The Counting of the Flock

The shepherd's dog came down from the pasture alone on the third morning, and this was the first wrong thing.

It sat at the edge of Vrenk's property — not whining, not panting, not displaying any of the ordinary distress of an animal that has lost its purpose — but sitting with a stillness that the dog had never owned in its life. Vrenk knew this dog. He had watched it work the slope above the Razor ridge for four summers. It did not sit still. And yet there it was, and the sheep were not behind it, and Blaž Horak was not behind the sheep.

Vrenk went up that afternoon with his neighbor Jernej, who carried a walking pole and said little. The path was sound enough to the first waymarker, then it softened into the kind of ground that October makes — not quite mud, not quite frost, a substrate that records weight but releases it slowly, as though reluctant to confirm what has passed. They found prints from the flock easily. They found Blaž's boot-prints beside them, the left heel worn lower than the right in the characteristic way. These prints climbed to the summer shelter without deviation and then — there is no gentle phrasing for it — they stopped. Not at the shelter door. Not at any natural boundary. They stopped in open ground twenty meters from the building, mid-stride, the right foot forward, as though the man had simply been removed from the act of walking.

The sheep were inside the shelter. All forty-one of them. This was already impossible, because the shelter door latched from the outside and the latch was still thrown.

Jernej opened the door and the smell was not of sheep. It was of something older and more mineral, the smell Vrenk associated with the deep karst below the high meadows — that exhalation of the earth's interior, cold and without appetite, the breath of spaces that have never held light. The sheep were pressed to the back wall, not milling, not bleating. Standing. Facing the wall. Each one oriented in the same direction, as perfectly parallel as objects arranged by deliberate hands.

Vrenk stepped inside and this was his error, though he could not have named it as such until later.

The quality of the sound changed. He had spent enough time in forests to understand silence as a texture, to know that true silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of something that has displaced it. This was that. The sheep did not move. His own footsteps seemed to travel only a short distance before stopping, absorbed, as though the air inside had become dense with something he could not metabolize. He called Blaž's name and the name went nowhere. It did not echo. It did not carry. It ceased, immediately, at his lips.

Jernej called from the doorway, asking what he saw. Vrenk turned to answer and the doorway was further than it should have been. He understood this geometrically before he understood it with any animal instinct — the distance was simply wrong. He had taken perhaps four steps inside. The door now appeared to be fifteen meters distant, Jernej a small figure in the frame of it with the October light behind him going grey and inadequate.

He walked toward it. The distance did not close at the rate it should have. He counted his steps carefully the way he had been taught to count in narrow passages underground, one reliable number following another, and when he reached twelve he permitted himself to look up and the door was no closer and Jernej was no longer in it.

The sheep had not moved. They faced the wall in their long row, and Vrenk noticed now that their breathing was synchronized in a manner that breathing is not, all forty-one chests moving in the same slow expansion, and the expansion was very slow, one breath every thirty seconds or more, and on each exhalation there was a sound — not a sound sheep make — a low, sustained frequency that resided more in the sternum than in the ears.

Vrenk walked.

He counted.

He is not in the record of people who were ever found on that mountain or any other. His boot-prints were later identified in the mud outside the shelter door among the others, the left heel lower than the right in the ordinary human way, and they stopped where Blaž's had stopped, in open ground, mid-stride, the right foot forward.

The dog was still sitting at the edge of Vrenk's property when the search party returned at dusk. It remained there through the night. By morning it was gone as well, and nothing about its departure had been recorded by the frost.

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