Book Review: ‘The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life,’ Helen Whybrow

When you pick up a Vermont shepherd’s memoir, you might expect it to be everything we associate today with the word pastoral — leisurely and restorative, like wandering through a meadow full of wildflowers. You might be wrong.

At Knoll Farm in Fayston, author Helen Whybrow and her husband, Peter Forbes, raise Icelandic sheep, grow blueberries and run a retreat center. In The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, published in June and long-listed for the National Book Award, Whybrow writes about her quarter century of shepherding.

She opens with a scene as nail-biting as anything in an action thriller. It’s about 2 a.m. on a frigid night in lambing season, and the author is attempting to help a suffering ewe named Bluestone give birth:

With my fingertips in the dark, I can feel a nose and two feet. The feet are soft and pointed, positioned just above what I think is the head, only I don’t know if they are back feet or front feet. I need to know because the answer tells me if I have one lamb coming out more or less okay or two lambs tangled together, with the first lamb folding its feet back and its twin doing a backward somersault over the top of it. This would be bad.

The unputdownable seven-page scene that follows serves as an apt preview of the rest of the book. Whybrow’s knack for dry understatement (“This would be bad”) complements her talent for pungent, tactile description (“The mass of womb and placenta are warm and wet, a jellyfish in a tropical sea, while the bony wall of the pelvis grinds against the back of my hand”). Bluestone’s labor gives the author an opening to recall her own daughter’s birth, effortlessly sketching a few biographical details. Finally, while we’re still in breathless suspense over the fate of Bluestone’s offspring, Whybrow pauses to reflect on why shepherds aid births this way, suggesting that “this ancient, primal thing of caring for a flock is ultimately about human attachment.”

Sheepherding, Whybrow reminds us throughout the book, is about continuity: an ancient tradition with patterns and seasons (breeding, lambing, shearing) that repeat annually. Inherently dramatic it is not. Yet, by pinpointing compelling episodes from her decades of shepherding, Whybrow spins continuity into conflict, controversy, conversation. She reminds us that the best memoirs tell stories while placing them in richly detailed contexts to show us why they matter.

The book’s 12 chapters and three “Interludes” cover the author’s sheep farming career — and the growth to adulthood of her daughter, Wren Fortunoff, who did the evocative illustrations — in chronological order. At the same time, the book spans just one seasonal cycle, with the first and last chapters set in lambing season, as winter prepares to give way to spring.

Rather than alternating between autobiography, crunchy sheep facts and broader meditations, Whybrow shapes each chapter to accommodate all three. So, for instance, a chapter on the author’s background (raised on a New Hampshire farm by UK natives) is also about what it means to belong to a place.

In “Spring Meadow,” a chapter primarily about vibing in verdant fields with the sheep, Whybrow uses the remnants of 19th-century barbed wire on her farm as a pretext to delve into the history of Vermont’s short-lived “sheep fever.” In another chapter, she solves the mystery of an ailing ewe while offering a wealth of facts about ruminants and grazing. A suspenseful coyote hunt on a summer night (“stars shimmering through a haze of heat shedding from the musky field, a half moon skidding above in a slick of oil”) sets the stage for an affirmation of coexistence. The tale of a disastrous thunderstorm becomes an anxious reflection on climate crisis before reaching a surprisingly tender and uplifting ending.

Throughout, Whybrow refuses to settle for platitudes about what she does and why. Farming, she writes, is always precarious: “a giant game of Jenga.” It can be dirty and hard or “astonishing and beautiful” — the phrase she uses to describe watching an experienced shearer at work. In a moving chapter on her mother’s decline, the author notes the “meaningful work” that farming can supply to elders.

Sometimes, too, shepherding is “weird” and unsettling. When Whybrow brings lambs to the slaughterhouse, “The whole thing feels like Narnia to me,” she writes, as members of her herd vanish and reappear as “a set of clothes, nothing more.” But the shepherd reconciles herself to the hovering nearness of death by committing herself to the health of the flock and the symbiotic human-animal bond: “I see my job — not to prevent death, but to try to prevent suffering.”

The memoir’s title and epigraphs come from Jean Giono’s 1933 The Serpent of Stars, in which he describes shepherds coating stones with salt to serve as a “consolation and a remedy” for their flock. Whybrow first read this enigmatic, lyrical book early in her farming life, she tells us. It became an enduring inspiration, helping her bridge the gap between her lives as a writer and a shepherd. Waxing lyrical herself, she writes that “Sometimes it takes a fiction or a dream to fill the place in your heart that you didn’t know was searching.”

The Salt Stones is a more conventionally nonfiction text than Giono’s, complete with a glossary, endnotes and bibliography. Yet some readers will find this superbly crafted book inspirational in its own way, as Whybrow reminds us why our foundational cultural texts are rife with imagery of straying sheep and beneficent shepherds. The Salt Stones embodies the author’s definition of “shepherd’s mind, which is about finding a way to listen, to tend, and to immerse in the living world,” she writes. As we immerse ourselves in this surprisingly eventful and vital account of the pastoral life, we may feel like we’re coming home.

From The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life

Farming long enough — tiring yourself out while others think it’s either unsavory or romantic, when the truth is that it’s hard and complex and individual, and how should they know unless they experience it themselves, which they won’t — can make you a bit cynical. I’ve been called Little Bo-Peep by visitors. I’ve been called a murderer when I try to sell our meat. I don’t feel like either of those things.

But if I step back, feel more generous and humble, I notice that the way people who are not farmers think about farming is not unlike the way most of us approach nature: It’s either a beautiful backdrop, a screensaver, a playlist of soothing sleep sounds, or it’s full of frightening hazards and germs and grime, to be struck down and controlled. Nature — and by extension the pastoral farm — exists largely in our imaginations as a place of wholeness and health, purity, and even virtue, or as a place that’s dirty and uncomfortable, something to be avoided. […]

It has become my project to try to see nature — and by extension, farming — as it is, and to have a deep relationship with that realness.

Whybrow will appear at the Brattleboro Literary Festival on Sunday, October 19,
12:30 p.m., at Brooks Memorial Library.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Ruminant Ruminations | Book review: The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life, Helen Whybrow”

This article appears in Sep 17-23 2025.

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