Dream d3298-s: Murmur at the Hurdle

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fold came back to me in lamplight, the hurdles standing in a low square against the dark and the keeper moving along its edge with a lantern held at arm's length.

The sheep came in twos and threes from the slope above, their breath visible in the cold, their wool catching amber at the gate where the keeper stood and whispered numbers I could not hear but could count by the pauses. Lano sat beside me on the ground, her ears angled toward the flock, nose working steadily through the dark. She did not move toward them.

I had been here before. I knew the smell of this fold - wet hurdle-wood and old dung and the crushed plant that grew at the eastern corner where the ground stayed damp. It was the same smell. The keeper's posture was the same, the particular way the lantern was held low rather than high, casting light on hooves and ankle rather than face.

The clerk stood near the gate post with a ledger open but wrote nothing during the count. The surveyor had taken a position at the far hurdle and was quiet. We all held our positions while the keeper moved and counted. There is a kind of courtesy in this: the count is the thing that must not be interrupted.

Forty, and a pause. Forty-one. A sheep that had been hesitating at the gate came in at last, and the keeper touched its flank as it passed, briefly, the way you might close a door after the last guest.

The lantern was set on the corner post when the counting was done. It threw its circle on the packed earth and the wool of the nearest animals and no further. The fold held its sounds - the small adjustments of bodies settling, a low call answered by a lower one.

Dunnebarrow was quiet around it. The dark beyond the light was not threatening; it was simply where the light did not reach. I stood in it and watched the lantern and the animals and the keeper, who moved now without urgency, checking the hurdle latches by hand.

Lano pressed against my leg, warm through the cold air. She watched the fold a moment longer, then turned her face toward the hill behind us where the dark had closed completely over whatever had been there before.

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