“Sammy,” I said. “I have a great idea! Why don’t you stay here and check in the sheep as people return them. I doubt if any sinister sheep rustlers would try to fence hot sheep with you in charge, and if they did, you could arrest them!”
“Okay,” Sammy said. “But I think it would be a good idea to give them each a receipt, with the ID numbers of the sheep they turn in marked on it. Down at the station, we always like to give people a receipt when they turn in lost or stolen property.”
“Excellent idea,” I said. “And we’ll keep a carbon, so we can make sure no one tries to sneak any sheep out one end of the pasture and then bring them in the other to earn more than one bounty for them, which is what I bet a few people would try if we didn’t keep track.”
“I would never have thought of that,” Michael murmured.
“No wonder you hate faculty politics so much,” I said. “You have no sense of deviousness. Come on—let’s do a census of the sheep we already have.”
Easier said than done. While the ear tags were a vivid yellow that was hard to miss, reading the numbers on them required us to get closer than the sheep liked—close enough to get kicked or butted, especially since by the time we finally caught up with our quarry, we were usually too tired to take evasive action. The captive sheep, which I had previously dismissed as the most dim-witted and sedentary members of the flock, proved remarkably deft at eluding us on their home ground.
From the amount of sheep dung waiting to surprise the unwary passerby in the flat part of the pasture, I deduced that the sheep must spend a lot of time hanging out there, which probably accounted for my remembering that I’d seen them. Once they escaped from the flatlands to the slope beyond, as half of them did before we could get their numbers, the dung gave way to sneaky hidden rocks, all accompanied by patches of thorns and brambles, conveniently placed so you could hardly help landing in them when you tripped over the rocks.
We never would have gotten the last two sheep identified if Dad hadn’t returned from tending Rob and used his powerful birding binoculars to read the tags from afar. He offered to search the rest of the pasture for any sheep that might be still lurking out of sight, and we gratefully took him up on it.
“What’s Eric doing?” Michael said, pointing. I broke into a run, with Michael and the lanky Sammy behind me. One of the sheep appeared to be dragging my nephew behind him. At least it was moving too slowly to be dangerous. Though why Eric didn’t simply let go of the sheep’s tail I couldn’t imagine.
Until I got closer and realized that Eric was trying to rescue Spike, who had chomped onto the sheep’s left hind leg and refused to let go. Or perhaps Eric thought he was rescuing the sheep from Spike. Since the sheep appeared calmly oblivious to her two hitchhikers, I suspected Spike had nothing but a mouthful of wool. His readiness to let go when Michael grabbed him confirmed my suspicion.
“You’re letting my sheep go!” Eric wailed, as I picked him up and tried to dust him off.
“Don’t give up the sheep,” Michael said, nodding.
“I’ll take it back to the pasture,” Sammy said. He captured the sheep and strolled off leading it with an ease that astonished me. How long did you have to live in the country before you learned how to do things like that?
“What on earth were you doing?” I asked Eric.
“Spike was helping me catch the sheep,” Eric said. “Good dog.”
Since Spike’s only previous encounter with sheep had been in a culinary context, I didn’t approve of casting him in a real-life remake of Lassie.
“That’s nice,” I said aloud. “But Spike’s pretty fierce. Maybe we should keep him away from the poor sheep.”
Just then, Spike proved my point by biting Michael.
“Okay,” Eric said. “I’ll take him back to his pen.”
Before I could stop him, he reached out and picked up Spike. Spike not only refrained from biting, he curled up in Eric’s arms and behaved angelically all the way back to his pen. Though I did suspect he was smirking at me and Michael.
Michael went off to solve the traffic jam by removing as many sheep as possible from the road, while I returned to the checkout table.
An hour went by. Maybe two. Or maybe it was only ten minutes. All my running around after sheep and suspects had worn me out, and I was starting to make embarrassing mistakes in simple arithmetic.
“I think a dollar is too much for this,” a woman announced, thumping a large, ungainly ceramic object on the table in front of me.
I studied the object. It appeared to be a cross between a candelabrum and one of those strawberry pots with ten or fifteen different holes for the plants to stick out. Perhaps it was intended to be a vase in the shape of a stylized octopus. Whatever it was, someone had painted it in color combinations even a kindergartener would find gaudy.