One Sheep Short

Frank counted the sheep every evening at the gate of the pen, with the dog sitting at his side. There were a hundred of them. Counting was a habit, his wife used to say, not a job, because the wall was good and the dog was better. She had been dead six years now, and he still counted.

Every Sunday his daughter phoned from the city, and every Sunday the argument was the same. Sell the farm, Dad. Come and live near us. You cannot run a hill farm alone at your age. And every Sunday Frank said that he was well, that the dog did most of the work, and that he would think about it, which meant that he would not.

On the Tuesday after one of these calls, the count came up one short.

He counted again, slowly, and got the same number. He knew at once which sheep was missing: the young one with the black face, the one that climbed like a goat and got through walls that held every other sheep on the farm.

Thunder was moving up the valley. It was still distant, but the air had gone heavy and quiet, and the light over the hill had turned a strange yellow. Frank took his coat and the long rope, whistled for Bess, and went up the lane.

The rain started before they reached the top field. It came in hard, the way rain does when it has been waiting all day.

"Find her," he said.

Bess went off through the grass with her nose down. At the far corner of the farm the ground falls away into rock, and there is a small cave there that Frank had known since he was a boy. Part of the wall above it had come down in the spring, and he had not fixed it. The sheep had gone through, followed the sweet grass to the edge, and dropped into the dark.

She was not hurt. He could hear her under his feet, calling and calling, and Bess stood at the mouth of the cave with her ears up, waiting to be useful.

Frank looked at the hole. Then he looked at his knees. Then he thought about his daughter, put the thought away, and tied the rope around a rock.

The drop was not deep, about the height of a man, but the rock was wet, and half way down his boot slipped and he sat down hard in the dark. For a moment he stayed where he was, holding the rope and listening to the rain. A flash lit the cave white, and the thunder came in right after it, very loud, and the sheep pushed her face into his coat like a child.

"Yes," he said. "All right. I know."

He put his hand on her back and talked to her, low and steady, the way he talked to all frightened things, until she stopped shaking. Then he got her front feet up onto the rock, put his shoulder under her, and pushed. She went up over the edge in one wild jump and stood in the rain looking down at him, as if none of it had anything to do with her.

Frank climbed out after her, hand over hand on the rope. It took longer, and it hurt more, and the sheep and the dog both watched him do it.

They came down the lane in the full dark, Bess walking behind the sheep, the storm rolling away east over the valley. At the pen he counted again, from the beginning. A hundred.

Inside, he lit the fire and hung his coat over the chair. The phone rang while the kitchen window was still running with rain.

"I saw the weather," Ellen said. "They said there were storms over the hills. Are you all right?"

"It passed through," Frank said.

"What did you do today?"

Frank looked at his coat by the fire, and at the rope lying by the door, and at Bess, asleep on the floor with her nose on her feet.

"Counted the sheep," he said.

Ellen was quiet for a moment. Then the argument started again from the top, and Frank let it run. He would retire, he said at the end of it, on the day he could no longer count to a hundred.

He fixed the wall on the Thursday, and the young one with the black face watched him do it, eating grass. She was over it again by the following spring.