Three Bags Full (4 page)

Sheep are not talkative folk. That’s because their mouths are often full of grass, and sometimes they have nothing but grass in their heads. But all sheep love good stories. What they like to do best is listen, marveling—for one thing, because it is easy to listen and chew at the same time. Something was missing in their lives now that George was not around to read stories aloud to them. So it sometimes happened that one sheep would tell the others a story. The story-telling sheep was very often Mopple the Whale, now and then Othello, very seldom one of the ewes.

The mother ewes mostly talked about their lambs, and that didn’t interest the other sheep. Of course some lambs were legendary—Ritchfield had been one of those in his time—but the mothers of those lambs deliberately kept their mouths shut.

All the sheep were interested when Othello told a story, but they didn’t really understand him. He told them about lions and tigers and giraffes, strange animals from countries where it was burning hot. There were often arguments, because each sheep imagined these animals differently. Did giraffes smell like rotten fruit, did they have bushy ears, did they have at least a little fleece? Othello didn’t usually get any further than mere descriptions, and even these were enough to give the sheep a queasy feeling around the backs of their necks. Othello never talked about humans.

When Mopple told a story it was nearly always about humans. Mopple retold the stories that George had read aloud to them. He had remembered everything, and his stories could be almost as good as when they heard them the first time round. They were just shorter. At some point Mopple would feel hungry, and that was where the story ended. The better a story it was (that is to say, the more meadows, grazing, and fodder it contained), the sooner it was over. The real excitement now wasn’t always in the stories themselves but in wondering how far they would get this time.

The prospects today looked poor. Mopple was telling the fairy tale. In no other story were there so many meadows, so much grass, and so much fruit. Mopple’s eyes shone as he told them about the fairy ball held every night on the frogs’ meadow. His eyes went moist as he told them how envious goblins pelted the fairies with apples during the festivities. He told them about the appearance in the long grass of the Goblin King, who could raise the dead from their graves and send them to haunt the living. Then something unusual happened. Mopple was interrupted.

“Do you think the Goblin King really did it?” asked Cordelia hesitantly. All the sheep knew she was talking about George’s death. Mopple quickly pulled up a tuft of grass.

“Or Satan?” added Lane.

“Nonsense.” Rameses snorted nervously. “Satan would never do a thing like that.”

Several of the sheep bleated in agreement. None of them thought Satan capable of such an act. Satan was an elderly donkey who sometimes grazed in the meadow next to theirs, and uttered bloodcurdling cries. His voice was truly dreadful, but otherwise he’d always struck them as harmless.

“I still think it was God who killed him,” said Mopple, with his mouth full. “Beth thought so too.” The sheep had a certain respect for Beth because she had invested so much time and trouble in such a doubtful item as George’s soul.

“Why would
he
do a thing like that?” asked Maude.

“God moves in mysterious ways,” explained Cloud. The others looked at her in surprise. Cloud realized that she had said something odd. “He says so himself,” she added.

“Then he’s a liar!” Othello looked furious. The eyes of the ewes were shining with admiration. Only Miss Maple was unimpressed.

“Was it high or low tide on the night George died?” she asked suddenly. For a second they were all silent.

Then Mopple and Zora bleated in unison, “High!”

“Why?” asked Maude.

Maple began walking up and down as she focused. “If George had been thrown over the cliff, the tide would have washed him away, maybe all the way to Europe. Then no one would have known what happened to him. This way, though, it was downright impossible for him
not
to be found. The murderer wanted George to be found. Why? Why do you want something to be found?”

The sheep thought long and hard.

“Because you want to please someone?” suggested Mopple hesitantly.

“Because you want to warn someone,” said Othello.

“Because you want to remind someone of something,” said Sir Ritchfield.

“Exactly!” Miss Maple sounded satisfied. “Now we must find out who’s pleased, who’s been warned, and who’s been reminded of something. And what they’ve been reminded of.”

“We can’t find that out,” sighed Heather.

“Maybe we can,” said Miss Maple.

Without another word she began to graze. For a moment all the sheep were silent, thinking with some awe of the huge task ahead of them.

A lamb suddenly bleated out loud with fright and indignation. Its mother, Sara, set up an agitated bleat of her own. She was twisting and turning as if trying to shake an insect out of her fleece. Her lamb stood beside her, looking tearful. Then something small and shaggy shot past Sara’s legs and ran off, zigzagging as it went.

The halfling. The milk thief. The winter lamb. He had taken his opportunity to steal Sara’s milk while they were all busy thinking.

Every sheep knows that a winter lamb bodes no good to the flock. Winter lambs are born at the wrong season, in the cold, with twisted characters and nasty souls. Bringers of bad luck, who can tempt robbers to roam around freezing flocks of sheep at the lean time of year. And there had never been a worse winter lamb than the one who had plagued their flock since last year. He had been born at the darkest hour of the night. His mother had died and they’d expected him to die too. But he tottered after the flock, squealing, and the sheep reluctantly made way for him. This went on for two days. On the third day they had expected him to die at last, but George foiled them with a bottle of milk. When they bleated reproachfully at him, he muttered something about “brave little thing” and against all the dictates of reason he reared the lamb: a ruthless milk thief, as badly out of proportion as a goat, far too small for a lamb of his age, but tough and cunning. They tried to ignore him as far as they could.

So there wasn’t much agitation among the sheep now. Once they were sure that the winter lamb really had run off to the edge of the meadow and was hanging around under the crows’ tree, they acted as if nothing had happened.

They spent the rest of the day grazing (but not on George’s Place), and digesting the grass comfortably in the evening twilight. Then they trotted off to the hay barn. Cloud had announced that it was going to be a rainy night.

They pressed close together, lambs in the middle, older sheep around them, full-grown rams on the outside, and went to sleep at once.

Miss Maple dreamed a dark dream, a dream in which you could hardly see the grass in front of your own sheepy nose.

The dolmen stood before her, bigger but flatter than it was in real life. Three shadowy human figures were standing on it. Maple felt their eyes resting on her. These humans could see in the dark.

Suddenly one of them moved toward Maple. His vague outline took on the shape of the butcher.

Maple turned and fled. The spade that she seemed to have been holding in one front hoof fell to the ground with a dull thud.

She heard the butcher’s voice behind her. “A flock needs a shepherd,” he whispered. Maple knew at this point that she didn’t need a shepherd, it was a flock she needed. She bleated until the other sheep answered from the darkness. Stumbling forward, she found the flock and pushed her way into the safe, woolly tangle.

Something made her suspicious. Her flock smelled wrong—just why, Maple couldn’t say. She heard the butcher coming closer and froze. Then a wind rose and blew away the darkness like mist. In the pale light Miss Maple could see that all the sheep in her flock had turned black. She was the only white sheep among them. The butcher was making straight for her, holding an apple pie.

Suddenly it was dark around her again. Miss Maple had woken up. She was about to snuggle up to Cloud, her favorite nighttime neighbor, but something was still wrong. The sheep round her smelled like her own flock, and yet they didn’t. She could pick up the scent: Mopple, who still smelled slightly of lettuce, Zora with her scent of fresh sea air, Othello’s resinous ram smell. But it was as if other sheep had been mingling with them, incompatible sheep that didn’t give anything away about their personalities. Half sheep, as it were. Miss Maple peered around, but it was at least as dark in the hay barn as in her dream. The rain was pouring down outside, and there were no other sounds. Maple suddenly felt sure that she had seen a movement close to the barn door. She pushed Cloud aside. Cloud began bleating quietly in her sleep, and other sheep joined in, making Miss Maple temporarily lose her sense of direction. She stood still. After a few moments the bleating died away, and she heard the rain again.

Outside, rain like stair rods was falling into the night. Maple sank up to her knees in mud. Her fleece soaked up the water, and she felt twice as heavy as usual. She thought of the lamb who had seen a ghost, and was going to make her way to the dolmen when she heard a sharp, ringing sound, like stone knocking on stone. It came from the cliffs. Maple sighed. The cliffs were certainly not the place she wanted to meet a wolf’s ghost on a pitch-dark, rainy night. All the same, she moved on.

It was not as dark on top of the cliffs as she had feared. The sea reflected a little light, and you could see the coastline, shadowy but unmistakable. You could also see that there wasn’t anyone there. Whoever had made the noise must have fallen off the cliffs. Maple felt her way cautiously up to the edge of the slippery slope with her wet hooves, and peered down. Of course she couldn’t see anything, not even how far down the abyss went. She decided to retreat, and realized that it wasn’t going to be easy. The grass was wet and slithery. Someone had set a trap for her, and she, Miss Maple, the cleverest sheep in Glennkill and perhaps the world, had walked right into it. Maple waited for a hand or a nose to give a gentle but determined push and send her over the edge.

She waited a long time. When she realized that there was no one behind her she lost her temper. With a furious backward jump she made it to reasonably firm ground again and trotted back to the hay barn. She stopped at the door and took a deep breath of air. It smelled of her flock and nothing else. Maple puffed and panted with relief, and noticed that her legs were trembling. She searched for Cloud, who was still bleating softly somewhere, lost in a dream where there was no butcher and no apple pie, probably just a large green field of clover.

Suddenly one of her still-shaking hooves trod in something warm and liquid. The liquid was dripping off Sir Ritchfield. The old ram was standing there motionless with his eyes closed, as if he were fast asleep. He was soaking wet, like a sheep who has been dipped underwater for a very long time. Miss Maple laid her head on Cloud’s woolly back and thought.

4

Mopple Squeezes Through a Gap

There was no wind the next day, and the gulls were not calling. Thick gray mist crawled back and forth over the meadow. No one could see more than two sheep’s lengths ahead. For a long time they stayed in the hay barn, where it was warm and comfortable. Now that Tess and George weren’t driving them out into the early-morning light anymore, they were choosier.

“It’s damp,” said Maude.

“It’s cold,” said Sara.

“It’s too much to expect of us,” said Sir Ritchfield. That settled the matter. The old ram hated mist. Ritchfield couldn’t use his good eyes at all in mist. He realized that he wasn’t hearing very well these days, and he very soon forgot which way he had come.

But there was another reason for the general hesitation too. The mist seemed to them sinister today, as if strange shadows were moving beyond its white breath.

So they stayed in the barn all morning. They got bored, they felt guilty, and finally they were hungry. But they remembered how George and Tess had annoyed them on days like this, and stayed put. A front line of white, thoughtful sheep’s faces stared shortsightedly into the swathes of mist, while Mopple started forcing his way out into the open air through a gap in the back wall of the barn.

The wooden splinters of the rotten planks caught in his fleece and scratched his tender skin. When he had squeezed himself about halfway through he began to wonder whether his idea about that gap had really been a good one.

“If the head will fit through so will the rest of the body,” George always used to say. Only now did it strike Mopple that he had been talking about the rats in the shepherd’s caravan feasting on the contents of rusty cans.

Mopple had never seen a rat at close quarters. He wasn’t so sure whether they really did look like small sheep. Mopple’s mother had told him so when he was still a plump suckling lamb; she said that they were very small and very woolly sheep who ran through the stables and barns in flocks, taking dreams to the big sheep. As a grown ram he had wondered why other sheep kicked out at those little rat sheep. He concluded that they were probably sheep having bad dreams. Mopple couldn’t complain of his own dreams. There wasn’t much variety in them, but they were peaceful.

Mopple stopped to think about what most sheep looked like. Zora, for instance: elegant nose and velvety black face, gracefully curved horns (Zora was the only ewe with horns in George’s flock, and they suited her extremely well), large fleecy body and four long, straight legs with delicate feet. The head might be a sheep’s most attractive feature, but it wasn’t the widest part of its body.

Mopple twisted and turned uncomfortably, determined not to panic—at least, not straightaway. Was it right to go out through a gap in secret, behind the backs of the other sheep? He had his reasons, but were they good reasons? For one thing, he felt hungry sooner and more often than the others. Not a bad reason. Mopple stretched his neck, got a tuft of grass between his teeth, and calmed down a bit.

The other reason was more complicated. The other reason was Sir Ritchfield or Mopple’s own memory or Miss Maple, or rather all three of them together. A clue. There had been a great many clues in George’s detective story, but George had thrown the book away. However, Miss Maple would know what to do with a clue. And Ritchfield would probably try to prevent Mopple from telling Maple. So Mopple had to get through this gap. To tell Miss Maple in secret. She wasn’t in the hay barn, so she must be outside somewhere. Or maybe not?

Before Mopple started it had all seemed very simple, but now a sharp splinter of wood was sticking into his side, and he was terrified of puncturing himself and leaking out like Sir Ritchfield. The sheep all agreed that somewhere in Sir Ritchfield there must be a hole through which his memories leaked out and trickled away, but they ventured to say so only when he wasn’t within hearing distance. These days it wasn’t difficult to be out of hearing distance of Sir Ritchfield.

Mopple tried to make himself thinner. The sharp stabbing feeling went away. He took a deep breath, and the tip of the splinter stuck into his side again. Panic was very close now. He felt it breathing down his neck like a beast of prey. He was going to leak worse than Sir Ritchfield, he’d forget everything, even why he was in this gap, and then he’d be stuck here forever and die of starvation. Starvation—him, Mopple the Whale!

Mopple made himself so thin that he saw stars in front of his eyes, and kicked out frantically with his back legs.

Othello had spent half the night out in the meadow, dripping wet and in a state of feverish excitement. Would
he
come back? From the moment when Othello saw Sir Ritchfield he had secretly hoped so. He had feared it too. Now it had happened. The memory of a scent still lingered in Othello’s nostrils. Ideas circled around his horns like swirling mist. Joy, anger, fury, a thousand questions and a tingling sense of embarrassment.

But Othello had learned to drive the swirling thoughts in his head away. Through the damp mist, he scented the air in the direction of the hay barn: nervous sweat and a sour smell of bewilderment. The flock was in the grip of disquiet. And rightly so: even Othello felt there was something eerie about the mist today.

Ritchfield still wasn’t letting his sheep out of the dry barn. All the better, but Othello wondered what the lead ram hoped to gain by it. Did Ritchfield know who had come to their meadow last night? Was he trying to conceal the fact from the other sheep? If so, why?

The black ram briefly wondered which way to go. The least likely way, of course. He trotted toward the cliffs. Last night’s rain and the misty air had washed away all the scents. Othello put his head on one side and used his eyes to look for tracks, the way a human would. He felt slightly ashamed of that.

Almost deaf, almost no sense of smell
, he heard the familiar and always slightly mocking voice say inside his head. A voice from memory, accompanied by the rushing of black crow’s wings.
If you want to know what the Two Legs know, you have to stop and think what they don’t know. All that matters to them is what they can see with their eyes. They don’t know more than we do, they know less, that’s why it’s so difficult to understand them, but
…Othello shook his head to drive the voice away. Good advice, no doubt about it, but the voice often said confusing things, and now he had to concentrate.

In one place the ground was not just soggy but positively churned up. By Miss Maple, probably.
He
would never have left a mess like that behind. Othello was looking for something less conspicuous. A little farther off he saw a stunted pine tree, the only pine growing anywhere far and wide.
Friendly evergreens, keepers of secrets, wise roots.
The pine tree attracted Othello.

He circled round the small tree until it seemed to lean over in shame before his eyes. Nothing unusual. Except for the hole, of course, but Othello didn’t think much of the stories about the hole. The hole was right beside the roots of the pine and went down through the rock at an angle. Day and night the sound of the sea came through it, gurgling and glugging, mocking laughter from the depths. It was said that at full moon sea creatures came up through the hole to run their slimy fingers round the hay barn. But Othello knew that the shimmering lines you saw on the wooden walls of the barn when morning came were really slimy trails left by slugs. The other sheep knew it too, in their hearts; they just liked stories. On some days you could see three or four particularly bold young sheep assembled under the pine tree, listening to the sounds in the hole and giving themselves an enjoyable fright.

Now Othello looked down there too: steep, certainly, but not too steep for a human who could use his hands, and not too steep for a brave sheep. Othello hesitated.
Something that tastes bad the first time you chew it won’t taste any better the tenth time
, mocked the voice.
Waiting feeds your fear
, it then added impatiently, as the ram still didn’t move. But Othello wasn’t listening to the voice. He was staring spellbound at something dark and shining at his feet. A shimmering feather, black and still as night. Othello snorted. He turned his head in the direction of the hay barn once more, and then disappeared down the hole.

Mopple was out in the open air, breathing heavily and trembling. His sides felt sore, and there was a sharp, stabbing pain in one place. To calm himself down, he repeated the most difficult phrase he had ever learned: “Operation Polyphemus.” George sometimes used to say it, and no sheep ever understood him. Mopple was one of the few sheep who could remember things he didn’t even understand. After saying it he felt braver.

Mopple turned his head to look, not without pride, at the narrow gap through which he, Mopple the Whale, had just squeezed his way. But the wooden wall of the hay barn had already disappeared in a mist so dense and solid that Mopple felt almost tempted to take a bite of it. He controlled himself, and pulled up some grass instead.

The mist wasn’t a problem to Mopple. You didn’t see as well in mist, that was true, but then Mopple saw poorly anyway. He was more bothered by the fact that you couldn’t pick up a scent properly if you had cool, grassy water drops inside your nostrils. But in general he felt safe in the mist, as if he were walking through the fleece of a gigantic sheep, fleece as light as a feather. Unperturbed, he went on grazing. Now he was sure that at least his first reason for getting out had been a good one. Mopple loved misty grass, clear-tasting as water, with all disturbing smells washed off it. He could look for Miss Maple later, and perhaps she’d be attracted over here by his grass-munching sounds anyway. He wandered back and forth at a trotting pace until he didn’t feel quite so hungry.

Suddenly his nose came up against something hard and cold. Mopple jumped back in alarm with all four feet in the air at once. From where he was now, however, he couldn’t see what had frightened him. He hesitated. Curiosity won the day. He stepped forward and looked at the ground. There lay the spade around which Tom O’Malley had assembled the human flock. It hadn’t been driven into the ground deep enough; it had leaned to one side and finally fallen over. Mopple looked crossly at the spade. Human tools belonged in toolsheds and not on the meadow. But this spade didn’t smell at all the way human tools usually smell, of sweating hands, annoyance, and sharp things. There was only a faint memory of human scent left around this spade; apart from that it smelled as smooth and clean as a wet pebble.

But if you tried hard enough to pick up that human scent you found the memory slowly, gaining a more distinct structure. Soapy water, whiskey, and vinegary cleaning fluid were all part of it. Mopple scented a short, rancid beard and unwashed feet. Almost too late, he realized that it wasn’t the spade he was smelling now but a real human being moving through the mist right beside him. He raised his head and saw a figure, the white, misty shadow of a figure, moving sideways in his direction, like a crab. He lost his nerve and galloped away through the mist.

Running through mist is not a very clever thing to do. Mopple the Whale knew that. But he also knew he couldn’t just stand still. His legs, which normally carried him unerringly toward wild herbs and fragrant carpets of grass, suddenly had ideas of their own. All the mist in the world seemed to have gathered inside Mopple’s head, and he would have liked simply to forget it, he would have liked to be all legs, running away from everything: George, the wolf’s ghost, Miss Maple, fierce dogs, Sir Ritchfield, his memory, and above all death. But one of his hooves was hurting from the unusual force with which his legs were hammering down on the ground. He tried thinking of something, anything, and promptly the most unpleasant thought of all occurred to him: the thought of what was bound to happen any minute.

Sooner or later he would come up against an obstacle. That obstacle could be the cliffs or the hay barn or George’s caravan.
Please not the caravan,
thought Mopple. The idea of meeting a furious, ghostly George waving a nibbled lettuce stalk in the vegetable garden—the scene of Mopple’s crime—scared him most of all.

Mopple the Whale bumped into something large and soft and warm. It gave way and toppled forward with a grunt. The smell was penetrating, and even before Mopple had finished investigating it his legs went weak with fear. He sat on his haunches and peered through the mist with eyes wide open. The grunt turned into a curse, words that Mopple had never heard before in his life, yet which he understood at once. Then the butcher emerged from the mist, first his huge red hands, then his rounded paunch, and finally his terrible, glittering eyes. They were looking at Mopple without haste; indeed they even seemed to be pleased with something. Without warning, the butcher flung himself on Mopple, as if to crush him with the sheer mass of his own flesh.

The next thing Mopple knew was that he must have managed to dodge him not just once, but several times. The butcher had repeatedly fallen in the mud; his elbows, belly, knees, and half his face were black with it. A few green blades of grass were sticking to his left cheek like whiskers, and through Mopple’s shortsighted eyes the butcher looked like a very vicious, fat tiger cat. The parts of his face that weren’t black with mud, especially his forehead and eye sockets, were red as a sheep’s sore tongue. His neck was red too and curiously thick and swollen. Mopple was trembling all over, exhausted.