Fake News, prairie island style

How satisfying to have showered early, be in my PJs, and have a gourmet Memorial Day dinner almost ready to enjoy--grilled trout, baked potatoes, roasted veggies, and salad. Um-umm. While lingering at the window, to enjoy evening light illuminating the bench to the northwest, I noted an odd shape in the sheep pasture, a shape that looked wrong. The magnified view through our mono-scope confirmed what I feared: a black-faced ewe lying in the ditch. Her head was up, a positive sign, but, if she'd been able to stand and move, she would have traveled with the other ewes and lambs out of the pasture and to our corrals for the night. Using higher powered binoculars, Jim double checked me. Yes, we had a ewe down. We turned off the grill and oven, hurried into chore clothes, and headed out, me on the 4-wheeler with a halter and ropes to tie her legs and immobilize her for the ride home, and Jim in the skid-steer with its bucket for loading and carrying her. What we discovered, recumbent in the ditch, was a sheep lookalike, a galvanized hot water tank that had been converted into a culvert. Its galvanized surface, oriented diagonally to our window vantage point, was just the right size and color to be a sheep's body and the dark shadow cast on the interior looked exactly like a Suffolk ewe's head. Since our evening rush to rescue (followed by a delicious, if delayed, dinner), I have carefully observed that offending culvert numerous times and in all sorts of lighting. It continues to look disturbingly like a black-faced ewe who has given up on life. We lease the pasture, so the culvert is not ours to move, but I make a point to count off our black-faced ewes each evening when I move sheep to the safety of our corrals for the night.