Dark Chocolate Season

Dark chocolate.

Madison Avenue connotations wrap us in glowing, warm feelings of love, acceptance and decadence.

Good dark chocolate, the kind that has just the right amount of rich bitterness mixed with sweet, is hard to find.

Once, in Peru, my family and I found the darkest chocolate I’ve ever savored. It was too bitter for them, but I rolled it around on my tongue until it dissolved completely.

Then I popped a dark chocolate coca leaf in my mouth -- for medicinal purposes only, of course. We were high in the Andes so the coca leaves helped with altitude sickness. Or maybe it was the dark chocolate that covered the leaves.

Whichever, they felt sick. I felt loved, accepted and warm all over.

In Montana, dark chocolate is my friend throughout the year, not just for Valentine’s Day.

I keep a little stash in a cupboard, where I usually forget about it until that desperate, specific hunger for its bittersweet, complex flavor consumes me and nothing else will satisfy it.

A single bar purchased from a specialty store will last most of the year.

Until Dark Chocolate Season arrives at the ranch.

Dark Chocolate Season is my favorite time of the year – better than Halloween, Christmas or Independence Day.

Dark Chocolate Season hit the ranch hard and fast last week.

It showed up in the form of snuggly, fragile lambs wobbling to their feet in the dawn.

Three ewes claimed the first lamb.

I picked up the lamb and led all three ewes into the barn, then fought off two of them and awarded the lamb to its rightful mama.

By the end of the first day of Dark Chocolate Season, I had walked farther than I had in the last two weeks, jugged seven new families and pulled two lambs from their wombs.

One lamb was so tight that I leveraged my pulling with one foot on the ewe’s hips. All of us were happy when the lamb stood up to nurse.

I made a mental note to get some dark chocolate covered espresso beans the next time I went to the store.

It looked like it might be a while.

For most of the next day, I carried new babies from the west pasture, mama ewes following worriedly while the lambs nuzzled into my neck.

I made a mistake with one ewe.

I spotted her beginning to give birth and left to give her some privacy – my presence makes a ewe nervous. Nervousness slows the process.

I came back to a dead lamb. The placenta had not slipped off of its nose during birth like it normally does.

The lamb had suffocated with its first breath.

I’ve saved lambs like that before, but only because I happened to be within seconds of wiping the placenta away from the baby’s nose.

I drowned my sorrow in dark chocolate.

The next day, a ewe was attentive to her new baby, but she kept circling the lamb, not allowing it to find a teat.

Her udder looked sore so I understood.

I led the ewe into a jug – a small pen of straw where new families spend a day before joining the maternity crowd.

I haltered the ewe and tied her to a post so I could squat and show the lamb where to find breakfast.

She jumped, bucked and tried to clear the panel. I ducked, losing my advantage of altitude but shielding the newborn from cloven hooves.

The ewe body-slammed me into the wall.

My head buzzed, but eventually, the lamb relieved the pressure on the ewe’s udder.

I savored more dark chocolate.

All three of us felt loved, accepted and warm all over.