For sheep are serious business--you can see
this at the Pennington corral. Somebody sweated
for months to dig out these stones and carry them to the
site, to feel out their flat planes and their
protuberances, to fit them together like an immense and
ungainly puzzle, somehow meant to stay vertical in spite
of winter freezes, spring gusts, the baking heat of
summer. Not to mention a crowding mob of woolies,
spooked by a bobcat or a moonlit coyote songfest,
Whoever worked on this wall had good leather gloves or
wound up missing skin. And--no doubt about
it--this project carved itself into the base of his
spine forever.
But where were the sheep
when he was building? Not necessarily staying out
of trouble. For these peaceful ruminants are as
difficult as goats to keep confined, yet once loose,
utterly defenseless. A determined dog can tear a
ewe to shreds; a pack can decimate a flock, just for the
fun of it. Nor do sheep make good decisions.
The lost sheep has in fact become a universal symbol for
foolish helplessness. I imagine their bony skulls
and what lies beneath: does an animal so limited
in intellectual ability have the capacity for
dread? Yet what else could it feel, given the
circumstances?
Much love is thus
required of the shepherd. I've known people who
raised sheep--my uncle, a Norwegian bachelor farmer in
Minnesota, kept a good-sized flock for many years--but
he was not a shepherd in the old, venerable sense of the
word. His ram, a yellow-eyed monster with curling
horns, he kept locked in a stall in the barn; the ewes,
confined by sturdy fences, grazed quietly among
crabapple trees. When the temperature plummeted
and the snow fell, he drove them all inside where mutual
desire--ram and ewes--kept them warm. Only once a
year did my uncle know the shepherd's heart, and this
was during lambing season. It was then he laid
aside his other chores to focus on his flock, to think
like a sheep, to inhabit that dark, uneasy psyche.
It was then that his natural tenderness, so rarely
called out during his hard days of labor on the farm,
came forth.
Real shepherds, those loners
who tend thousands of animals on the open range, are
harder to find. I met one once, a Basque man on a
high Sierra plateau with his trailer, his dogs and his
gun. The sheep were everywhere, 2,500 of them,
cropping grass in the thin alpine air. They'd come
from the Valley, he told me, and he would take them down
again, a 10,000-foot descent, when the cold days
began. We'd stumbled onto his pasturelands, my
young husband and I, while hunting for arrow-heads along
an icy river. The battered pink trailer had been
there for years--in fact, we'd seen another one a mile
back, empty, with words in a strange language scrawled
on the inside walls, as though without telephone or mail
some anguished shepherd had had no other way to court
the girl he'd left behind. Our own shepherd
explained this to me in his few words of English:
young men from his country, he said, came to America for
work and work alone. When they saved enough to
marry, they went back to their towns at the base of the
Pyrenees.
I wanted to know more.
What did he do, for example, about mountain lions?
What happened during lightening storms? Did the
sheep go crazy? My husband, his mind on the
arrowheads, wandered off along the riverbank while the
shepherd and I talked on and on. He was a small
man about my size, younger, I was sure, than he
looked. His face was seamed, his fingernails
black, his front teeth rotted. Something had
chewed on one ear and a persistent fly hung near the
crusted-over wound. His dog, a border collie mix,
lay close by, keeping both master and flock in her
steady gaze. We were standing near the pink
trailer with the rifle propped against it. His
brown eyes moved off to the east in the direction my
husband had headed, and I followed his look.
Nothing but green meadow and the backs of grazing sheep.
He
turned back to me and cleared his throat, then asked,
very courteously, if I would mind stepping inside the
trailer, for he had something to show me, something he
was sure I'd like to see. A profound silence fell
upon us, broken by the distant scream of a wheeling
hawk. No thank you, I said carefully, already
starting to move off. I've got to be going
now. I need to catch up with my ... No, please, he
said, I think you would like this. I looked at the
door of the tiny trailer, which was ajar, and tried to
imagine its impoverished interior A water bucket,
perhaps, and a tin pot, bags of rice and beans, a cot
and a ragged sleeping bag. Were there love poems
on the walls?
No, I said. I'm
sorry. I really need to go now. I smiled
reassuringly into the soft brown eyes and thought that I
would kill my oblivious husband if I got out of this one
alive.
Then wait, he said. One
moment only. He turned and slipped through the
door and I contemplated just bolting, darting to the
side and running blindly until whatever was going to
happen to me happened. Beyond the trailer, the
flock moved slowly through the grass like an immense
living body. All was peace, except perhaps in the
heart of this lonely shepherd.
But then
he was back, holding out one closed fist for my
inspection. The hawk screamed again, further off,
and I said, What is it? Slowly, he rotated his hand
and opened his palm. On it lay a perfect obsidian
ax head. For you, he said. Do you like?
The
noon sun struck light from the razored edges. It
belonged in a museum, or back in the cave he'd found it
in. My husband, I thought, would go crazy for
this, the find of the day. I reached out and
touched it, then shook my head. Thank you, I said,
but I can't take it. It's too beautiful, do you
understand?
Please, he began, but I
shook my head again, firmly this time.
He
pulled a filthy handkerchief from his back pocket and
wrapped it around the ax head, sliding it into his
jeans. Then he put out his hand once more, and I
wondered if he wanted me to shake it. Instead, he
placed two delicate, filthy fingers against my sweatered
breast. Before I could even startle, he'd
withdrawn them. Look, he said. Between his
fingers was s single white hair. He nodded at the
dog, smiling and exposing those pathetic teeth of his.
I
swallowed, flushed, and walked off with as brisk a
dignity as I could muster. What had just
happened? I didn't know--only that I'd been
embarrassingly naive, that my husband had been worse,
and that this isolated shepherd with the crusted wound
on his ear had somehow read both of us with the
penetrating accuracy of a psychologist or priest.
When I was a long way off, I looked back for just a
moment. He was still standing by the steps of the
pink trailer, watching me, and when he saw that I was
looking, he lifted his hand in a wave.
Years
later, I wondered what else he'd read about us. I
wondered if he'd seen that the marriage wouldn't last,
that we were both too young and ignorant to sustain a
genuine partnership. I wondered whether he'd seen
through to my dark sheep's mind, which, during the
tumultuous time of the divorce, suddenly panicked,
stampeding me nearly to the edge. Maybe he'd had
the best of intentions after all. Maybe his
shepherd's heart had seen what my husband in his youth
could not possibly know: that I was in serious
need of some loving guidance.
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