when one day I broke a tooth on a fruit stone I welcomed the pain.
Long before I had engaged to help with the yearly gathering of the sheep for the shearing, and now the time came round. The boy came up to ask if I would meet Emyr on the quarry road early the next morning. I wondered how I should face him, but there was nothing for it and I said I should be very glad.
He was there in the gray morning, surrounded by his dogs. He was anxious and preoccupied: this was the most important day in the farming year for him and he was afraid it was going to be spoiled by the low-hanging cloud that hid the top half of the mountains. We did not talk much as we went up the road. It was just as well, because I could not make my voice sound natural; even the most trivial words sounded forced and overdone: I wondered that he did not notice it.
As we climbed higher we reached the cloud. It blew in irregular wisps between us and the higher rocks: they would appear, gaunt, outlined dramatically against the streaming cloud behind them, and then vanish.
The aim of the morning’s work was to gather all the sheep scattered on the mountain and to drive them down to be shorn. Already a dozen of the other farmers had set out for prearranged points on the limit of the mountain, to be ready at a given hour to start driving the sheep inwards to the gathering place. This was a co-operative task, like the threshing, and some of the farmers came from miles away.
The wind increased as the sun mounted, and before we had reached the top of the road the last streams of cloud had been torn off the round top of Penmawr. Emyr’s mind grew lighter: he explained to me that these shearing days were fixed long before at a farmer’s meeting, and that if the day turned out rainy (a wet sheep cannot be shorn) or cloudy, so that the sheep cannot be gathered, there is no help for it; the day is lost, and the farm must wait until all the others have had their turn, and then the whole business of the year is unsettled. And the great preparation is wasted: there are perhaps twenty shearers to be fed (friends, neighbors, relations—there are no men to be hired) apart from the hangers-on, and it is a great point of honor among the farms to feed them well. A good wether is killed, a whole ham cut up, innumerable puddings made—a hundred preparations that go to waste if there is no one there to eat them.
However, the cloud had lifted, and it did not look as if it were going to rain. I was posted at a place where the sheep had a habit of plunging down the scree and breaking back into the mountain when they were driven: I was to head them to the pens at the top of the road.
A long wait alone in the cold wind: I allowed fantasies to take shape in my mind and when the first sheep appeared I was not ready for them. They were trotting uneasily toward my gap. Already they were quite close: when I came from the shelter of my rock, shouting and waving my stick to send them back, I was on their flank; the foremost bolted for the gap and the others followed him, rushing along with quick, springing bounces so near past me that I could have struck the last.
This was very bad. I hoped that no one had seen me. Other sheep began to come over the skyline, white strings of a dozen ewes and their lambs. It was easy enough to deal with them if they saw me early enough, but twice a lamb came suddenly through the rocks at my side, bolted down the gap, and then the ewe would follow whatever I might do.
There were more and more: they were coming from new directions now, as the other drivers got nearer to the gathering place. I saw the first of the dogs, and some minutes later the men began to show on the skyline, scattered all along the edge above me. There was a last flurry of warding off the sheep and then abler men with dogs took over my place and the sheep, milling hundreds of them now, were urged into the labyrinth of stone pens at the head of the road.
As I walked down by myself,
Long before I had engaged to help with the yearly gathering of the sheep for the shearing, and now the time came round. The boy came up to ask if I would meet Emyr on the quarry road early the next morning. I wondered how I should face him, but there was nothing for it and I said I should be very glad.
He was there in the gray morning, surrounded by his dogs. He was anxious and preoccupied: this was the most important day in the farming year for him and he was afraid it was going to be spoiled by the low-hanging cloud that hid the top half of the mountains. We did not talk much as we went up the road. It was just as well, because I could not make my voice sound natural; even the most trivial words sounded forced and overdone: I wondered that he did not notice it.
As we climbed higher we reached the cloud. It blew in irregular wisps between us and the higher rocks: they would appear, gaunt, outlined dramatically against the streaming cloud behind them, and then vanish.
The aim of the morning’s work was to gather all the sheep scattered on the mountain and to drive them down to be shorn. Already a dozen of the other farmers had set out for prearranged points on the limit of the mountain, to be ready at a given hour to start driving the sheep inwards to the gathering place. This was a co-operative task, like the threshing, and some of the farmers came from miles away.
The wind increased as the sun mounted, and before we had reached the top of the road the last streams of cloud had been torn off the round top of Penmawr. Emyr’s mind grew lighter: he explained to me that these shearing days were fixed long before at a farmer’s meeting, and that if the day turned out rainy (a wet sheep cannot be shorn) or cloudy, so that the sheep cannot be gathered, there is no help for it; the day is lost, and the farm must wait until all the others have had their turn, and then the whole business of the year is unsettled. And the great preparation is wasted: there are perhaps twenty shearers to be fed (friends, neighbors, relations—there are no men to be hired) apart from the hangers-on, and it is a great point of honor among the farms to feed them well. A good wether is killed, a whole ham cut up, innumerable puddings made—a hundred preparations that go to waste if there is no one there to eat them.
However, the cloud had lifted, and it did not look as if it were going to rain. I was posted at a place where the sheep had a habit of plunging down the scree and breaking back into the mountain when they were driven: I was to head them to the pens at the top of the road.
A long wait alone in the cold wind: I allowed fantasies to take shape in my mind and when the first sheep appeared I was not ready for them. They were trotting uneasily toward my gap. Already they were quite close: when I came from the shelter of my rock, shouting and waving my stick to send them back, I was on their flank; the foremost bolted for the gap and the others followed him, rushing along with quick, springing bounces so near past me that I could have struck the last.
This was very bad. I hoped that no one had seen me. Other sheep began to come over the skyline, white strings of a dozen ewes and their lambs. It was easy enough to deal with them if they saw me early enough, but twice a lamb came suddenly through the rocks at my side, bolted down the gap, and then the ewe would follow whatever I might do.
There were more and more: they were coming from new directions now, as the other drivers got nearer to the gathering place. I saw the first of the dogs, and some minutes later the men began to show on the skyline, scattered all along the edge above me. There was a last flurry of warding off the sheep and then abler men with dogs took over my place and the sheep, milling hundreds of them now, were urged into the labyrinth of stone pens at the head of the road.
As I walked down by myself,
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