Rameses

Rameses is a young ram with horns still little more than two points, and one of the flock’s most readily imagined explanations for danger. His short horns mark him out when he attempts to confront Sir Ritchfield, but his significance lies less in physical authority than in his willingness to speak: he suspects, proposes, panics, and eventually helps give the flock’s understanding of George Glenn’s death a clear form. Across these moments, his liveliness is both a resource and a vulnerability. He can leap to conclusions, yet he does not remain merely a comic figure of youthful alarm; he takes part in the flock’s efforts to interpret threats and to make its message understood.

Identity and Temperament

Rameses is introduced as a young ram whose horns are still short. The description becomes pointed when he is sent to speak to Sir Ritchfield: the older ram addresses him as a short-horned ram, turning Rameses’s most visible physical difference into a measure of the gulf between his authority and Ritchfield’s experience. Rameses’s youth is also reflected in his lively imagination. When the flock discusses who might have killed George, he offers an explanation with the confidence of someone able to picture a scene in detail, even when the evidence does not support it.

His imagination does not make him indifferent to danger. On the contrary, Rameses is quick to interpret uncertainty as a threat. His responses range from an energetic accusation to outright fear, and that range gives him a useful place in the flock’s collective thinking: he voices possibilities others may be considering, even when those possibilities need to be corrected or refined.

Suspicion and the Work of Interpretation

After Othello describes a thin man speaking with Gabriel, noting that the man smelled of whiskey and Guinness, especially on his hands, Rameses immediately accuses him of being responsible. He imagines that the man poured whiskey over his hands because he could no longer bear the smell of blood. The explanation is vivid, but Maude, whose sense of smell is better than any other sheep’s, challenges its premise: human beings do not scent blood as sheep do. Rameses’s theory thus exposes a limit in the flock’s attempts to interpret human behavior. The sheep can observe a smell, but they cannot safely assume that people experience it in the same way.

His theories also draw on the stories and supernatural figures available to the flock. When Cordelia wonders whether the Goblin King killed George and Lane adds Satan as a possibility, Rameses rejects the latter. Satan, as the sheep know him, is an elderly donkey who makes bloodcurdling noises but has otherwise seemed harmless. Rameses’s refusal to blame him shows that his imagination is not simply indiscriminate: he can distinguish a frightening sound from a character he considers capable of murder. At the same time, the conversation shows how far the flock still is from a reliable account of George’s death. Its members are sorting through stories, impressions, and incomplete observations rather than human evidence.

A Proposal to Challenge Authority

When the flock worries that Sir Ritchfield is grazing on George’s Place, Rameses states that the old ram is no longer their lead ram and proposes that someone make this clear to him. The other sheep adopt the suggestion, and Rameses finds himself selected to deliver it. He approaches hesitantly, expecting to address Ritchfield, but the older ram interrupts before Rameses can make his case. Ritchfield acknowledges that he is no longer a lead ram, insists that no one will remove him from the pasture if he does not want to leave, and tells the flock that it is they who need to become clearer.

The encounter ends without Rameses asserting the authority he has proposed. He returns to the flock without having said a word. The scene makes his initiative real but limited: he can recognize that an old arrangement no longer fits and persuade the others to act, yet he has no easy command over either Ritchfield or the group’s confusion. The failed confrontation is also distinct from his earlier speculation about murder. Here he is not offering a theory about what someone else has done; he has accepted a task and physically approached the ram he means to challenge. His retreat makes the cost of that responsibility visible.

Fear, Discipline, and the Flock’s Changing Situation

The loss of George leaves the sheep without a shepherd, and Gabriel’s arrival intensifies their fear that they have passed into someone else’s care. During the resulting panic, Rameses cries that they are Gabriel’s flock now and that they are doomed. His alarm is part of a wider outbreak: Maude cries out about a wolf, Lane and Cordelia press their heads together, and the mother ewes call to their lambs. Rameses does not stand outside the panic to analyze it. He expresses the possibility the others fear, giving voice to how precarious their dependence on a shepherd feels.

Melmoth later assigns Rameses, Lane, and Cordelia an exercise at the hole beneath the pine tree: they are to listen to the cold sea muttering in the depths below. The task belongs to a set of exercises intended to teach the sheep to pay attention and to drive fear away. Rameses’s part is specific and sensory, but it also contrasts with his earlier habit of rapidly turning a sign into an explanation. The exercise asks him to attend to what is there—the sea and its sound—rather than immediately settle on what a frightening situation must mean.

Naming the Murder and Supporting Rebecca

As the flock prepares to make people understand its conclusion about George’s death, Maude asks what they are meant to explain. Rameses gives the accusation a fuller shape: he says that Beth poisoned George, then wanted his soul as well, and put the spade in him so that his ghost would not haunt her. The account combines the flock’s understanding of the poison and the spade with its beliefs about George’s soul and ghost. Miss Maple then presses for a simpler message; Heather reduces it to Beth as George’s murderer, first by poison and then with the spade, and Zora reduces it further to a stark sequence of names. Rameses’s explanation therefore occupies a middle ground between the flock’s supernatural interpretation and the compressed accusation it hopes people will grasp.

Later, when Rebecca has been reading aloud and becomes absorbed in her own grief, Heather and Maude bleat loudly, and Rameses joins them. Rebecca looks up, opens the newspaper again, and resumes the story. The moment is small beside the flock’s investigation, but it shows Rameses participating in a recurring exchange between the sheep and their new shepherdess: Rebecca reads to them, while their calls bring her attention back when she falters. His role remains that of a young member of a collective rather than a solitary hero. He is most revealing when the flock is trying to speak—first among sheep, then in the form of a message meant to cross the boundary between sheep and people.