I Am A Bad Shepherd

I love winter.

The angry wind. The snap of frost in the air. The numbing pain as the air bites into every piece of exposed skin. The raw wildness. I am a winter person. It is my favourite season. There is a beauty in the cold. A beauty in everything slowing down and sleeping for the season. A beauty in everything dying and going dormant. I do not tell people this but the reason why I love the winter is it represents how I feel. For three months the world looks like how I feel inside. There is lots of life in winter, but it is a desperate life. Life on the edge. Life scrambling to keep warm, scrambling to keep fed. The life that is not sleeping through this struggle, is a life that goes just day to day. Make it to the evening and then see what the next day holds. Then carry on again. I understand that. There is a beauty in that struggle. A beauty and a sadness.

I love the snow. That is the passion in winter. The snow is the season’s greatest outpouring of emotion. Not your drizzly, gone by lunchtime snow but a proper dumping. A crunch under your boot. The whole slate wiped clean. All sins and mistakes forgotten. The whole past year wiped out. Everything forgotten for a moment. I can also understand that. That need to forget. That amnesia even if it only lasts for a moment. The snow arrived late, last night, I had waited three and half years for proper snow, for a proper dumping. Three and a half years I have now lived here in Normandy, France. Maybe now I can forget everything, wipe the slate clean. But first I have a problem. I need to find a body. A body hidden in the snow. There is also beauty in the irony of getting what you wished for at the most inconvenient time.

I am looking for my murder victim, I suspected this was the outcome last night when I caught the suspect. There I was on the bridge, looking at the snow dreaming about a multitude of different people and different lives, when the suspect came running around the corner into me. Clearly shocked, surprised by my appearance out of the blizzard and in contrast to all the white, the suspects actions were apparent due to the blood stains. It was a reality check. I came back to the real world with a jolt. The suspect is now sitting behind bars and is not confessing to anything. The suspect is also protesting their incarceration. It does not matter how long they protest; the guilt is there in their eyes. I searched last night but it was dark, the wind was strong and the snow was heavy. I sat quietly in the storm listening. I could hear no sounds so I had to decide that I was looking for a fatality not a casualty. The fatality would still be there in the morning, where a casualty would not. The area was not that big to check it would have to wait until morning. Who knows maybe, just maybe I was wrong.

At the corner of the property is a walled garden about the size of half a football pitch. It opens on one side onto the River Crevon. I have circled the garden looking for my dead body now three times followed by fourteen black Ouessant sheep. Curious little animals. They have slept outside so they all have an inch of snow crusted along their backs. The barn was open but it held no interest for them. They are the smallest breed of sheep in the world about the size of a small border collie. They come from a bleak little island off the coast of Brittany. Not these exact sheep but the breed originally. They love the harsh weather, they are real tough little fuckers, it is all to do with standing up to that unforgiving Atlantic weather. That strength and resilience is buried deep down in their genes. I heard once of farmer who used to put all his animals in for winter. He picked up a couple of these sheep, put them in for the winter and they died. They needed the cold, they needed to feel it, to breathe it, to live it. It was part of their nature. Without it they lost their purpose. They just gave up.

I check the river. Maybe my dead body is there? I cannot see it anywhere and I doubt it has washed downstream, the flood gates are closed and the current is not strong enough. I know what you are thinking, red blood, white snow, but I am afraid you have been watching too many movies. Overnight that blood has frozen and with two more inches of snow on the ground there will be no red markers pointing the way for me today. I sit down in the garden by the chicken house and think. It has to be here. A dead body even in snow should not be this hard to find. I know the problem; it is the size. I am looking for a small body. A body about the size of a small child. I know it is here. I know I am in the right place. You see there should not be fourteen sheep following me around, there should be fifteen. The suspect I caught last night was Marla, my Belgian Shepherd dog. You see, I knew what she had done straight away because this is not the first time.

I am a city boy living a country life, well at least trying to. That little walled corner is part of my patch. The sheep are usually over the river on the back field. I know the extreme weather does not phase them. They are soldiers. I just wanted them to have the option for some shelter. If I never moved them, left them where they were I would not even be on this hunt. I am now at the point of checking the dividing wall. If Marla pulled one over the wall; that would be a first, there would at least be a dip in the snow. A difference between last night and now. A point with slightly less coverage. I keep going back to that most ridiculous phrase. I am such a bad shepherd.

These little fellas I found at a friend’s property up the hill. They were sad and hungry. So a mutual friend arranged for me to buy them. I started with eight of them. I may be a bad shepherd, but they seem to love me. I do not know much about sheep so I treat them like dogs. They come when called and bleat when they need something. They trust me and I kind of dig them too. I have my favourites. Bright Eyes, Polly and Little Voice. I have some I am not that fond of. Grandmother, Big Gob and Bertha. Where is my missing sheep?

At one end of the garden I have some large footings. Four meters wide by twenty meters long. I have had them dug now for almost two years. They are for a semi sunken greenhouse. I only just got planning last September. Englishmen, planning and French paperwork are a long drawn out process. I should have had the base built and frame erected straight away but September and October were all a bit of a catastrophe. I spot the mound in the middle. Small. About the size of a border collie. I do not go over straight away. I just squat down and stare at it.

when I do go over to the mound and clear the snow away from the face. It is ‘Little Voice’. Over the last couple of years, the sheep have had to be separated or come in, either because of injury, treatments, lambing or to buddy up with another sheep having their own problems. I called her ‘Little Voice’ because she pleaded to re-join the flock with the smallest sweetest call. I usually buddied her with her sister ‘Big Gob’, who had a fog horn of a call. ‘Little Voice’ was one of my favourites. Dead, because I brought them in because of the snow, because I day dreamed on the bridge, because Marla is a killer.

I am a bad shepherd.

The truth is I am failing. I do not have to move the body now. The snow will keep it safe, I scoop up some more snow and recover her face. I walk away. The morning's job is done. As I look over my shoulder the other fourteen sheep stand at the edge of the footings. ‘Grandmother' the matriarch hops down and gives the mound a nudge with her nose. I am not dumb. I have a freezer full of sheep. We do eat them. I just do not need it to happen this way. ‘Little Voice’ was too young, the sheep for the freezer are the old girls and the rams. Rams are complicated and occasionally need culling but I cannot think about that now.

I am tired and I am failing.

My failure does not even come with the appropriate drama and effect. It is that slow dripping failure. That slow drip that keeps you awake at night. That slow drip that drives you mad through repetition. That slow drip that brings the roof down, eventually. Failure and how it feels, especially when it is based on nothing concrete, takes away all your energy. Like that drip, it steals your sleep, that lack of sleep steals your energy. That lack of energy stops everything.

The slow drip is only a metaphor. I need this to be real. I can fix a real drip. I would rip the roof off and rebuild anew to end the endless pitter patter. How do you silence a metaphor? I am strong willed, stubborn, forthright. Well I was until recently. The last few months have been very hard. The truth is there is something very broken inside. Something does not work anymore. Something I cannot locate anymore. I think I might have given up.

I just have been too stubborn to realise it.

This confession is fictional. Or is it?

The truth is this week I have been dealing with a lot of emotional stuff and did feel able to write about that. So I took a number of real life events and amalgamated them into one fictional story. Think of it as fighting metaphors inside a larger metaphor. It is all good. Think of it as me just exorcising some stuff; a public cleansing. Hopefully you enjoyed it.

Anyway, thank you for reading my story.

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1st published on Vocal July 2021