Exmoor

The brunt of the storm. Wind shifts north and true. Tussock grass bends backwards in the unrelenting gale. Duelling gusts one way and the other. Rain in sheets. Buzz of tall grass snapping in symphony. The roof hammers, deafening, sheet metal drumming like a snare on the frame. The gusts so strong they might rend it free and send it sailing off the side of the mountain. The sheep huddle, shivering, a solid mass moving to and fro under the weight of fear, each beast at the outer edge eyes wide and burrowing backwards, kicking reflexively, trampling, a fire wasp nest of friction and heat. The oldest and youngest lambs will not survive God’s reaping. Forked lightning rends the air, ozone sharp and tangy, reverberating crack of thunder with an instant onset and a long, deep coda, a voice shouting in the night. The time between the lightning and the thunder stands still. A potentiality of violence. A crackle and a crash. Electric wind and static charge across the tormented and thrashing meadow.

On the day he first visited her grave the sun struggled through a wan grey sky. Still-fresh clod sat beneath the pristine headstone, hewn in rough basalt with a small centered inscription. In his hand a small bunch of white wildflowers, picked from the meadow, which he lay on the grave haltingly, jerkily. He stepped back and bowed head for a significant pause. The pearlescent grave jutted from the virgin ground like a tooth. He shook and keened and dropped to his knees, where he remained until the moon first peered above the canopy.

Four days later a man from the town came to visit. His back bowed against the weight of his canvas rucksack as he strode up the steep gravel path to the shepherd’s hut. He pounded on the door; peered through the windows with his face cupped by his hands; circumnavigated the hut once, twice, thrice; and finally with a shrug dropped the bag at the door and set back off down the path. A metal can rolled from the pack and clattered against the door.

For another day the bag was untouched, but when the sun’s light next stroked the flagstones of the hut they shone on bare stone.

The night dragged with it a thick fog. The shepherd remained in his hut, struggling through a cold can of food, then fell into repose on his rough cot. His thinning body lay frozen in a stiff and puppet-like stillness. He stared unblinking at the wall. Whorls and patterns swirled in the wood grain, an infinite fractal of nature’s invention. His eyes traced the grain, over and over, as the hours slipped by.

From the hillside, downslope, came the sounds of his flock, the once-familiar bleating and jockeying, but somehow transmitted more loudly by the fog, and warped. The bleats had begun to carry an alto undertone, one of pain and sadness, but the shepherd remained unmoved.

The next morning came to the shepherd without a respite from the previous day. Sleeplessness pervaded every thought and action, slowing him further from the molasses pace of the previous weeks, and he swung around the cabin almost drunkenly. The herd’s noise belled maddeningly inside his head, an uneven staggered drone that was now too much to bear. No more individual voices could be determined; it had become a single smear of ugly noise.

The shepherd dragged himself from the unwashed bed, stumbling in his sleeplessness, and paused to smooth down the vacant left side. The hut’s interior had begun to turn to chaos, an entropic magnet pulling empty cans, muddy clothes, and unused tools into a new centre of mass. Some past mornings, the shepherd had not risen but leapt from the bed, as if making a show of force, and strode to the door. But on placing a hand upon the handle his body would sag, and he would stand, still, staring vacantly with his eyes wide and darting.

This morning, though, with the dissonance of the flock still ringing in his ears, he shrugged up a pail from a hook by the door and stepped out into the light, blinking in the sudden brilliance. Overhead great towers of cloud loomed in the blue dome of the sky; greater and greater masses of white boiling over from the one below like great cauldrons flung into the heavens. The grass of the meadow swayed in the light breeze and small white butterflies danced through the wildflowers. Now he tended to the herd. The animals were well-watered from the troughs, but even the lushness of the winter growth had not sustained them in his neglect, and their burrs needed removing, their fences fixing, and their horns untangling. He set about these tasks in silence, brow furrowed against the blinding reflection of the sun off fenceposts and water. The ground felt spongy under his feet, as if the earth itself was gently resisting his movements. By the time he had finished his work, the golden orb of the sun was high, and the trees moved erratically and unpredictably, animated by a gusty wind. With no more work to do, the shepherd sagged, his face losing its hardness and sinking back to lined and weary. His limbs dragged as he walked back up the path towards the hut.

It was then, with one palm on the wooden door, that he heard the faintest mewing, so faint that were his senses not intensified by the sharpness of fatigue he would have missed it. Behind a gnarled and bent-over willow the noise continued even as he dragged himself towards it, and rounding the stump he found its source. A sheep lay dead in the small depression at the base of the tree, flystruck and marred by stench. Curled up next to it was a tiny lamb, days-old, feeble and naked, pure natal whiteness now reduced by mud to a dirty brown. As it felt his presence it stirred and made to stand, but found its legs without energy. It continued to mew softly. Crouching down, with one hand resting softly on the neck of the dead sheep, the shepherd scooped up the lamb and held it to his breast, then stood and turned back towards the hut.

The shape of the room had begun to fit his contours perfectly, the contours of his life, and at first the lamb felt like a blight, an ugly tumour that was under his feet when he stepped blindly backwards, or squirmed out from beneath his body when he sagged onto the cot. At first too its bleating continued maddeningly; it refused the bottle of warmed milk he extracted from one of the herd’s other mothers, then complained of hunger and thirst deep into the night. At one point, darkness having reached its thickest point and started to slowly embrace a sliver of dawn, he cursed it with all his might and fury, this strange, leggy, hapless creature. But the morning brought perspective, his head crackling with the energy of another sleepless night, and when he offered the bottle again this time the lamb approached it warily and tested the nipple with its long red tongue. It began to lap, growing emboldened and tugging and pulling at the bottle in his hand, milk dribbling down its chin and its small watering eyes looking up at him. From then onwards it didn’t seem such an unwelcome presence. When he returned each day from shifting the flock and treating his animals in the pastures, the lamb was waiting at the door for its own food, and, satiated, would rest by his leg as he ate from his own tins, which were still dropped off sporadically but surely by the villagers from down below.

Spring flourished, and passed, and with summer’s heat the lamb continued to grow. It was by now old enough to leave the hut. It never strode far from his side, as he pounded through the sun-kissed dandelions and wildflowers under the azure sky, but he delighted in its clumsy forays into the world. One morning, when it sniffed placidly around the open lip of a water trough, only to lose its footing and careen into it, sputtering about with its hair matted and stuck over its eyes, he even laughed.

Most days they would visit the grave. The shepherd, carrying a haphazard bouquet of brilliant wildflowers plucked from the circuitous route into the copse, would kneel at the foot of the headstone while the lamb danced around him, myriad white butterflies playing too in the dappled enclave, alighting on his body as he dreamt while awake. Sometimes, after quiet contemplation which could last for hours, his shoulders would heave silently, and he would shuffle back to the hut without a glance back to the trailing lamb.

It was a glowering day in July, after such a visit, that he returned home with the lamb to find a note on his door. Deciphering the handwritten page, a growing realisation dawned that this was to be his last delivery of canned food; the villagers could no longer provide without any form of payment. The shepherd let the note gently drop to the mud, pushed the lamb inside the door with his foot, and sat down on his wooden chair, eyes ahead and unblinking.

Two villagers came that night. They first knocked, then pounded on the door, in turns pleading and exhorting him to emerge. But through the thickness of the hut’s walls their cries were muffled and reduced, and the shepherd sat still in his chair without a sound. The lamb, disturbed by the noise, mewed and rubbed against his legs. When the voices had found futility and faded to a murmur, there was a final thud at the door, and the sound of receding feet on the gravel path. The shepherd’s eyes remained affixed to door, his right hand trembling as the lamb continued to cry.

For two nights he remained in the hut. Nothing seemed able to stir his reverie, not the sharp cries of the birds in the morning or the increasingly desperate mewing of the uncomprehending lamb. He slept in fits and bursts, at all hours, and left his bed only to relieve himself, which he did with a silent shuffle, sliding his feet to push the lamb aside. The temperature in the hut rose, with no windows or doors opened to ventilate it, and the air begin to water with the scent of his neglected body. But still he lay there, staring.

The shepherd sat within the hut, leeward and sailing in the gale, and listened to the maddening roar of the storm. A single oil lamp lit the dim space, wick bright but sporadic and musical, and shadows danced across his face. The draft was incipient and bracing; dangerous weather, weather that kills. The roof had never been fully sealed and was no match for the onrushing deluge. Leaks became rivulets became pools, the furs of his bed and his furniture pushed back into the safest corners. But the water was threatening even those.

His book lay haphazardly discarded, pages splayed and creasing; his mind was consumed fully by the wrath of the elements. His great overcoat fought the chill, wool rough and damp, but still holding heat, baffles of coarse fabric trapping waning body heat tight. Wrapped within his coat the lamb slept unsteadily.

Daybreak: a stillness and a deceptive calm, hiding the violence which played out still across the fields and the valley. The flock was depleted, lambs trampled by their own in sheer panic, strewn broken and dying, legs bent at irregular and spasmodic angles. The larger beasts were not immune to the force of the storm, but take longer to succeed this Earth. Striving, pained bleats and yelps from those which were broken, but a long way from death, and small, gentle weeps from the sheep with remaining lifespans measured in minutes. Among the broken and twisted trees, stripped of foliage and flung sideways as if by God’s own hand, the shepherd strode, overcoat billowing and head genuflected, the still-gusty wind sheering thorugh his turned-down hood and chilling to the bone. The detritus lay about him, too many lives to save, too much care to give, an irreperable wound slashed across the landscape from which there was no hope of recovery. The petrichor hung in the air and the wind faded, now no more than a dark murmur punctuated by the soft weeping of the animals. The shepherd looked back at his hut. A sheet of roof bent at an errant angle, but otherwise it stood, windows ablaze under the overcast sky. The lamb trotted warily by his side.

He continued on with a singular focus, the damage receding into the background as he walked with increasing urgency towards the small copse of bent and broken trees, and the gravel path strewn and muddy leading within. As he entered the copse the dappled light of the leaves danced on his unshaven face. Blinking his eyes at the transition in luminance, he rounded the corner, saw the clearing, sank to his knees, dropped his lantern to the side, and wept.

Some time later he rose with a start, full and upright, and strode from the copse without looking back.

The rest of the fields had suffered greatly. Fences were near torn from their posts, the stone wall of the well had collapsed into itself and the pail gone with it. The flock was broken and dying. He returned to the tattered hut and retrieved his shotgun. One by one the agonised bleats fell silent as he went through his merciful rounds, flinching each time as the shotgun kicked backed into his shoulder. When it was done and death had again visited his meadow, he leant wearily on the gun, back bowed, knees locked and stiff, and surveyed the scene. There was nothing left for him here.

He walked to his hut, took his overcoat from the hearth, scooped up the lamb under one arm, and began down the path to the village. The door to the hut teetered softly in the breeze behind him.