The Girl Who Rode the Sheep

I looked over at Ashlyn. She was standing a few feet back with her arms folded tight across her chest, watching the two of them at the fence.

Dane stood beside her with his hand on her back. Neither one of them said a word.

Then the announcer said, “Number nineteen, Emmy, six years old, forty-one pounds soaking wet,” and the bleachers laughed, and my daughter let go of the fence.

I lifted her over the rail, and Rollin took her from me and carried her to the chute under one arm like a sack of feed, and she was laughing.

I do not know how she was laughing. My knees had turned to creek water.

He set her down on that ewe. She was a big, rangy white ewe, the biggest one in the pen, and I would have traded her for any other sheep on the face of the earth if anybody had asked me.

Emmy laid down flat. She put her face in the wool. She wrapped both arms around that ewe’s neck and hooked her little boots in under its belly, exactly the way Rollin told her, and exactly the way she had done it nine times in my uncle’s pen.

“You ready, nineteen?” Rollin asked her. I could not hear her answer. I just saw the helmet nod, twice, up and down.

The gate opened. That ewe came out of the chute like she had been shot out of it. She did not jump sideways.

She put her head down and ran straight up the middle of the arena, and my daughter went with her.

One second. Two. The bleachers stood up all at once, and the sound they made rolled across that arena like weather.

Rollin was running beside them. In his straw hat and blue plaid shirt, running beside a white sheep with my daughter on its back, one arm out low to catch her if she came off. He did not catch her. She did not come off.

Three seconds. Four. Five. Somebody up in the bleachers started counting out loud, and then the whole crowd was counting together, the way people count down at New Year’s, every voice in that arena.

Six. Seven. She was past the mark. She was past the middle of the arena.

The ewe was heading straight for the far fence, and Emmy was still lying flat on its back, her arms locked around its neck and her helmet bobbing with every single stride.

The ewe got to the far end of the arena and stopped dead at the pipe fence, the way sheep do when they run out of room.

Emmy rolled off the side into the soft dirt exactly like Rollin told her. Then she got up. She got up and she put both arms straight in the air.

I do not remember the next part very well. I know the crowd was loud.

I know the announcer said eleven seconds and the whole length of the arena, and that in all his years calling this fair he had never once seen a kid ride one to the far fence. Down the fence, Ashlyn had both hands over her mouth.

Rollin walked Emmy back across that arena with his hand on top of her helmet.

She had dirt on her face and wool in her braid and the biggest smile in the state of Colorado. When she got close, I climbed halfway over the rail to grab her.