all read that Green Gardens is one of the best hikes in Gros Morne National Park. I agree.

High headlands cloaked in lush, green grasses. Yum! A boreal forest full of low-lying plants for my lambs and me. Hate that tuckamore, though. Coastal meadows with lots of grass and flowers—some already blooming. Fresh water in Trout River, which parallels half of the trail, more at Long Pond and at the waterfall just before Old Man Cove. And the views—when I feel I can take my eyes off the lambs, I never tire of looking out at Bonne Bay.

It amuses me to watch hikers descend the staircase to the cove. We can lampede down that slope in half the time. Even with my new lambs, I could cover this 9.4 kilometre in-out trail in far less time than the four hours it takes them.

How they struggle on the return leg. (I hear it’s more than a thousand feet up back to the trailhead, but that’s the Americans talking. 340 metres is our measure.) People should figure out that a set of hiking poles wouldn’t give them four legs like us, but it would be the closest they could come to matching our dexterity.

But people think we sheep are stupid.

Take that couple from Colorado talking to that pair who call themselves Spice and Magellan, telling them about their new grandtwins, born last night. It’s rare for sheep to have twins, but I did, too!

Visitors ooh and aah about the wild shape of the volcanic seastacks. I’m not interested—nothing grows up there for us to eat. And pillow lava? Baa! Poor image I say. I wouldn’t use the word “pillow” or think of laying my head down on molten rock from 100 kilometres beneath the ancient seafloor. Baaad metaphor. Give me a grassy tussock any day.

“Ewenice,” my friends say, “Some hikers think we’re wild!” Free to roam all summer, yes. But we spend our winters in warm barns on the farms around Trout River. Hikers probably don’t even know that my owners are descendants of the Crockers.

And why call the cove at the end of the trail Steves Cove? There are more sheep than Steves, as anyone on this trail knows.  

…

July 5, 2024

I channelled Spice today, sensing she was writing about us at Green Gardens.

It took me awhile, but I led her to a book her daughter gave her, On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor.

(Moor–perfect name for a writer about the outdoors.) And guess what? He’s been to Newfoundland, and he wrote about sheep is this book!

He knows we’re smart. He mentions our role in the word bellwether. Wether is a castrated ram trained to follow spoken commands and fitted with a bell. The leader of a flock of us.

Anyway, he sums up how I feel out here in the summer with all the hikers:

On wild land, wild thoughts can flourish. There, we can feel all the ragged edges of what we do not know, and we make room for other living things to live differently.

Navigation

Hempsted, Andrew. Newfoundland and Labrador. Moon Guides. Berkely: Avalon Travel, 2017.

Moor, Robert. On Trails: An Exploration. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.