“Blaaaaa!”

Evan looked down at the pile of sleeping lambs beside him in the orphan pen. One of them was waking up hungry, blinking into the light of the heat lamp above it.

“You’re next, laddie,” Evan whispered. “I think.” He would check the feeding list in his pocket, because his usually sharp memory could no longer be trusted.

First, he’d finish feeding the newborn in his lap. The peedie beast was snuggled up against his chest, sucking on the bottle’s teat, its tiny legs splayed and its eyes set in happy squints. Evan’s arms were starting to freeze into this position, holding the bottle in one hand and cupping the lamb’s jaw in the other to maintain the proper angle.

After five days and nights in his family’s lambing shed, the rest of the universe had ceased to exist. There was no Loch of Stenness, no town of Stromness, no Scotland, no United Kingdom. No world. There were just lambs, lambs, lambs. Lambs and ewes and the damp night air.

Growing up, he’d helped during lambing season for a few hours a day, but like his brothers now, his availability had been limited by school and football. So Mum and Magnus had done most of the work and hired a night lamber for the wee hours.

Evan had volunteered to be this season’s night lamber for the cost of a plane ticket and a cat sitter, saving the farm nearly two thousand pounds. He wasn’t needed in Glasgow just now anyway, as his hip flexor strain would keep him off the football pitch for two weeks—coincidentally the same amount of time he’d been suspended from his job.

As the lamb in his lap continued feeding, Evan let the back of his head rest on the stone wall. The warmth of the heat lamp was tempting him to collapse on the fresh straw for a nap. But that could mean disaster in the form of stillbirths he wasn’t there to prevent.

Evan chomped down on the last unbitten section of his cheek to wake himself. After this, coffee, he promised.

So far none of the “orphaned” lambs in this pen were literal orphans. Two were triplets who couldn’t be fully fed by their birth ewes, as sheep only had two teats. The one in his lap and its twin had been rejected by their mum, who didn’t seem keen on the whole being-responsible-for-another-living-creature enterprise.

“Don’t worry,” he said to the lamb as she finished the bottle. “I’ve got big plans for you.”

Evan’s hip creaked with stiffness—along with the rest of his body—as he got to his feet and shuffled into the main part of the shed containing the enormous antepartum pen. It currently housed 108 pregnant ewes, which meant nearly half had already lambed. Most of the ewes were sleeping serenely near the center of the pen, making it easy to see the ones with more urgent tasks on their minds.

Over in the corner, one of the older ewes was lying propped against the wall, tail wagging and lip curling—a sign she was close. Her wool bore a red painted dot, indicating she was having a single, according to her ultrasound. A perfect candidate for adoption.

Still, her water bag hadn’t come out yet, so he had time for a restorative cup of coffee.

Just as he poured a fresh mug, he heard a deep, roaring bleat. He hurried back to the antepartum pen to see the ewe lift her chin and press her cheek against the wall. Her water bag was now out, which meant the birth would hopefully soon follow.

Evan retrieved the lamb he’d just nursed and brought her back as the ewe was having contractions. He approached slowly and asked, “Whit’s on, lass?” in a low, soothing voice.

The ewe’s expression said, “What do you think is happening, you eejit?”

Soon her baby was entering the world in proper diving configuration, nose between its outstretched forelegs. Evan set the orphaned lamb behind the ewe, then gently but firmly tugged the newborn out. The ensuing placenta drenched the orphaned lamb, who widened her eyes in surprise. Evan draped the steaming newborn over its adopted sibling and started rubbing its “baby goo,” as Justine used to call it, onto the orphan to make them smell the same.

Then he paused. The new lamb wasn’t breathing. He patted and massaged the newborn’s side, and when that didn’t work, he picked it up by its hind legs and swung it back and forth. Finally he laid it down and tickled its nostril with a bit of straw.

The lamb gave a hard sneeze, then shook its head and coughed.

“There you are,” he said as he wiped the lamb’s mouth. “I was getting worried.” This was a lie. He was too tired to feel worry or any other emotion.

The ewe got to her feet, snapping the umbilical cord, then turned to nuzzle her offspring. Apparently having lost count on the way to two, she licked both lambs with equal fervor, nickering softly.

Evan cleaned his hands on the straw—more or less—then prepared a small postpartum pen where the new mother could bond in peace with her two bairns.

By the time he’d introduced the family to their temporary home, two more ewes were lambing. One birth was uneventful, the first of twins, but the other needed assistance. Like many singles, this lamb was oversize and thus took forever to get its giant head through the birth canal, even with Evan’s help. After massaging, pounding, swinging, and poking it into taking its first breath, he could barely feel his arms.

Then there was a lull. The greatest rush of lambs would come at daybreak—an evolutionary prescription allowing maximum bonding time before predators arrived after dark. But here in fox- and badger-free Orkney, the lambs’ only predators came by day: stray dogs, mostly, along with so-called scavenging birds like great black-backed gulls.

He checked the lambs in the postpartum pens for full bellies, then spray-painted matching blue numbers on the sides of each family member as well as a spot of green paint on the hips of the males. Then he updated the tally on the white board and finally headed to the shed kitchen to make more formula.

When he arrived, his coffee was cold. He gulped it anyway, fearing if he took the time to reheat it, a new crisis would pull him away.

As he mixed the reeking imitation colostrum, he took a moment to be grateful that this mind-numbing routine gave him no time or energy to think about Ben or the Warriors or his job. They all seemed like features of a film he’d once seen.

His recurring nightmare was sheep-focused, too: There was always one postpartum pen he’d forgotten to clean and bring food to. When he remembered it existed, he would embark on a fruitless search, knowing it would contain a dead ewe and dying lambs.

He stopped stirring. No, last night the dream had ended with him finding the elusive neglected pen. There was no ewe inside, just one lamb rolled up in a rug, two tiny cloven hooves sticking out of each end.

Evan usually avoided thinking about Patrick outside the safety of a therapy session. But now his mind was too tired to stop the memories flooding in: Patrick’s glee at meeting another gay supporter of Glasgow Celtic, his gratitude as the shy nineteen-year-old learned one erotic pleasure after another.

Evan had never been adventurous in bed during his four years with Fergus, but with Patrick he’d abandoned most inhibitions, broadening his own horizons to impress a man he hadn’t cared about.

A man he hadn’t cared about at first. It was impossible, he’d learned, to be detached from a person who knew every inch of his body, who made him laugh and even once cry, who loved pug puppies and Aero chocolate bars and his ma.

Evan closed his eyes and focused on his breath, using a technique his therapist had taught him to let go of these spiraling thoughts. Then he went back to mixing the stinky, life-supporting lamb formula. Patrick was gone, but Evan could still save these sheep and this farm.

The cycle began again: feeding orphans, birthing newborns, attempting an adoption—this one failing—checking bellies, painting numbers, rubber-banding tails, dabbing umbilical cords with iodine, drinking coffee.

As dawn approached, the cycle became all lambing, all the time. His family joined him at five, with Mum and Magnus taking over the births, Sigur feeding the orphans, and Thorfinn helping Evan sort the day-old lambs in the nursery pen, seeing which were strong enough to go out to the hills with their mums.

When daylight broke, the two of them loaded the first set into the trailer, then Evan settled into the driver’s seat of the farm’s four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Thorfinn handed him a shepherd’s crook. “You want the shotgun, too? You never ken what might be oot there.”

“Honestly, I’m so knackered, I’d probably blow my own head off.”

“Should you be driving, then?”

“If it involves sitting on my arse for even one minute,” Evan said, “then aye, I should be doing it.” He turned to the two lambs behind his seat. “Buckle up, bairns. It’s your first road trip.”

He drove out of the shed into the mist-soaked morning. Climbing the hill behind the byre, he steered around the bigger bumps to avoid jostling the lambs.

Once in the field, Evan let the ewe trot down from the back of the transport, then placed her babies beside her. At a day and a half old, they were already a hundred times more hearty than the ones born last night. They nuzzled the damp grass, one of them sneezing as he inhaled the dew.

Thus began the best part of their lives: running and playing on the West Mainland’s lush spring pastures—lush by Scottish standards, anyway—and enjoying the occasional sunshine. Next to that first meeting of ewe and lamb, this was Evan’s favorite moment.

He pulled out his phone to capture it. As he hit record, one of the lambs kicked up its heels and started bouncing around. Its twin joined the cavorting, jumping up to butt its head against its mum, then falling on its face in the grass. Then, as if remembering what the ewe was there for, both lambs began suckling.

Evan stopped recording and just watched for a moment. Suddenly he was seized by an irresistible impulse.

He attached the video to a text message and typed, Thought you might like to see this.

As soon as he hit send, he knew it was a mistake. Ben had definitively rejected him. Deep down inside, Evan had always known it would happen. For a brief time after learning the truth about his parents’ divorce, he’d let himself hope that he could share this spy’s life with a person as real as Ben.

Ben, who somehow still saw the best in him, even after knowing how Evan had betrayed Patrick. Ben, who had filled in the Certificate of Awesomeness on Evan’s refrigerator with the words Being a Hero.

Despite all that, it had ended as Evan had feared: with tears in the eyes of the man he loved.

He scrolled up through the texts they’d sent each other the last two months. It reminded him of a similar masochistic exercise he’d undertaken in Belfast, rereading texts from Fergus he could never answer. He would have given anything to send one word of reassurance, to tell Fergus things weren’t as they seemed.

But no words could make it right, not then and not now.

Evan slowly became aware of a commotion on the other side of the hill. It sounded like a bunch of bronchitis sufferers holding the World Cup of Coughing.

He looked up to see two ravens circling over the area the noise was coming from.

No.

He grabbed the shepherd’s crook and sprinted toward the sound. As he crested the hill, he saw his worst fear realized: a quartet of great black-backed gulls surrounding a small white mass. A ewe stood twenty or so feet away, shielding her surviving lamb while its twin was ravaged by thick, sharp beaks.

With a roar, Evan ran down the hill, brandishing the crook. The gulls took off at his approach, thumping the air with five-foot wingspans, their calls pitching up with indignation. From what he could see through his red mist of rage, they were a breeding pair and two juveniles—a mean and hungry family.

“I’m sorry.” He knelt beside what was left of the lamb. “I’m so sorry.”

Grief washed over him with the force of a gale-ripped wave. This was why he’d left Orkney in the first place: He couldn’t accept these routine, unlamented deaths, how animals and crops sometimes perished no matter how hard you fought to save them. That’s just the way the world is, laddie, Magnus would remind him.

His stepdad had been right, of course. Life outside these islands had shown no mercy either.

Something gray moved in the corner of his eye: a gull feather, its quill caught in the grass, its vane waving in the relentless wind. A murderer’s calling card.

He got to his feet, picked up the shepherd’s crook, and slammed it down upon the feather. Then he kept going, long after every barb was ripped from the feather’s shaft.

With a resounding snap, the crook shattered, and still Evan beat the ground in his endless, pointless fury. When there was nothing left but splinters, he dropped to his knees and stabbed at the cold, hard ground that swam before his eyes.

How many more months would he see Patrick’s terrified face smashed by a boot? How many more years would he hear Fergus’s plaintive voice mails, begging Evan for a reason to live?

A deep croak came from above. He looked up to see the pair of ravens, circling lower now, no doubt hoping to make a meal of the lamb—and maybe Evan himself, the way things were going.

They called again, together this time, dredging up one pure thought and memory, of Ben’s face as he opened a peedie white gift box on his 5.75th birthday.

Wiping his eyes with a dusty sleeve, Evan turned back to the lamb. He took off his jacket, laid it on the ground, then carefully moved the body onto the makeshift stretcher.

When he reached the four-wheel-drive vehicle, the notification light was blinking on his phone. He set down the lamb, wiped the blood from his hands, and swept his finger across the screen to reveal a message from Ben:

I’d like to see that in person.