Laura Gilpin’s “Navajo Shepherd Boy”
—Red Rock, Laura Gilpin, Photographer, and Elizabeth Froster, 1950
We watched them come
up the ridge all day,
the little Dine boy behind
his herd of sheep, all day
across the undulating
red, great masses
of cloud threatening
hard, quick rain or
lightning, neither of which
he could take cover from.
The sheep walked and grazed.
We watched
their soft gray mouths
tear at the silver grass,
dark dirt quickly drying
into red as the sheep
moved on, fine dust
kicked up
into the boy’s face,
as he smiled
at us in passing,
and I thought
of what the rancher told us,
yesterday,
that to truly see the sheep
was to forget
our notions of it:
there is no weakness
to a hunger that must be
bottomless to keep itself alive.
Something
the boy must know,
who trails his herd
eight miles in a day
to find it pasture
on land that shrinks
and desiccates
from the herd’s need:
the sheep reshape this land
the boy can never hope
will be expanded
for himself, given
already the gift of sheep
from the government.
The boy must walk, the boy
must feed
what forever hungers,
then stand, sickened,
alongside his father later
to watch him shoot
half these ewes according
to federal
conservation; dead left
to rot and blanch
in the wash: too much flesh
to eat or sell.
The boy walks.
He does not have a hat.
He does not have a horse.
He carries his own food
in a pocket as he walks
noiselessly through the wash,
looking, for the moment,
so like the rancher
in his sense of purpose,
the one we watched
grab the struggling back
legs emerging from a sheep
and pull until we saw
the slick sac stream
from her body,
followed by the next,
as the rancher tore
the silver caul
of mucus from their mouths.
When a ewe gives birth
to two lambs she chooses
which to keep
by waiting. She watches
until the first one stands,
then comes to it
and begins licking,
roughing the blood up
into the surface
of its skin. Sometimes
the other dies.
Sometimes
the herder saves it,
and its marble eye trains
ceaselessly upon him.
That day, the other
lamb died. We watched
the ewe circle in her stone pen,
rubbing and rubbing
against it till the living
lamb scrabbled up
to follow through the gate.
We watched
as it stumbled after
through the wash,
its strangely
furrowed face a knob
of bone, a bit
of its mother’s wool
still clinging to the stone. 
Contributor’s
notes
Imogen Cunningham’s “My Father At Sixty”