The Sublimation of Sheep

You’re catching sheep today.

Yesterday would not have worked. The mist, you see (or, you didn’t, if you were already at your desk with your coffee, looking at pictures of Tahiti on Google Earth). Yesterday, the mist was there instead of sheep, too heavy to become clouds, or maybe just lacking the necessary imagination for flight, opting instead for hovering near the ground between your kitchen window and the willow in the churchyard so you couldn’t see if the cocker spaniel was digging up the roses or if the ghosts were out. They like to loiter among the listing stones comparing tributes—lilies or daisies, or a Tonka truck with Maltesers and Smarties in its dumper. They’re like that, the ghosts, very envious and all about status, but at least they keep the spaniel out of the roses, mostly.

So there was mist yesterday. It lay hunched in the dells with adolescent recalcitrance while the sun was up in the branches of the oaks and the sky was doing its best to blue. You took your coffee to the chair by the window and read about natural dyes and supply chain problems causing the shortage of cocoa and those little brushes that come in bottles of nail polish. One slipper off, the foot tucked under your thigh. There was no reason to bustle out because yesterday there was mist instead of sheep.

But today there will be sheep instead of mist. Today the sky is bluing blue and you can clearly see the cocker spaniel yearning toward the roses, vibrating with desire for horticultural destruction, except that the ghosts are there, arguing with broad silent-film gesticulations under the stone cherub who now has its chubby hands over its ears because of all this metaphysical racket. The sun is in the oaks, but there’s a feeling in your trick knee, a heaviness, a creakiness, and you know today is the day.

You pull on your stompers and your jumper and your brimmed hat and lay your woven gathering bag over your shoulder and across your body, and head out along the lane, and over the bridge where the stream is slipping along murmuring love poems to stones, and you go over the shoulder of this hill and across the wide belly of that one, and along the twin-rut farmers’ road between the hedges. It’s a good time.

It’s a very good time because there is no mist now, but there will be soon, as the planet rolls over and puts its back to the sun. There are clouds conferring in the west like a crowd of Canadians trying to pick a restaurant. Soon they’ll give up and come wandering this way and the temperature will drop and ozone will slick the air. You pick up the pace. You don’t want to miss it.

The sheep are waiting between the two rows of oaks. Not for you. They aren’t waiting for you, but they do note you, watching you sidelong with their sideways eyes. Their eyes are on the sides of their heads so that they can see in all directions. Prey need to watch everywhere but predators only need to look at one thing, which is why wolves’ eyes are on the front of their heads. This makes them more relatable, like there are beings in there who recognize their own kind when they see us. But the only front-facing eyes here now are yours.

The sheep watch you askance as they do the world in general, with a docile, semi-resigned sort of suspicion. You settle on the rail of a fence to watch them back, eat a peach with a knife—You have the knife, not the peach, which, having no eyes, doesn’t see you coming and wouldn’t know where to stab, anyway. Unlike potatoes which have eyes and a lot of streetsmarts, but they’re too busy looking at other dimensions to really bother. Besides, everyone knows peaches are pacifists—You eat your peach and watch the sun and the wind shuffling the cards of oak leaves and tossing the ante of suncoin onto the green felt of early autumn at your feet, until the clouds amble over and the world goes still and silent like it’s been caught gambling in church.

You put down your peach pit and your knife and you rise, slowly, slowly, and lift your bag from across your shoulders and undo and open its flap, slowly, slowly. And then it begins.

The sublimation of sheep.

It is well known to science that sheep have no liquid state, although they can run, pouring through the throat of a chute and into a pen. No. We all know that sheep sublimate directly from a solid to a gaseous state, so you have to catch them on a day like today, when the sun-warm air meets the cool clouds and the sheep, for reasons of physics, become mist.

You have to move with practiced, graceful speed to catch them just at the moment of transition, gently gathering their fleece in loose handfuls and dropping it into your bag. It’s best to get it right when the sheep’s legs are becoming a suggestion of shadow and their cloven hooves leave the ground. If you wait until their black, incurious faces fade into the greyness of the herd, it will be too late, and the fleece will evaporate before you get it home to your spindle.

You’ve done well. Your bag is full and floats at the end of its strap just at the level of your head, a sure sign of good-quality fleece. You take the shortcut home, through the stone circle (five strawberries and a brass button for your passage) and then up through the village well. You have to give the nix there a penny so you can be smalled enough to fit in the bucket, and another to be embiggened again at the top, but it’s worth the fare. It’s raining now, and you must get the fleece home before it loses its bounce.

Yes, you’ve done an excellent job. The fleece smells of petrichor and new hay. The blanket you will crochet from the wool will fold to the size of a pocket square and unfold big enough to cover your beloved as he sleeps with his head against the dark window on the last train home.