We had a lamb die this afternoon. I'm not sure what the cause of death was. Sheep can die for a thousand different reasons, some usual, some so implausible as to defy description. His body was in the barnyard. It was raining when I got down there in the truck to carry him off up the hill to the spot we use as a graveyard. When I picked him up, there was a patch of dry ground underneath, lighter in color than the wet barrnyard, in the shape of a lamb. It looked half like a crime scene outline, half like some ancient petroglyph line drawing saying, here we once had sheep.