The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

When I first encountered Helen Whybrow’s The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life earlier this summer, reviewing it for Civil Eats, I found myself immediately immersed in its sensorial richness and unflinching honesty. Since then, the book has been longlisted for the National Book Award in Nonfiction and it’s no surprise why. Whybrow writes of farming with a rare intimacy, where ecological observation, maternal instinct, and generational land stewardship overlap in daily acts of care and improvisation. Her sentences hum with the same vitality as the landscapes she tends: lambs bonded through their mothers  to the hillside, fields alive with both medicine and menace, mornings so exquisite they blur the line between labor and reverie. The Salt Stones explores terrain we at MadAg care deeply about: the importance and precarious existence of small farms, regenerative farming with the wild, raising meat humanely and seeing the bigger picture of humans’ kinship with nature. In this excerpt, we glimpse the heart of her work, a season of lambing, a child learning to shepherd, and the eternal balance between beauty and peril that defines life on the land. We hope you enjoy this glimpse into The Salt Stones and that it calls you to read the book in its entirety.

Jonnah Perkins, Mad Agriculture Director of Media

IT IS ONE OF THOSE PERFECT SPRING MORNINGS WHEN A thin mist hovering over the ground magnifies the bright green of the world, and small birds dart in and out of the soft veil with great purpose and lilting song. The new leaves on the sugar maples behind the house look like the crumpled trembling wings of a bat, poised above tasseled blossoms of the most delicate red and gold. Ferns are unfurling from the leaf litter on the edge of the lawn, papery copper skin splitting open to reveal tight green galaxies. The overflow from the farm spring rushes through a patch of red-stemmed pussy willows bursting with yellow pollen, and pulses into the pond, drenching the first bright whorls of field mint and pennyroyal. The pond exhales a fine mist, touching everything that is newly born, shiny, and ephemeral.

I was up before dawn to check only on lambs, but in this light, everything calls out to be noticed. I make a round through the blueberry field and apple orchards to the north of the barn. Rhubarb pushes up bold folds of leaves from bare earth, and the flowering plum trees hum with a cloud of tiny black mining bees. The century-old apple trees, some of them no more than a hollow rind of bark with a few random limbs, are covered with downy gray-green leaves and a pink blush of blossoms.

When I finally come inside the house, it’s late. From the kitchen I hear the creak of the school bus as it brakes at the end of our steep driveway, then passes on without stopping. Peter’s boots are gone, and I know he’s already up in the woods, cutting some trees that came down across the logging road. When I run upstairs to wake Wren for school she is already up, and she begs me to let her stay home. Her bedroom window overlooks the pond to the south, and the light on the water casts a shimmer across her ceiling. She knows it’s splendid outside, not to be missed for anything.

“I’ll watch the sheep all day and keep them from running away,” she begs.

I pause before I answer. I am not that popular with her first-grade teacher at the moment, given the number of tardy notes we have accumulated when mornings got away from us in the chaos of lambing season. Peter and I never shy away from letting her skip school if there’s a good reason, and she’s already an expert at entertaining herself while we work around the farm, but when she’s done with being independent, she’s done, and I have to be done too.

Having her home scatters my attention even more than it already is in the madness of spring on the farm. But she has an idea that captures my imagination too. A free-range day. “Okay … let’s try it,” I reply after some thought. “Today I could use a serious and expert Shepherd.”

BIRTHING SEASON IS OVER NOW. FOR THE FIFTY-THREE LAMBS all marked on the clipboard in the barn, only two are marked “died at birth,” which means it was my best season so far. It’s hard not to fall in love with every one. Each lamb has its own coloring and personality. Some are white with golden faces or circles of black around their eyes, others are all black with a white dot on the forehead or tip of the nose. Some are badgers—dark underbelly and dark stripes under the eyes with silver or butterscotch on the blanket. Some are the opposite, called mouflon—light under the belly and in a stripe up to the chin, like a tuxedo and white bowtie. This is the most ancient pattern from the original ancestor of all sheep, passed down for thousands of years from the wild Asiatic mouflon. My favorite are the moorit lambs, ranging in color from dark chocolate to honey, and sometimes with lips and ear tips frosted with gray.

Today will be the flock’s first full day on grass. I’ve been transitioning their diet slowly, with a few more hours of grazing each day over a week, so that their stomachs can adjust without dire consequences. At this point, I’m eager for them to live in the fields as soon as possible. Two of the lambs have dark diarrhea that could be from the new grass but might also be from coccidia, a microscopic parasite that lives in the soil of the winter paddocks where manure has built up. Lambs are susceptible to it and can die if not treated. I’ve sent a poop sample to the vet’s office; if it’s positive, the treatment is to dose each lamb with liquid medicine for seven days, which would require penning them with their moms and keeping them inside a week longer—all somewhat daunting right now in the general mayhem of the lambing paddock and counter to my impulse to get them out of there.

Thinking about coccidia and other invisible parasites is what currently keeps me awake at night. Lambs, especially, struggle to cope with the huge menu of internal parasites that they inevitably ingest with the grass. A whole cast of microscopic villains lurk in the sheep’s daily salad. Stomach worms, tapeworms, roundworms, and the most deadly character—barber pole worms—all survive the digestion of the rumen and attach to the sheep’s stomach lining, causing minute sores that, in enough quantity, lead to anemia and even death. Though the damage is slow, the death is sudden. Lambs seem fine one day, lethargic the next, then they’re dead, with a bloody foam at their lips. Last summer I learned how to check their eyelids for anemia and dose them with wormer and B vitamins if they start going downhill.

Other parasites work more slowly, feeding on the animal’s liver or lungs or heart. Liver flukes, lungworms, and a particularly terrifying creature, the meningeal worm, which infects the spinal cord and the brain, all reproduce inside the body of freshwater snails. Each morning I see scores of newborn snails hiding in the silver dew-soaked grass, and it reminds me how many trillions of deadly parasites I can’t see, all in the iridescent beauty of the spring field where my lambs feed.

Today, I’m thinking as I start breakfast, we will take the sheep somewhere they have never been before. Land that hasn’t seen sheep for decades has fewer parasites to infect them. It’s also more likely to be overgrown with shrubs with medicinal properties for the flock’s digestion. Thanks to Wren wanting to stay home and watch sheep, a vision for the day is forming: A long health walk for the sheep, a pasture renovation project, and an adventure for my eager shepherd-in-training. A walk uphill and to the east.

For decades, perhaps generations, the biggest hill above the farm was where Ann Day grazed her horses and Scottish Highland cattle. Most of the grasses died out from being continually grazed, and only plants with a bitter taste, plants with thorns, or plants that crept close to the ground survived. Parts of the field were like a mini dust bowl. Walk over that area now, and you’ll see that goldenrod, milkweed, blackberry and raspberry, cinquefoil, bracken fern, and small saplings of poplar and maple are having their heyday. The hillside is too steep to mow, so only by grazing sheep or goats who are willing to eat these “weeds” will we help clear the way for light to reach the ground and germinate the more desirable pasture grasses and clovers that are still lying dormant there from years past, waiting for a chance. When the brambles and bitter plants like goldenrod are tender and young in spring, the sheep will eat them to the ground and begin to knock back their spread. At least that’s the hope. Today we will experiment.

As I tell Wren the plan, she sits on the kitchen counter, cracking bright-yellow eggs onto a blue plate. I soak slices of bread, sprinkle in a little salt and nutmeg, swirl a slab of fat around the hot pan. She cranks open the window above the sink, and the delicious smell of cool damp earth mingles with the smell of browning butter. While Wren is with the sheep, and the sheep are renovating the pasture, my farm hand, Mary, and I will work on removing the greatest danger to having them free-range there in the future: barbed wire. Old barbed wire is everywhere at this old cow farm, and our sheep, who are ever-curious foragers and can’t feel the first prick of wire through their fleece, have ways of finding the wire even when we didn’t notice it was there, in a hedgerow or clump of trees. It binds them up like a sharp metal lasso. We’ve removed it from all the lower fields but not the upper acres. It’s a good plan—nowhere on my long list of plans, but today Wren will be free, and so will the lambs.

I pack a bag with water, snacks, a wire cutter, and other fencing tools. We snarf down our French toast and head outside. I call the sheep together at the gate. The sheep come to know us by our clothes and our bearing, how we move, and they are beginning to know my voice. It’s always the same call I make—a long warble from high in my throat that comes from somewhere alien, or maybe from the origins of time. I feel a little ridiculous when I call, but it’s the one sound that makes them all pick up their heads and come running, from every corner of the field.

The sheep charge out of the paddock, so eager to taste the grass that they snatch bites as they run, forgetting for a moment about their small lambs who follow behind, crying in the melee. Wren has grabbed my tall shepherd’s crook and is still dressed in her too-large, hand-me-down pajamas, dark blue with shooting stars and ringed planets. The wind is stiff, so she has my wool sweater pulled over the top. Her fine hair is growing long and hangs unevenly in her eyes and small, impish face. A plastic beaded choker she made on a piece of yarn lends a flair to the whole getup.

As we walk, I tell her a little about what to watch for when herding, although like a good farm pup, she already seems to know by instinct. “Watch their heads … they will turn next in the direction they are looking. Walk their flank, moving closer if you want to push them ahead and in a wide arc if you want them to turn. Sudden movements or coming straight at them might cause them to bolt, so we stay parallel. Stay calm.” Our sheep are a primitive breed and not handled a lot, so they have a large flight zone. We don’t have to get too close for them to react to our movements.

When Wren was very young, we didn’t give her any tasks on the farm. We just tried to keep her from wandering too far away, from being chased by the mean rooster or clocked by a ewe who thought she should guard her lambs from a small mammal on two legs with a wide-legged gait and grasping hands. Almost as soon as Wren could walk, she would stand in the sheep shed with a sweaty fistful of hay, offering it to every animal within a few drunken paces.

She did get pushed down a few times by a defensive ewe. And once, much more terrifying, the rooster flew at her with his spurs out, so Peter migrated the magnificent, evil bird way up into the woods to spar with the coyotes.

Wren learned to walk with Ruby, a badgerface lamb born on a snowy night. Ruby was so cold when I found her that she was too weak to nurse. Her twin had already died, but Ruby lived in the house in a cardboard box close to the woodstove for a few days while she gained her strength, and once she did, Wren followed her unsteadily around, one hand on her back, both of them falling and getting up again on the slippery kitchen floor.

AS WREN AND I WALK EAST INTO THE EARLY MORNING SUN, we feel the cool mist wetting our skin and hair. A robin throws back its head and sings from the very top of a wild apple tree. Our pant legs are drenched and heavy with dew. The sheep stream ahead of us, calling to each other in the yellow buttercups and delicate blossoms of lady’s bedstraw as the early morning sunlight fractures the mist into white and blots out the terrain. We walk after them, as if through a light-filled doorway in a dream. Wren skips ahead, and I feel as if I could walk forever, right off the milky-blue cloud edge of the world.

To the south of us is the steep slope down the fields to the forest, then to the wide valley where the Mad River winds north out of the Granville Gulf. Above the river and the layers of mist rise the eastern foothills, a tableland where the oldest farms, like ours, sit halfway up the mountains. The farms we look out on nestle below the Northfield Range, ancient mountains with a profile like a pregnant woman lying on her back—Mount Scrag her rounded belly, Mount Alice her breast, to the north a chin and forehead, to the south a knee. Rising like islands above the chop of fog are other mountain ridges to the south and west, while the forest and wind bring their song from the north. I see Donny Joslin’s old sheep farm crumbling into the flinty hillside, and just down the road from there Gib and Sue Geiger’s stately red barn and clutter of beeyards. Farther still, behind a foothill, is the Von Trapps’ dairy, one of the few remaining in the valley, where they sell raw Jersey milk and make cheese. We are one of two farms on the west side of the valley. About a mile above us was the Vasseur dairy, sprawling across several hundred hilly acres of fields and a magnificent forest of sugar maples where they still have an active sugarhouse, although they sold the land in little lots after the patriarch of the family developed bad lungs from so many years in the cow barn. 

Wren and I steer the sheep above a clump of white birches that grow out of one of the many rock middens scattered around the farm. Birch seeds, being so fine, are caught by the stones and germinate in bits of soil between them. These large mounds of small stones are evidence of generations of farmers picking rocks behind the plow and tossing them aside. The fields are so steep and scattered with so many hazards in the form of protruding bedrock that it’s hard to believe that previous generations of farmers chose to plow, but we know from an old farm journal from the late 1800s that this farm produced mostly wheat and potatoes, and both crops require tilling. I imagine how walking behind a horse steering a heavy plow on these tilted acres would be mighty strenuous but somewhat less terrifying than driving a tractor across it.

A fox family has made a protected den in these rocks beneath the birch roots. Small bones are littered on the hard-packed soil around the hole. The sheep are grazing and wandering at a less frantic pace now, so we stop to look. We spot a mouse skull—picked clean—some other small bones and bits of gray fur, and a ribcage that looks like the recent remains of a barnyard hen. I knew this hen. The magnificent mother fox, her tail like a white- tipped matchstick coming through the grass, had stared me down the day before at dawn, looking to catch any chickens that had been roosting in the sheep shed rafters rather than safely in the coop. She had already found one and was back for more. I saw a trail of white feathers, dragged over the rails of the gate, resting upcurled in the grass like the lost pages of a letter. Foxes will cache-kill in spring, stockpiling as much game as they can in one hunt and coming back for it to feed their young over several days. Last spring, even with an electric fence, we lost twenty-five hens in one fox frenzy, in the middle of the day. Feathers were everywhere in piles, white and gold on the blood-soaked grass.

WREN HAS SHED HER SWEATER AND HEAPS IT ON ME TO CARRY. Lighter now, she clatters down from the loose stones and races up the hill where the sheep have gotten way ahead of us, nearly to the edge of a meadow where it meets the trees, fanning out into the emerging thickets of ground raspberry, blackberry, and goldenrod. Will they eat this bitter prickly stuff? I trail behind, trying to identify the plants beneath my boots. I recognize yarrow, whose Latin name—Achillea millefolium—refers to Achilles, who was said to use yarrow to stanch bleeding. I also see plantain, another herb good for healing wounds. These are ancient plant medicines that every shepherd used to know. Would such herbs be good for parasites that cause internal sores? Will the lambs learn from their mothers what is good for them to eat, as I’ve read? These weeds in this neglected field may turn out to be my medicine chest, which makes me wonder how far I want to go with “field improvement” for lusher, more even stands of grass. Protecting some wilder, more overgrown places feels important—its own kind of stewardship…

Photos by Helen Whybrow and Peter Forbes

Partial chapter excerpt from The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, by Helen Whybrow (Milkweed Editions, 2025.) This material is protected by copyright.

Order The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life by Helen Whybrow from Milkweed Editions