Magic the Mystery Lamb

I thought he was a dog when I first saw him on the kitchen floor one Friday afternoon in March. He was fuzzy, like a Portuguese Water Dog, and oddly-shaped. He was perfectly, purely black, from head to toe to tail; his eyes were shiny black in his coal-coloured face.

He bleated and I suddenly understood.

Lambs are sometimes rejected by their mothers. They smell funny, or young sheep don't understand what they are, or one of a set of twins is suspected of having slipped, cuckoo-like, into her womb and is kicked away. All small-time sheep farmers are guilty of the odd lamb in the kitchen. Sometimes they are carefully revived on the lowest setting in the oven. As a vegetarian, I have always thought this a cruel foreshadowing of their potential fate, but I suppose the truth is that pet lambs are almost never eaten.

Magic had no such terrible origin tale. He didn't seem to have a mother. He had appeared, alone and early in the year, and insisted on coming home with my father. Nor was he weak enough to need to go in the oven; he determinedly wobbled around the kitchen on shiny hooves, reminding me of a teenage girl staggering slightly in her first pair of high heels. He wanted milk, and he wanted it NOW.

At first, we had to share refrigerated cow's milk, gently warmed. It doesn't have enough fat, but it'll do in a pinch. I think we might have added some cream. By this stage, I was cooing. I had completely fallen for this high-pitched little creature. His unbelievable blackness entranced me; most black sheep have a spot or two of white somewhere, but not he. I christened him Black Magic, after an old fashioned brand of boxed chocolates, but it fell away to Magic within minutes. He was too little for a double-barrelled name.

We put him in the porch for the night, on a blanket. He clip-clopped around on the lino on his little stiletto legs, growing stronger by the minute. My city-girl cat stopped in her tracks when she saw him. She had no idea what he was.

By morning, he wanted to make it clear that his accommodation was substandard. He woke the whole house, bleating; he downed a whole bottle of milk and demanded more, more, more. My father bought powdered ewe's milk and Magic was delighted.

All this time, we wondered whence he had come. Would some outraged crofter show up any minute to accuse of lambnapping? Enquiries were made as to his provenance, but everyone denied him. No, they didn't have any black sheep; none of their ewes had shown any sign of lambing; he was far too early to be one of theirs. Magic was fairly sure he was one of ours, and made it clear that he would be happy to move into the spare bedroom any time he was asked.

My mother put her foot down. One night in her house was enough for any tiny, riotous sheep. His toilet training was less than ideal and his volume control was broken. Magic went to live in the porch of my grandmother's empty house down the road, on the grounds that it was still too cold for him to be outside and the pen in the barn was not yet ready for abandoned babies. He was probably the first sheep in the history of sheep to have a house of his own. He greeted my father or I at the door every three hours, enthusiastically headbutting our legs.

I had visions of keeping him forever, conveniently forgetting all my childhood fears of rams. He would live in the garden and his horns would somehow be as perfectly black as the rest of him. But late on Sunday night, disaster struck.

Magic's bleating was as urgent as ever when I came to the door, but for once I didn't find him directly behind it. Somehow, he had tripped or slipped and become wedged in a corner. He couldn't get up without help. When I pulled him up, he did stand and walk around a little, but he was weak and shaking. He was happy to see the bottle, and I thought the milk would make him better. As he drank, though, he seemed to become more and more listless. By the time he was finished, I was calling my father in a panic. Despite his much greater experience, he didn't know what was wrong any more than I did. We tried to keep him warm and comfort him, but by the next morning, he was dead.

It was the last bottle of milk that had killed him. Magic probably had hypothermia, a frequent cause of death in early lambs, and more milk was entirely the wrong treatment. Digesting milk requires energy that would be better spent on warming up. I wish I had learned that before Magic appeared in our lives.

Hypothermia is most common in baby animals, because of their lower fat reserves, but any mammal can suffer from it, if they're exposed to the cold for long enough. If an animal you care for is shivering, lacking in energy or has suddenly developed poor co-ordination, focus on warming them up first and contact a veterinarian for individual advice if at all possible. You can read about first aid for hypothermic pets here.

There'll never be another lamb as perfectly black and as adorable as Magic, and I'll always feel guilty that I was the one who killed him with ignorance. At least I know now how to stop it from ever happening again.