After the long drive from the city trauma center hospital, where I’m a chaplain, I arrived at home late, hot and tired. There was a message on the phone machine from an elderly San Antonio area woman. She had two young “goats” in her yard and she was worried for their safety as she lived rather close to a busy state highway. The lady told me that she is partially disabled and is only able to navigate outdoors with the use of an electric golf cart. She did not feel able to care for orphan goats.

We talked for some time and I finally agreed to make the two and a half-hour drive from my Elgin, Texas, sanctuary/home to help catch and transport the little animals.

I arrived in San Antonio in the early evening of the following day and caught only a glimpse of the lost “goats” before they ran off. That glimpse, however, told me that these goat children were, in fact, newborn Barbados lambs who desperately needed the attention of a mother.

The kind-hearted lady and I discussed various methods of catching the little ones. I finally opted to leave a large wire dog crate with a bucket of oats and corn inside in hopes that they would be drawn to go inside sometime during the night. With that, I left for the return to Elgin, thinking that it would be some time before I heard from the lady again.

Well, at 6:45 AM on Sunday morning my telephone rang. It was the kindly lady in San Antonio saying, “They just went into the cage and my son-in-law closed the door. They’re in there but they’re not happy about it.”

So began my return trip to San Antonio. I arrived to find two terrified babies in a big dog crate. They were no more than a week old and very hungry although they had been trying to nibble on grasses and the grains I had left. I learned that they had probably come from a neighbor’s property. The neighbor had refused to claim them, although she had a number of Barbados sheep, and ultimately acknowledged that some of her dogs had killed two of the ewes just that week.

We made the long drive back to Elgin and began the difficult process of teaching two uncertain infants to suck from a rubber nipple. Within a day or two the ewe lamb Bea caught on and did very well with her bottle but her brother was completely baffled by the strange thing in his mouth. I had to begin feeding him with a twelve cc syringe which certainly made for long feeding times. After a number of weeks of syringe feedings little Andrew saw the light and he began to suck actively on his syringe. At that point I was able to reintroduce him to his bottle and he quickly caught up with his sister.

Both lambs had white muscle disease at the time they came to Dreamtime and were generally malnourished but with vitamin injections and so forth began to turn around. They have thrived on goat’s milk and have grown and developed well. They have never doubted that they are sheep and hang out contentedly with their Merino cousins. I believe that I have been accepted into their world as a rather strange-looking sheep mama but since I bring them good stuff to drink and provide them good oats and hay, they regard me with affectionate tolerance.

Our sanctuary world has been enormously enriched with their presence and we are again reminded that love and beauty come in many forms.