Lewiston students visit Pete the Sheep at Legacy Lambs farm

Apr. 17—WINCHESTER — Pete the Sheep is already a minor celebrity in the Craigmont-Winchester area among school and library aficionados. And he is about to become even more famous.

A group of students from Lewiston's Jenifer Junior High School visited the Legacy Lambs farm near Winchester on Tuesday to learn about Pete's extraordinary life and participate in illustrating a book about him.

"So today is about inspiring kids to possibly write their own book and to learn how to illustrate a book," said Chris Case, co-owner of Legacy Lambs, who is also the librarian at the Winchester Community Library.

Case has already written a book about one of her sheep called "Elmer Goes to the Beach." For the Elmer book, Case engaged the talents of local youngsters to help illustrate it and then used the book — and her sheep — as inspirational teaching tools at area schools and libraries in the Prairie River Library District.

She plans to follow on that success with a second book about Pete.

"Pete was a bottle baby raised by a bunch of the town kids," Case said. "Literally, the whole town of kids raised that sheep because I had to be at work. Pete is an exceptional sheep. He should have died but I just think the love of those kids made it work out."

Pete, Case said, weighed 3 pounds at birth and nearly froze to death in the minus-7-degree weather a year ago. The newborn lamb was brought inside the warm lambing shed and nursed by Winchester students who bottle-fed him every two hours to help him survive.

Case showed the Jenifer kids a slideshow of Pete's timeline: Pete in a laundry basket; Pete lying beside Case's mom's dog, which was bigger than the lamb; Pete curled up on a mattress sleeping with a cat; fully grown Pete decorated up for Christmas; Pete drinking Dr. Pepper; Pete being painted on by students at the library; and, finally, Pete in a turtle costume.

"Pete doesn't know he's a sheep," Case said. "He thinks he's a people. Kids and Pete — they get along pretty good."

All during the slideshow, Pete, now about 210 pounds, watched through the wooden slats of his stall, every now and then "baaaaa-ing" in commentary.

Case said Pete has "a little saying" he shares with the students who visit:

"Do what makes you happy because that's what makes you EWE," Case said.

"So if you are thinking about things you would like to do, make sure you do those things because that is what makes you happy," she said. "And you deserve to be happy."

Many of the students arriving at Legacy Lambs in a yellow school bus had never been to a sheep farm before.

It was the first time for Cohen Foote, 13, who said he enjoyed the story about Pete and was looking forward to working with other students on the book about Pete the Sheep.

"I like sheep," Foote said. "I like their fur and I think their faces are really cute."

Colton Bingman, 14, also appreciated the tale about Pete.

"This is actually a really good story," Bingman said. "I think that it's possible it should find its way to other libraries. It's a good little kids' book."

Katy Helt, the special education teacher at Jenifer, said she believes her students could become authors with the right accommodations.

"I think coming here and doing something like this is very important for them," Helt said. "Because oftentimes students like mine get left out of societal expectations because people think that they can't. And I am much more in the mindset that they only can't because they aren't provided with the opportunity.

"So being able to provide my students with an opportunity like this, which can be very scary to some of them because they don't know what the expectations are, some of them don't have a full comprehension of what is expected today."

Helt said the students read about sheep and farms before visiting Legacy Lambs and will discuss the field trip and write thank-you notes after returning home. Even though it was a struggle for some of them to come along and be in an unfamiliar environment, "it's just really exciting for me to see them generalize their skills as well as being about to show others their capability and what they're really able to do."

Hedberg may be contacted at khedberg@lmtribune.com.