Aegypt by John Crowley

Author:John Crowley [Crowley, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780575083141
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SIX

One lamb had died; it lay, a wet lump, near its mother, who nuzzled it dazedly. Farther down the shed, a ewe had died delivering: beside her, a living lamb attempted to suck. Spofford lifted his lantern, in whose light his breath clouded, and carefully numbered them, so weary he almost could not keep count. The rest were all right. So: one dead lamb, its mother full of milk; and one motherless lamb. But the living ewe wouldn’t give suck to the orphan; some instinct, smell, something, prevented it. So the orphan lamb would starve, unless Spofford began now to feed it by hand.

Or he could try an older method, that he had heard of from someone, who, he forgot who; he had in his mind the dim image of an old shepherd who had learned it from an older, and so on back through the years. Well all right.

He opened his knife, and working swiftly and almost automatically as though he had done this many times before, he took the thin wet skin from the dead lamb, pulling and cutting it free. When he had it, he took up the orphaned lamb, and after bundling it in the pitiful rag of its cousin’s skin, he laid it by the dead lamb’s mother.

The mother examined it, insofar as she could; she nuzzled it, and found it to be her own. At the disguised lamb’s insistence, she let it suck: let it live.

How do you like that, Spofford marveled, bloody to the wrists of his sheepskin coat. Now how do you

‘like that,’ he said aloud, waking.

It wasn’t night in February, lambing time, but morning in December. It had snowed in the night, the first snowfall of the year; a white light filled the loft of his cabin, so that he knew without raising his head that it had snowed.

Boy (he thought, stirring), sometimes they can be so convincing. So convincing.

He sat up, and scratched his head with both hands. His sheepskin coat hung, clean, on a peg. He laughed aloud: that was a great trick with the lamb. He wondered if it would work. He hadn’t – as far as he remembered – ever heard of it, though as a boy he had once hand-fed an orphaned lamb. For sure the aged shepherd whom, in the dream, he had remembered telling about it (apple-cheeked, with stump of pipe and lamb’s-wool hair) was nobody he knew in waking life, a complete fiction.

Over breakfast he decided he would ask one or two sheepmen he knew in the county whether that switcheroo was a possibility. Whether it was a well-known old trick.

And if it was?

Washing up, he made a further decision. This seemed a day charged with significance: that dream, this snow-light, certain deeps seeming just for today to be open and plumbable within him. So when his chores were done he would go over to the Lodge to visit Val, a thing he had been intending to do for a long time. While

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