Regional legend · 4 min read · Set in Glen Sorrow ·
The Count of Sheep Never Equals
A glen where every dusk count of the flock comes out one over, and the surplus is a face nobody from the valley has ever owned.
- status: folklore
This is how they tell it in Glen Sorrow, and they tell it standing at a gate with the light going, because that is the hour the tale has to be true.
In the old days the crofters counted the flock twice: at dawn for the ledger, and at dusk for the headage man, who wanted to be shown the animals standing up before he signed anything. It was the dusk count that went wrong, and it went wrong the same way every time, which the glen came to think of as a manner rather than a mistake. Fifty in at the fold at dawn, fifty counted out at dusk — and fifty-one. Count again: fifty-one. Send the dog round: it will not bring the extra one. It will not even look at the far edge of the flock, where the surplus stands, and a dog that will not look is a worse report than any number.
They tell of a shepherd called Tam Learmonth who tried to settle it once and for all. Autumn, the year of the big count, mist on the head dyke. He penned them, climbed to the wall, and made his count with a slate and a proper pencil, twice, the way the agricultural officer had drilled him. Fifty-one each time. Then he did the thing the tale exists to warn about: instead of counting, he made himself stand still and watch them, at last light, the way you watch people and not stock.
They were turned, all of them, to face up-hill. From below, along the edge of the flock, the tops of the heads and the gaps between them held together the way wet sand holds together when you press a palm into it, and what they held was a face. A grown face, Tam said ever afterwards, a woman of perhaps fifty, and she was nobody from the glen. He knew every face the valley had. He said so at the bothy, and the old men nodded, and none of them asked him into which pocket he had put the slate.
The next dusk the count came one over again, and the next, and the face at the edge of the flock was a little more lined. That is the part the glen is sure of, and it is the part that keeps the rule alive: the extra sheep counts one over every evening, but the face ages one day for each of ours, so that whatever is being counted up out there is living faster than the glen is. By the time Tam died the face was an old one. His son drew it once, on the back of a warrant, and the drawing was sent down-country, and after that there is a part of the tale the glen did not see the end of. A woman came from a city by the sea and asked at the mart for leave to stand at the fold at dusk. She said the face was hers, and that it was twenty years older than her looking-glass said. She asked could she come back at lambing. The glen told her come back at lambing. Whether she came, the tale does not carry.
The rules came down with it, and they are kept as rules are kept here, quietly, without a committee. Count at dawn when the ledger wants a number, and give the ledger dawn numbers only. If you must count at dusk, count aloud, plainly, so the flock knows where you are in it, and look up between the numbers — the tale says the flock minds being counted and would rather be looked at. And never go looking for which one is extra. Tam's dog had the right of it there.
There are two ways the glen staggers under it, and it holds both. Either the flock is one short of what it was, and something is standing in for a sheep of ours out on the dark side of the hill; or the flock is one over, and something comes in with ours at the going-down of the light and is gone by the ledger again at dawn. The marsh men say the first. The head of the glen says the second. Nobody says the third thing, which is that both might be the same surplus, just counted from different ends of its day.
At the mart now the young men count with slate pencils and the headage man's carbon duplicates, and they will tell you they have never heard it, or that their fathers never said. The old shepherds keep the tale for the bothy and the gate, and tell it to anyone who will stand with them past four o'clock, and every autumn there is one who does — and stands with his pencil dry, and says what they all say in the end: that he counted the flock last week at dusk, and counted it again, and will not tell you the two numbers, only that they were not the same.