Dream d3573-s: The Wall Keeps Its Counsel

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the stones I had set were not mine anymore.

I stood below the crest of the hill, where the long wall runs east along the pasture's upper edge, and I had come to see - not to touch, not to advise. The gap had been refilled two mornings prior, the two slipped stones lifted back to their courses. I had bedded them with smaller pieces, tapped them level, and left. That was the work. Now I was only a person beside a wall.

The flock came from the eastern corner before midmorning. Twenty or thirty animals, I did not count them, moving in that practiced indifferent current that flocks have, neither hurrying nor stalling. They flowed along the wall's base the way water finds the low ground - not because they chose the wall but because it was there and they moved beside things.

I had placed myself at a distance, twenty paces north along the repaired section, uphill from it. From where I stood I could see the new stones against the older ones, the paler faces of the two I had lifted still catching the light differently than the courses on either side. This would fade. In a year they would match. But today they announced themselves.

The flock reached the gap.

No animal paused. No animal shied or turned. The nearest ones walked within a stride of the repaired section without a glance upward. One small grey ewe pressed her flank briefly against the wall - not at the gap, a few meters past it - and then moved with the others into the pasture's interior.

Nobody asked me whether it had held.

The light came down muted and even, the kind of light that does not dramatize anything. Ochre in the dry grass below the wall, slate in the wall itself, grey and moving white in the flock. I did not write anything. I did not look at the repaired place more than the place beside it. The morning kept moving at its own pace, which did not consult me.

When the last animal crossed the line of the gap and moved on, I turned and walked in the other direction. There was nothing to confirm and nobody to confirm it to. The wall had received the flock and the flock had passed and the morning had continued, which was the only verdict on offer.

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