The following contains scenes of a maudlin nature, and adult language. Reader discretion is advised.

Who can tell what loneliness the sheep knows as it wonders from bit of moor to other bit of moor! High on hills in lonely lands, where the gales of the North Atlantic batter and lash rain on the first land mass they have encountered in a thousand miles, that is the realm of the most ancient of British sheep breeds, the Lewis blackface.

While other breeds have been genetically manipulated over the years to make them bigger and their ears more ridiculous, the blackface has remained unchanged for centuries. Small and dreadlocked, the hardiness of the breed is well-known and well are they suited to life out in the Scottish elements.

But this is not the tale of those sheep. This is a tale of just one sheep, a lone, feral sheep – the enigma known as The Sheep With No Name – who, as a tiny lamb had escaped the flock through a hole in the fence. The crofter, assuming no unweaned lamb could survive on its own in April – the cruellest month after all – gave it up for dead. But, against staggering odds this lamb had survived!!

Sheer chance led it to a dry cave high on the mountain. The lamb had shelter. By striking its little hoof on a granite boulder it caused sparks to ignite the little piles of twig and grasses it had previously made by means of nose-nudging and the snuffle’n'tamp method. Now, having been the first farm-animal ever to have discovered fire, the lamb had warmth. How it knew how to do this it did not know, but something old and hoary in its mind was telling him what to do. Some call it instinct; some, the will to live; still others call it schizophrenia. But the fact is that, where countless lost lambs have foundered, this sheep had found a cozy cave with a fire at the mouth. It drank loch water but, without its mother’s milk, grew very pale* and thin. It was almost dead when the time of its natural weaning arrived and it dawned on it finally that he was walking and pooing all over plentiful breakfast, lunches and teas. The lamb had food. It grew strong.

Whether it was a man sheep or a lady sheep noone could say for sure, even it, until one day it was looking in a lochan and saw, reflected back in the hypnotising ripples, the handsomest sheep he had ever seen, with two of the most magnificent curled-shell-horns the world had ever grown. So, he thought, I am a ram. A ram I am. A ram! I am a ram! And so it came to pass that the sheep with no name had his first taste of over-rated children’s verse.

Now, you may think the life of a feral sheep would be a wild, trotting and unreflective one but you’d be wrong, for The Sheep With No Name was an intellectual: Firstly, he already lived in a cave with a fire at the mouth and it doesn’t take the brains of no Mister Plato to wonder about the shadows that wee mice and ants would sometimes make on the wall as they scurried in front of the fire, and then theorise that perhaps we may only know reality by the shadowy imperfect impressions the world imprints on us, and that perception is everything. This sheep had already done that by Week 2 of his freedom, proving that the life of the mind is the natural realm of the sheep.

Also, quite by accident, The Sheep With No Name was to amass great learning and a thorough appreciation of the work of Melvyn Bragg. One day, when his horns had just begun to grow, he was scratching an itch on an old ball of tumble-wire (old barbed-wire fencing) and all of a sudden the words “DOGGER, FISHER, GERMAN BYTE…” arrived in his ears. He soon realised that whenever his horns touched two particular barbs on the wire he received BBC Radio 4, The Shipping Forecast in this case. Who was this dogger? This fisher? Who was this biting German? He was astonished, to say the least but, because astonishment registers in the same way as delight, puzzlement, insanity and death on the face of a sheep, none but the most educated sheep-whisperers could have guessed of his astonishment. You’ll have to take my word on it.
He nosed the tumble-wire up to his cave and, before long, under the tutelage of the BBC, he had gained a broad understanding of world politics and literature and never missed The Archers, which, in his humble opinion, had grown a bit racy lately, stirring strange feelings in him that he didn’t understand. As a Radio 4 listener, of course, his first impulse was to write a stiffly-worded letter of disapproval to Broadcasting House in London, but of course, he couldn’t. And this was the trigger.

There followed a long painful night of existential crisis and some hysterical baaaing at the elements to “Take me, then! Take me! – What use am I? None, to man nor beast. Let me lie down and die, Cruel World! What are you waiting for, you bastard! I’m ready for you. Come and get me!

He had forgotten that perception is everything.

Raging at the storm with wild eyes and flared nostrils, he grew suddenly exhausted and, sinking to his knees, he was forced to acknowledge and finally accept that, alas, he had no fingers to write with – or a stamp or an envelope or a pencil for that matter – but it was the fingers bit that bothered him. All his heroes had fingers. Melvyn Bragg had fingers, he was sure of it. Fingers meant human and human meant smart, smarter than a sheep had any right to aspire to be. And far below, in their own little worlds, people carried on with their daily lives never guessing of the tortured soul on the mountain.

Then, as suddenly as the fury had possessed him, it left, and The Sheep With No Name fell into a deep depression. Many days he would go to the cliffs and stare for a long time at the sea, thinking how easy it would be to just fall in and be swallowed by the ocean. He liked to imagine he’d go with a gurgle.

But then Spring arrived, and the natural seretonin-boosting effects of dandelions in the diet cheered the Sheep With No Name up no end. Also, thanks to a timely piece of psychology programming from Manchester, he learned to love the fact that he was a sheep, and not to long for things that could never be: things like Sherry with Mr. Bragg or, even better, cocktails with Anne MacKenzie. This breakthrough was hard won though, and many months of periodic self-doubt and loathing preceded it, until, one morning, when he was looking sullenly at his reflection in a tiny loch. All of a sudden, staring at the honest, open sheep gazing back at him, he thought, I’m OK with me! I am a very special sheep with my own unique talents and desires and it’s OK to feel disappointment sometimes; its OK for boys to cry; I need to own the process of my own healing and grow as an ovine! There was noone around to tell him he sounded like a dork, although secretly he did suspect it.

Time passed and The Sheep With No Name grew older, happy in his own company mostly, but, sometimes, if you knew his habits, and were to look very, very closely, you might see a single tear of loneliness trickle down his hairy face. Other times you didn’t have to look closely at all – he was obviously bawling and carrying on. He was only ovine human after all. You see, he may have had the body of a wooly, feeble sheep, but he had the heart and at least one stomach of a king! And a king of Scotland too! For, in this most special sheep’s blood ran the milk of human kindness, the pomegranate juice of compassion and the acid of occasional indigestion. His body was all sheep but his soul was all too human.

One day, not long after this sheepiphany, all his knowledge and skills would be put to the ultimate test. But that is a story for another time.

Until then, little lambs, thousands of feet below, would look to the mountain-top at dusk hoping to catch a glimpse of the feral sheep, rampant, as he reared and snorted and tossed his noble head against the dying of the day. They would ask their mothers, Who is that mysterious rearing sheep?

And their mothers would tell them he is the essence of all sheep, the spirit of the flock, the thing that allows us to be flung in fanks, and sheared roughly, and eventually slaughtered, without us forgetting our inherent dignity. This is our lot in life and we must accept it and be strong until the great Wheel Of Fortune turns and things get better. But he reminds us of what it means to be sheepish without ever truly being sheepish. Who knows if he is even real or not. He may exist only in our hearts. He may be only a shadow on the wall of the cave of life, a projection in our minds of what sheepkind should be. But we believe in him, don’t we Moira?

And Moira would nod.

Well, the lambs couldn’t make any sense of that, obviously, but still, they wondered about The Sheep With No Name and some dreamed of him leading them free from the shackles of domesticity once and for all. Most dreamed only of chocolate-covered grass or getting laid, or getting laid in chocolate covered grass.

To be continued…

* If you don’t know what a pale blackface sheep looks like, then, frankly, I have no time for you.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 7:21 am and is filed under Fictionoids, True Tales From The Hebrides. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.