Lamb watching

Greg and I are spying on the lambs. It's a cool, rainy day anyway, good for being inside. We walk from window to window with the binoculars and the camera, observing but unobserved. The lambs born first show off their superiority: they butt the smaller ones, who sometimes butt back, and sometimes just settle down on the ground, or run off to nurse. The older lambs like to be king of the mountain, and climb up onto any higher level they can find: a granite boulder caught here since the ice age, the concrete platform of the solar tracker, a wicker chair. They butt the others off: get out of here; this is mine! 

There’s nothing these lambs meet up with that does not incite their curiosity. They must explore wood piles, daffodils, chairs, tree trunks, propane tanks, ATV wheels, whatever is in their way. It’s all new!  They literally gambol about.  They are gamboling distilled.  They leap off the ground from all four feet, they bounce across the grass like the world is their trampoline, they jump over each other. They are so new that I can see their entire bodies, their muscles and bones and inward shapes, not yet layered over with meat or fat or wool, drying umbilical cords still dangling beneath them. 

They are so new that they firmly believe their own mother is the most beautiful mother in the world, even if a more objective observer could say she was a bit mangy. Then, suddenly overtaken by so much newness, they lie down and rest for a while.