Shepherds of the Wild/Chapter 20
Chapter XX
Dreams, dreams! Spot, the young ram, waking or sleeping, never escaped from them. They came to him through the long, still hours of night, they disturbed his sleep in the mid-afternoon rest when the flock sought the deep shade, he knew them even in the hours of grazing. They were so plain, so real that they seemed more like memories,—events that had transpired before he came to lead Crowson's flock.
Yet his damming was not the least in doubt. Crowson himself knew Spot's full record as far as his own immediate life was concerned. He had been born in the lower foothills,—the first lamb of the season. And his mother had died to give him birth.
Such casualties do not happen often among the domestic sheep. There were a few such losses each year, usually due to an unnatural delivery, but in this case there was a simpler explanation. Little Spot was oversized; in a remote way that Crowson could not quite identify, he differed in outline from any other lamb in the flock. The same divergence could still be noticed now as Spot reached his second autumn.
"Good Lord," Crowson had said, when he marked the lamb's coloring and size. "Here's a little devil that would be worth watching if his ewe were just alive to keep him fed. I'd like to see just what kind of a ram he'd grow to be."
He supposed that Spot would die; a motherless lamb in western flocks can't be counted on to survive. But in this case Spot obviously had other plans. Before the end of his first day he had attached himself—with an instinct that was seemingly miraculous—to the largest, strongest ewe in the flock, one whose own lamb had died. Crowson himself fastened the skin of the dead lamb on his back until the ewe gave him her breast.
It was as if he already knew his destiny and needed full-feeding and rich milk to attain it. Spot grew fast. And in the castration and docking season little Spot was spared,—just to see what kind of a white-rumped, miscolored, heavy-headed ram he would grow to be.
And almost from the first day he had had those strange, haunting dreams. Mostly they were thrilling, breath-taking, joyous dreams, but sometimes they were simply nightmares. The earliest one of all, perhaps, concerned some sort of a terrible enemy that always seemed to be menacing him from above. It was something that could drop with the speed of a waterfall leaping down a cliff, or the morning light chasing the shadows down a snow-capped peak as the sun came up. Spot knew that it had cruel talons that could lift him in the air and carry him to a fearful land of cold and darkness whence he would never return. The sheep do not ordinarily watch the skies—the range of their eyes is downward—and thus the only way to mark Swift Wing's approach was to see his shadow on the crags. And once when the shadow of a lazy buzzard flicked across the meadow—a sight unnoticed by the other lambs—Spot's little heart choked with terror, and he tried to squirm under the ewe's body.
Cliffs, waterfalls, snow-capped peaks! What did little Spot know of them? He was born on the lower foothills, and from the highest camp where Hugh drove the flock the peaks were still far aloft, glittering in the sun. Yet Spot knew them. In his dreams he knew exactly how the waters broke, gleamed, and roared as they dropped from ledge to ledge; he knew the feel of the firm snow under his hoofs, the glory of the sun from the topmost spire of the highest peak, the touch of the cold crags as he lay in the sun.
His dreams were ever so much more real to him than his realities: the band of patient ewes, the firelight of the herder, the slow grazing over the wide stretches of green grass. In fact, Spot put no trust in camp fires and herders. The herder, he felt in the depths of his heart, should be eyed with suspicion. This strange, forked breed was no companion of his. He couldn't get away from a feeling of strangeness and unfamiliarity with the scenes of his birth, as if he had wandered away from home and didn't know the way back. He was lost and lonesome and unhappy, and he had been cheated from some glorious heritage that was rightly his.
He couldn't get used to the slow movements of the ewes and the other lambs. His muscles seemed to itch and burn when he was idle. He wanted to run, to dash up the rocky cliffs; and yet he dared not leave the flock. The gregarious instinct among sheep is too well ingenerated for that. Once weaned, he spent his surplus energies in running back and forth across the front of the band, ever longing for the lost land from which he had strayed.
In his dreams he always left the meadows far behind him. Even the forest itself was left too, and he was set free and joyful in a more familiar land: a place of jagged cliffs and sliderock, narrow passes and steep precipices, great rock crevices and snow-capped peaks. It was true that some of his band accompanied him. But they were all taller, all stronger, all active as himself. And a great blood-brother—whose word was immutable law in the pass—was always in the lead. It seemed, dim and deeply hidden from him, that he himself was ordained—when his full strength was upon him—to lead that band in their wild adventures over the cliffs and stretch his own irrevocable law over the ranges. But that was far off. In his dreams he was merely one of the dark-colored band, marked with white even as himself; and the leader had tremendous, curling horns of which even Lurk-in-the-trail, the cougar, could rightly be afraid.
Such games they had in his dreams, such breath-taking adventures and wild leapings from crevice to crevice, from ledge to ledge. Sometimes it seemed to him that he would climb and climb, as a star climbs in the sky, to the loftiest pinnacle of the highest peak from which the whole mountain world would spread in glory below him, and the setting sun would throw its red glow over him. The longing for his lost land was with him every waking moment. He loved his dreams: his reality seemed absent of all delight. He was always sorry to waken. Deep, insatiable longings and vague unhappiness filled his days.
It was a perfectly natural development that in his second year—even although he had not yet reached full maturity—he should obtain the leadership of the flock. The other sheep sensed his self-reliance even though they could not share in it, and even the old ewes followed him with entire simplicity and trust. He seemed to have had the advantage of some stern sort of an education that they did not have, and almost unaided by the herder he led them to the choicest feeding grounds. He was brave when they were afraid; he sensed danger when they were blind and deaf; and most of all he had the spirit of kings. But they could not follow where he would have liked to lead them. And because of the eternal instinct toward gregariousness, he had to stay back with them. It would have been easy for him to whip past the dog, gaining quickly the high passes where such beasts as Cry-in-the-night could scarcely follow. But the others could not keep pace.
The dreams were always real and lifelike, but one night in late September they swept him with unutterable vividness. The flock had bedded down at the highest camp in the range: Crowson's holdings ended in the fringe of timber immediately above them. And all at once he leaped straight out of his dream into wakefulness.
He was trembling all over with excitement; his blood simply racing in his veins. The night throbbed, his heart swelled as if it would burst. At first he only saw the moonlight, fragile and silvery, over the sleeping sheep. He raised his head.
One of the wilderness traits that even the domestic sheep have not altogether lost is the ability to stand absolutely motionless until human eyes get tired of watching. Not a hair twitched on the young ram. It was such a posture as his followers had often seen in him when the flock was menaced by some approaching beast of prey; yet Spot was not thinking of enemies now. And all at once a wild flood of ecstasy passed through his frame.
Out of the darkness of the ridge certain living forms came stealing one by one, as silently as stealing shadows. A wonderful and noble monarch—to whom even the wolf made obeisance—was first in the file,—just as Spot had known. Others, even smaller than himself, brought up the rear. And then Spot knew the truth.
He knew that his dream was coming true.