Sheep

Sheep are part of the novel’s working landscape, but they also become evidence in a chain of events that challenges Hohsalle’s explanations for disease. Their deaths connect crop crossbreeding to livestock loss, the behavior of dogs, and the disputed origins of illness among people and animals.

Flocks and farming

At the settlement led by Taya, sheep pastures lie beside farm fields, with rye planted in late fall already sprouting in the cold. The flock is part of a Zolian farming household’s livelihood and daily surroundings, not merely a passing detail: its condition gives Hohsalle and Makokan a way to ask how illness and death have affected the settlement.

When the inquiry turns to reports of similar sicknesses, the family distinguishes its grandfather’s illness from a wider pattern of loss. He alone among the people had become sick after a dog bite, Tomeh and the old woman explain, but many sheep had died. Their account immediately broadens the investigation beyond the human case and its suspected animal carrier.

Grain and sheep-dancing sickness

Taya explains that the deaths followed the accidental crossing of Aquafa wheat with rye brought by Zolian settlers. Rye pollen had probably reached the wheat fields on the wind; the resulting hybrid grain was more likely to be toxic, and its poison was powerful. Both the local Ahfal Oma’s fire horses and the settlers’ sheep died after eating it, though the consequences fell across different communities and kinds of livestock.

Among sheep, the poisoning produced a distinctive sequence: they jumped and leaped as if dancing, then went into convulsions. The settlers called this illness sheep-dancing sickness. After the Ahfal Oma were exiled, the settlers spent a long time burning off the Aquafa wheat before they could grow rye safely. The episode therefore links animal disease not to a single beast or bite, but to a changed agricultural landscape and the delayed effort to restore safer cultivation.

Carcasses, dogs, and disease inquiry

The dead sheep also became part of a second chain of exposure. The old woman says dogs did not eat grain; instead, they dug up and ate sheep that had died after consuming the toxic crop. Their owners, she adds, had made them eat the carcasses. The dogs then died, and the settlers blamed the locals, accusing them of defiling the land, even though the old woman attributes the dogs’ deaths to the poisoned sheep they had been fed.

That history gives Hohsalle a concrete alternative to a simple account of infection by bites. At the salt mine, his observations had led him to doubt that the disease spread through fleas, ticks, or wind, and to consider transmission by bites from an animal. Yet he also reasoned that shepherds would likely have been bitten if infected wolves or Ossam had attacked their sheep. Taya’s account changes the context: sheep had died in large numbers, but their earlier deaths were attributed to toxic grain and ticks, while dogs’ deaths followed their consumption of poisoned carcasses. The evidence does not itself establish that these past deaths were the same disease as the human cases Hohsalle is investigating.

An ecological clue, not a settled answer

The sheep’s role in the inquiry is consequential precisely because it resists a single-cause explanation. Grain crossbreeding killed livestock; carcasses entered the dogs’ diet; and the settlement’s memories of those losses became entangled with accusations between settlers and local people. Hohsalle’s questions separate these events into possible causes rather than treating every animal death as proof of one spreading illness.

Sheep thus mark the limits of inference as well as the reach of ecological change. Their deaths help explain why dogs might have encountered poisoned flesh, but they do not resolve how the disease under investigation spread across Aquafa or whether the older incidents belonged to the same outbreak. In a story where animal behavior and human decisions shape medical reasoning, the flock is both vulnerable livestock and a crucial part of the evidence.