The Grey Wether

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the stone that everyone insists is a sheep.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

I am a stone. I should like that established at the very outset, in the plainest words the language runs to, because it is the one fact about me that the entire parish has agreed, for two hundred years, to treat as an open question.

I am grey. I am round in the back. I am about the size and the settled shape of a good ewe who has lain down in the heather to think about nothing in particular — and I have lain here, on the high moor above Mucklecombe, since before the heather, since before the moor was given its name, since before there was a single soul in the west of the realm to be wrong about me. And from the first shepherd who ever came up here behind the first flock, to the one who was up here on Thursday, I have been, in the fixed and immovable opinion of everyone who has ever laid eyes on me, a sheep.

Let me tell you how the days go, so you may judge for yourself the weight of the evidence I am up against.

I am counted. Twice a day, every day, into every tally, by every shepherd, since tallies began. A flock of two hundred is a flock of two hundred and one when I am in the field, which is always, and no shepherd has ever made the count come out and thought to wonder why the arithmetic of the moor runs one ewe heavy in exactly one spot.

I am whistled at. The dogs, I will say, are not fooled — a dog knows a stone; a dog has a nose and the sense to use it — and the good dogs long ago worked out that the grey ewe on the rise is not their business, and lie down, and sigh, and wait for the shepherd to catch up, which he does not, for a shepherd is the one animal on that hill who trusts his eyes over everything, including his dog, including the plain cold fact of me under his own hand.

I have been sheared. Once. I will not dwell on it. The young man was new and thorough and had got halfway round me with the blades before the truth of the situation came up through the handles and into his wrists, and he sat down in the heather and said a word I shall not repeat, and I have, to this day, a paler band round my middle where two hundred years of lichen came off in an afternoon, and I am told it suits me.

I have been driven home in the wet, unsuccessfully, by a man who could not understand why the one sensible ewe who ought to want her fold was refusing it with a stubbornness he had never met in a sheep and, had he thought about it, never would again. I have been reported to the Pound-Keeper as a stray. I have been worried over, in the fog, when I "would not get up," by a girl of about nine who cried, actually cried, over a rock, and I have never in two hundred years felt anything so keenly as I felt that, and I am a stone, and we do not feel things, and I felt that.

The parish, of course, is not entirely a fool, whatever the above suggests.

Long ago — nobody knows when; it has been repainted more often than the chapel — they set a board in the ground beside me, and on the board, in good deep letters kept fresh by people who know exactly what they are keeping fresh, it says:

THIS IS A STONE. IT IS NOT A SHEEP.

It has never worked. Not once. I have watched it fail for two centuries, and the manner of its failing is the truest thing I know about people: a man who has decided I am a sheep does not read the board. Or he reads it, and takes it for a joke, or a riddle, or a warning about some other stone, some sheep-shaped rock elsewhere on the moor that a sensible parish would naturally want to flag — and then he goes back to trying to move me, because the board is only words, and I am plainly, roundly, greyly, a sheep.

The board fools nobody and saves nobody and is repainted anyway, faithfully, generation on generation, and I spent the first hundred years or so unable to see the point of it, along with the point of most of the rest of it.

Because I did resent it, for a long time. A stone has its dignity. I am older than sheep. I was here before the breed was thought of and I will be here, grey and round and entirely myself, when the last mutton in the realm has been eaten and forgotten. To be counted, and whistled at, and sheared at, and driven, and mistaken, day upon day, by soft brief creatures who cannot tell granite from a ewe — I thought it an indignity, and I thought it for a hundred years, which is a long time to be cross about anything, even for a stone.

And then I did the arithmetic the shepherds never do, and it undid me.

There are a great many stones on this moor. Thousands. I have lain among them since before the naming, and I will tell you the plain fact of their existence, which is that not one of them is ever counted. They are rock. They are correctly, accurately, unarguably rock, and they lie where they fell and weather to sand with not one living soul to mind whether they are there in the morning. They are right, every one of them, and they are alone, every one of them, and the two things are the same thing.

And I am wrong. I am the one stone on this whole grey hill that is wrong — and being wrong, I am counted. I am tallied twice a day. I am whistled home in the wet. I am fretted over in the fog by little girls. When the snow comes the shepherd comes up the hill to see the flock is whole, and he counts, and I am in it, and if I were not — if I ever, somehow, were not there — a man would stand on this rise in the snow and know, to his bones, that he was one short, and would look for me.

A flock does not leave its own out on the hill. And a parish that has decided, against all the evidence and against its own painted board, that I am one of the flock, is a parish that will come up the mountain in the teeth of anything to make sure I have not been lost — which is more than the moor has ever once done for a stone that had the good sense to be a stone.

So. Here is where I have come to, lying up here being wrong, these two hundred years.

I would rather be a wrong sheep than a right stone.

A right stone is accurate and alone. A wrong sheep is mistaken and kept — counted, watched, worried over, come back for. And I have grown fond, in the end, even of the board, THIS IS A STONE, IT IS NOT A SHEEP, because I have understood at last what it is: it is not a correction. It is the only headstone a stone will ever be given, painted fresh by a parish every few years so that a passing stranger will not fret himself over a rock — and a people who will keep a sign in good repair for two centuries to spare strangers the worry of me have not, you understand, been fooled. They know precisely what I am. They have always known. They have simply decided, in the settled and immovable way this realm decides the things that matter, that knowing what I am is no reason whatever to leave me off the count.

I am a stone, and I am not a sheep, and I have been counted in the flock for two hundred years by people who know better — and I have learned, lying here being wrong, that to be taken for one of the flock is a warmer fate by far than to be correctly left alone. The moor is full of stones that are right about themselves, and every one of them is by itself. Be slow, then, to insist on being counted for exactly what you are. A parish that will fret over you in the fog, and come up the hill for you in the snow, and keep a board bright to spare a stranger your worry, has not made a mistake about you. It has made a decision — and there is no warmer one it has to give.