The shepherd and the wolf
FICTION: A short story for my daughter
My daughter has a continuing conflict with another young person in the learning community and we have been discussing this with her. One person seeks control and one person, whose experiences of situations of control and exclusion have been negative, is triggered and responds with violence. We have been talking about these patterns and conditioned responses with my daughter but when I read Carol Black write in a Thousand Rivers that “a Yup’ik elder knows that young children learn better from story than lecture”, and so I thought that I should write her a story, and so I did.
I have written pieces on home, the beach, work and procrastination over the last few months for the Soaring Twenties Social Club’s monthly Symposiums. This month’s theme is fiction and so I share this story that I wrote for her a month or so ago whilst writing poetry with young people in the yurt.
Many thanks to all of you that have been with me on this journey of writing about self-directed education over the last four months, may you have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and in these times of giving and receiving presents I consider it a true gift that each of you considers my words worthy enough of your inbox. And a special thanks to Thomas Bevan for providing the impetus to initiate this project.
High in the hills of a mountain range lived a shepherd in a small hut. On the small porch of the hut was a bench and beyond that, nestled in the middle of a lush wildflower meadow, was a small fenced in corral that he kept his sheep in overnight. He had two jobs when high in those mountains, maintaining the fence of the sheep pen and watching the tree line for the wolf that lived among the shadows of the pines. During the day he sat in the midst of his sheep, with his slingshot ready and loaded, always on watch.
The wolf lived among the trees in a den deep in the woods, at the bottom of a buckled fold in the hills. At night she ventured cautiously into the clearing and tried the fence for holes and gaps and worried the sheep. On rare occasions she managed to find a hole the shepherd had missed and would snatch a lamb away, but mostly she fed herself by waiting in the shadows on the forest edge, hiding in the brush waiting for a sheep to venture too close, distracted by the taste of fresh lush grass, the smell of mountain herb and the sound of buzzing bees.
When the first autumn fog rolled in and obscured the view of the valley bottom from the shepherd’s bench he knew it was time to round up his sheep and take them down the rocky path to the winter grazing. The wolf would follow and the same dance of wolf, sheep and shepherd would continue down on the pastures by the river. In the thick of the pines by the river the wolf would camp and on the other side of the frigid fast flowing water where the flat valley bottom stretched out the sheep would bow their heads to nuzzle the grass and the shepherd would periodically puzzle over how he seemed to be one sheep short yet again. Come spring the sheep would take the rocky path back up the hills and the wolf would return to her den among the pines.
It was a crystal clear midsummer day when looking down at the valley the shepherd made out lots of small clouds moving around. It wasn’t unusual to be above the cloud line at this height but when the sky above was so brilliantly blue it was odd to have so many clouds below. After a confusing second or two he realised that he was in fact looking at a herd of sheep wandering the valley floor, and quite a number of them.
Over the next few weeks he watched as two farmers felled pine trees and worked together to fence off most of the wildflower meadows. There had always been small pens fencing pockets of meadow away for safe sleeping, but beyond that the meadows had, for as long as he had known, stretched from one end of the valley to the other unbroken. But now it seemed two men had moved in with aims of making the winter grazing much safer. Every evening he watched them work until the light faded, and by the time the chilling air of September was washing over the hills they had fenced off two thirds of the valley into a dozen rectangular fields. The shepherd rejoiced. At last, for at least half the year, he would be able to graze his sheep in relative safety, protected from the prying eyes and jaws of the she-wolf.
For that same summer the wolf was becoming more bold, no longer willing to wait in the shadows; she would dare to run into the midst of the sheep causing chaos before selecting a weaker older sheep to snatch away. However, running into the midst of the herd meant running into the waiting sling of the shepherd and he never loosed as many pebbles at his enemy as that summer. On numerous occasions he had managed to land a direct hit, however, all of them landed on the rear flank of the retreating wolf, no doubt inflicting pain but nothing serious enough to stop her coming back for more sheep the next day.
One morning the wolf emerged from her den late after spending the first few hours after waking tending to the wounds on her rear legs. Stretching out and tending further to her wounds she was snapped out of her reverie by the voice of an owl from the bough of a birch tree just above her head. The owl consoled the wolf, noting that they had seen her coming home to the den more often than not with wounds to tend and wondered if they had considered that there were other places in these mountains where food was easier to come by and less likely to come with a human trying to kill you.
“Over that steep mountain yonder,” said the owl waving a wing westwards, “lies a forest very much like this, with trees and meadows and old badger setts. There are herds of deer that graze in the forest and wild sheep that hug the hills and no man to protect them. There you could hunt with no one chasing you.” And with that the owl took off into the morning sun.
The wolf pondered those words for a week. She had never left this valley. This land and this shepherd and his sheep was all she knew. But as the nights grew colder and her sores smarted more in her sleep she started to wonder if it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all. And the next morning as the shepherd descended to the valley floor and the safety of the new fenced fields, the wolf slipped away towards the tall mountain and the safety of a new life in a forest shy of man and full of deer.
It took almost a week to cross the forest, trek up above the treeline, find the rocky pass to the left of the mountain that led through and down the other side and into the forest. At first the wolf blessed the owl. She was barely through the pass before she feasted on her first wild sheep, and numerous more followed before the thin pines and scree gave way to birch and beech and herds of deer she could satiate herself upon. But as autumn turned its back and winter approached head on, times became harder. Here there were no humans and the prey was plentiful but with plentiful prey came plentiful hunters and there were numerous other wolves, some arranged into tightly knitted packs of kin, willing to fight to the death for every kill, and more than happy to scavenge and steal the elderly buck she had just brought down before she had barely had a mouthful. Yes, a shepherd would want to avenge the death of a sheep but if you dragged the carcass deep enough into the woods at some point the effort of the chase was not worth it, but here every morsel was mortal.
In the valley the shepherd was also finding out that every silver lining comes with a cloud. And this cloud was deep, dark and had enveloped almost the whole valley. The two farmers stoutly refused to let him share the pastures behind their fencing, subjecting him to the two ends of the valley they had deemed too scrubby to bother with. No amount of reasoning would persuade them, they had put the fence up and they were entitled to reap the rewards of safer pasture.
At first the shepherd was angry, over time this mellowed however as his herd seemed to miraculously survive the first month unscathed; the wolf seemed either perturbed or put off by the fencing and no longer posed a problem. However, after grazing the westward end of the valley for a month or so it became clear that he would have to move his herd to the eastern end and onto the marshy wetlands that soaked up the river as it wound down the valley before emptying into the lake. It took him a whole day to herd his sheep along the riverbank, past the lush grazing now hid in plain sight behind pine fences that till last winter had been his to freely use; walking past such plentiful grass enraged him again.
This last kill, a year old doe, had been her first after a litany of far too many failed attempts. She was weak and thin by now and needed the warmth of meat in her belly. But the pack that hounded her for the last few months had heard the sound of the hunt and caught the scent of the kill and were on her too quickly for her to eat her fill. Tired, hungry and too weary to hunt again this time she fought back, but valiant as she was sheer numbers won the fight and she limped away, tail between her legs. Tending her wounds she thought back to the shepherd and tried to remember ever feeling so defeated, ever feeling so tired, or even so injured. Resolved she decided to return to her home; this land of plenty was indeed full of food but far too full of fang as well.
It was a week after she had set off for home when, with most of the grazing at both ends of the valley gone, the shepherd decided to confront the two farmers again. In the early evening he penned his sheep in and then made the trek along to the front gate that stood opposite the stone bridge that led the way over the river and up the hill and towards the summer grazing. Again he was rebuffed, there was only enough food for their sheep behind the fencing and though they were sympathetic that his sheep were running low on grass there was not much they could do to help. Look, they said, the snow is melting very soon you can return to the mountain pastures and graze them up there.
As he turned on his heel, blood boiling and bubbling up his neck, a second away from exploding into his head and everything turning red, he saw, on the other side of the bridge looking directly at him, his old friend the wolf. She stood looking, as ever, extremely wily but also incredibly thin and scruffy too. But the sight of her turned his veins to ice as a cold calculating plan came together in his head in an instant. He returned to his makeshift hut and waited until the sun had truly set and grabbing his hammer he crept along the river bank back towards the bridge. He found a corner of the fence and slowly began pulling away at the nails until a small hole, enough for a wolf, was opened up. Then he turned on his heels and left. The next morning, rising before dawn, he returned and fixed up the hole. After a quick breakfast, he let his sheep out to graze and wandered down to find out what had occurred during the night. Apparently the wolf had got in, killed a dozen sheep just for fun, and dragged two more off into the woods.
For the following three nights he followed the same pattern, out after sunset and back before sunrise, and the wolf followed her instincts and very quickly the farmers lost over half of their sheep. On the third morning he rose and saw the river flowing fast and threatening to spill over the top of the bank and knew that it was time to take the rocky path up the hills. As he neared the bridge he crossed the two farmers herding their sheep the other way, towards the lake and the pass out of this valley and into the next. This valley is not safe, they told him, there is a wolf that can get through fences and has killed far too many of our sheep, we are heading back to the next valley where wolves don’t climb fences and sheep are safe.
And so the shepherd returned to the mountain pasture and the wolf returned to her ways, following the herd, snatching the weak and infirmed whilst dodging slingshots raining down on her. But the shepherd had a new found respect for the wolf, she had after all helped return this valley to him. And so every Easter Sunday the shepherd slaughters his largest lamb and after feasting all day and most of the night he leaves one of the hind legs out on the doorstep as a peace offering to the wolf. And every Easter Monday he awakes to see the leg still there and his second largest lamb missing and a trail of blood running off into the woods and he smiles and thanks the Lord that he has been left with such a hearty breakfast.