Sheep Rot and Fly-Strike

Overview

Sheep "fall to rot and fly in wet years", and shepherds name them together because they come together. The rot is a wasting of the liver that takes a flock slowly through autumn and winter; foot rot lames it; fly-strike eats a sheep alive in a summer week. Each is a trouble of wet ground and dirty wool, and none is as sudden as a murrain, but a wet run of years can halve a household's flock.

Cause

Liver rot comes from a small flat worm. Its young live for a while in the water snails of wet meadows and seeps, then cling to the grass, and a sheep grazing there swallows them; they grow in its liver and eat it from within. Foot rot sets in where hooves stand for weeks in mud and wet grass. Fly-strike is the work of blowflies, which lay their eggs in wool fouled with dung or wet with a wound, and their maggots eat into the flesh.

Who It Strikes

Sheep above all, and lambs and old ewes worst; goats less; cattle grazing the same wet meadows sometimes take the liver rot. The heavy-woolled, dirty-tailed sheep of the lower meadows are struck by fly more than the lean hill flocks. People are not struck, though they eat the rotten livers of slaughtered sheep without harm.

Signs and Course

Rot. After a wet summer the flock thrives at first, even fattens. In autumn the worst begin to dull and drop behind; their eyes and gums go pale, their wool pulls out, and a soft swelling hangs under the jaw. Through winter they waste and die. A shepherd who butchers one finds the liver hard, swollen, and full of flat worms.

Foot rot. A sheep lifts a foot, then limps, then grazes on its knees; the hoof is hot, stinks, and peels from the flesh.

Fly-strike. In warm, damp weather a struck sheep stands apart, stamps, twitches its tail, and bites at its flank or rump. The wool there is damp, darkened, and stinks, and parting it shows the maggots. Found the same day, the sheep lives; left two or three days, it dies.

Contagion

Liver rot passes only through the pasture: a meadow that gave one flock the rot gives it to the next. Foot rot spreads from lame sheep to the ground they walk and so to others. Fly-strike does not pass between sheep.

Treatment and Its Limits

The shepherd's answer is ground and watching. In wet years flocks go to high, dry pasture, and wet meadows are drained or fenced off for cattle and hay. Tails and rumps are clipped clean of dung, flocks are sheared before the fly season, and a struck sheep has its wool cut back, its maggots picked out, and the wound washed and tarred. Lame feet are pared and tarred and the sheep kept on dry ground. Nothing known cures a rotten liver; the shepherd sells or kills a rotting sheep before it dies. Beast medicine draws on the animal's own pattern (see Biological Affinity), but a healer's working is too dear to spend on a sheep.

Mortality

A wet year can take a third of a flock to rot and more in a run of wet years; fly-strike takes the sheep nobody looked at. Survivors of the rot stay thin and poor in wool for a year.

Lore and Belief

Shepherds know rot follows wet ground, and blame the wet itself, rotten dew, or grazing before the dew has lifted. Fly is laid at the door of a lazy shepherd, and fairly. A flock that rots is said in some valleys to have been grazed over a grave.

In the Medieval Era

Rot and fly are met in every wet run of years in the terraced valleys of the Headwater Marches and at the inland edge of the Confluence Basins, where Flockturn's farmsteads keep their sheepfolds. Wool and cloth go up to the holds of the Ironspine, so a rotten year in the flocks is felt in the holds as well as the valleys. Shepherd families keep the knowledge of which meadows rot, and a newcomer who grazes them in a wet year learns the hard way.

Where It Appears

• Sheep