Crime and Punishment

Craig arrived yesterday. I took him over to say “hello” to Roger but that was a mistake because he keep dozing off during the aperitifs Roger brought out for us. Preston has his friend Jean-Charles here, and they spent the evening sitting out by a campfire drinking beers and roasting chorizo. This afternoon, some American friends who own a house on the other side of the departement will come over and we’ll make a trip to the iron yard. The dealer there has lots of decorative plaques that you put in the back of your fireplace to give off even more heat and my friends were going to go to an antique fair to look for one, but I told them I thought they would have a better selection and receive a better price if they went to the iron dealer’s yard. They’ll stay for dinner.

Blanche has spent the past two nights, alone, out in her pasture. This new sleeping arrangement came about because one morning she wouldn’t go in her pasture for over an hour. I lost my patience with her and, I am ashamed to say, that I hit her with a bamboo herding stick I was using to try and prod her in the direction I wanted her to go. I hit her many times. People say sheep are stupid, but she isn’t. She didn’t want to go into her pasture because she doesn’t like being separated from the house and the companionship that flows from the house. I would love to let her wander free near the house, but she would devour the flowers in less than a half an hour.

I spanked Preston once when he was a little boy, and he immediately hit me back. So I never spanked him again. I realized that the only thing he learned from the spanking was that it’s okay for people to hit people. I realize the futility of hitting a person or an animal, and so I feel very badly that my lack of patience overcame my intelligence. That happens every day, but usually violence isn’t the result. The caveman in me won out.

I felt like a battering husband who hits his wife, realizes what he has done, truly regrets it, and then says to the wife, “I love you but you made me do it.” Blanche didn’t make me do it, although for a brief, regrettable moment, I was certain she did. I had a “schedule” to keep and she wasn’t accommodating my schedule. She just wanted to be near the house. So I hit her because she loved human companionship.

I leave her out in the pasture now. I'm afraid of again losing my patience with her should she follow her intependent streak if I continue moving her back and forth from her house. There is a shelter in the pasture but she doesn’t use it as it’s over in another part where she seldom goes. However, by leaving her out all night, it appears that she is beginning to accept her life as a real sheep. She sleeps in the corner near the house, and as soon as the sun rises, she starts her circuit of nibbling the pasture. When the day turns hot, she lays next to her water tank. Yesterday, she figured out that the tank keeps the flies away from one of her sides and cools her body down.

I’m working on finding some other sheep. A sheep needs company, someone, somesheep to be close to during the night. And since Craig is here now, I can’t fulfill that role anymore. I believe this flocking instinct of sheep, their inability to defend themselves, and their willingness to lovingly bond with humans, is the reason they are used in the New Testament as metaphors for Jesus’ followers.

I’m very sorry I beat Blanche. I hope that I didn’t scar her emotionally, as one ruins a horse if it is beaten. She seems to be just as friendly as she always was, and with all her wool (because our shearing job was inept) perhaps the sordid situation was, to quote someone I know well, “more painful for me” than it was for her. I’m in the very strange predicament of wanting to be forgiven by a sheep. I’ll never know if I will be forgiven, and even if a sheep forgives I doubt that she will ever forget that she can’t trust me to always take good care of her.