Sheep

Sheep enter the narrative both as animals in a rural economy and as companions in Florita Almada’s thinking. Her husband buys and sells them across the Sonoran countryside, and she sometimes travels with him; later, after his death, she takes to the roads with her own animals. A poem’s resting flock then gives her a pointed contrast for human life: the sheep seem free of boredom and worry, while people must confront their own restless thoughts and the uncertainty of where their efforts lead.

Work and Travel

Florita’s husband is a livestock dealer who trades mainly in goats and sheep, with occasional dealings in cattle and pigs. His work takes him along dirt roads and animal tracks through towns and mountain routes. Florita sometimes accompanies him, despite the convention that a dealer should not travel with a woman, especially his wife. These journeys let her compare landscapes that initially seem familiar but prove different on closer inspection; she sums up that change by saying, “Every hundred feet the world changes.” The flock is thus part of the material world of trade and travel through which she learns to notice difference.

After her husband goes blind, Florita cares for him with the skill she gained in childhood while looking after her own blind mother. When he dies, she briefly takes over the livestock business. Traveling with the animals along mountain trails is pleasurable, but selling them at markets and slaughterhouses is a nightmare, demanding a commercial sensibility she says she does not possess. She abandons the trade and continues traveling with her late husband’s dog, her revolver, and sometimes her animals, which grow old alongside her. Sheep therefore belong to a changing relation: first her husband’s livelihood, then an undertaking she tries and relinquishes, and finally part of the company of her independent travels.

The Shepherd’s Poem

Among the books Florita reads, a yellow-covered volume contains a poem whose shepherd’s experience she finds unusually faithful to life lived in solitude. She imagines the shepherd out with his flock beneath the night sky, where questions about suffering, death, loneliness, and the direction of a brief human life come into view. The poem is about an Asian shepherd, not a Mexican one, but Florita considers that difference immaterial: shepherds are the same everywhere. The flock helps the poem move between a particular life of herding and a wider account of human existence.

The poem repeatedly sets the sheep’s apparent ease against the shepherd’s inward unease. Florita envies the flock because it travels as if trouble-free, soon forgetting each need, hurt, and fear of death. When it rests in the shade, it is calm and happy; it does not seem to suffer from boredom. The shepherd, by contrast, can sit in the same shade and still feel anxiety as though a thorn were pricking his mind. The distinction is not simply between comfort and hardship: even when the shepherd says he desires nothing and has no reason to complain, consciousness itself leaves him vulnerable to unrest.

Human Labor and the Abyss

The flock’s apparent freedom provides the measure for Florita’s meditation on effort. The poem imagines an old, weakened traveler bearing a heavy burden over mountains, valleys, rocks, sands, rivers, and swamps, pressed onward through heat and cold until the road ends at an immense abyss. Florita treats this image as a statement about the mortal condition: effort does not guarantee a destination that can redeem it, and at the end the traveler’s experience is forgotten. The sheep’s resting and grazing form a stark counterpoint to this relentless human passage.

Florita does not leave the image as an abstract philosophy. She draws practical conclusions from the poem: thoughts can carry a shepherd away with them because that is human nature; facing boredom directly takes courage; and, if all effort does lead toward an abyss, people should at least avoid cheating one another and treat one another properly. The flock’s apparent freedom from boredom is therefore not merely an ideal of animal happiness. It helps expose a specifically human burden, while Florita turns that recognition toward a modest ethic of conduct.

Narrative Significance

The sheep have a double place in Florita’s account. They are actual animals tied to trade, travel, and the companionship of her later life, but they also occupy the poem’s contrasting position beside the shepherd. That contrast gives shape to Florita’s reflections without making the animals only props for a human lesson: their untroubled rest, movement, and forgetfulness are the terms by which the poem measures the difference between animal life and human self-consciousness. Through them, the narrative links the material rhythms of rural work to Florita’s reading, her experience of solitude, and her practical insistence on treating others well.