This is Rumble Strip. I'm Erica Heilman and today I'm running a kind of hybrid show.

In addition to making Rumble Strip, I make stories for Vermont Public,

which is our public media here in Vermont, which includes our public radio.

And today's show is a kind of augmented version of a story that I made for them a few months ago.

So thank you, Vermont Public, for letting me share this story with

Rumbel Strip listeners and fair warning this story is about sheep slaughtering

so it includes the slaughtering of a sheep. Welcome.

Okay, so I'm using the tractor tire and my body to make like a squeeze shoot

because we're just out in the field. We don't have the animal in a

squeeze box like you do at a slaughterhouse. That's Mary Lake. She's a sheep

farmer and she's also an itinerant sheep shearer and

slaughterer for about 400 farms around Vermont which means she travels to these farms

and does the shearing and slaughtering on site.

Mary is a tall muscular woman in bib overalls and a baseball hat and dangly earrings that she carved

out of a ram's horn.

She wears a chain around her waist with a scabbard full of knives.

Mary is definitely someone who you would want on your lifeboat, not just because she's strong,

which she is, but she's the kind of person who would make fair and smart

decisions about your fate should that become necessary and even though

this was one of the more visceral recordings I've ever made, by which I mean

there is a lot of viscera, I was thoroughly impressed by Mary's gentleness and her

certainty of purpose. Here's Mary Lake.

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