Rebecca Flock takes over shepherding George Glenn's flock

Rebecca Flock takes over shepherding George Glenn's flock after the sheep deliberately choose her over Gabriel O’Rourke. Their decision joins two relationships left unsettled by George Glenn’s death: the flock’s loss of a shepherd who cared for it, and Rebecca’s estrangement from her father. Rebecca arrives as their new shepherdess, but the flock’s choice is not simply a change of management. It is an act of preference and trust, which she begins to meet through the familiar practice of reading aloud.

The Bond Left by George Glenn

George Glenn’s relationship with his flock had been built out of repeated, ordinary attention. He came to the meadow early, when the sheep were still huddled together asleep, and laughed as Tess drove them apart so they could begin grazing. While they fed, he worked in the vegetable garden or made repairs. The sheep might feel aggrieved at being roused, but their irritation wore off by afternoon, when they gathered at the steps of George’s shepherd’s caravan to hear him read.

Those readings were part of the flock’s experience of being cared for, rather than an incidental pastime. George Glenn read fairy tales, a book about sheep diseases, and a detective story that he abandoned halfway through, leaving its mystery unresolved. Most often he read romance novels. The sheep remembered the ritual and its setting: George Glenn among them in the meadow, the flock gathered by the caravan, and a human voice making a story available to listeners who understood the world differently from its human narrator. After his death, the flock recalls both practical care and companionship; Miss Maple argues that they owe him the effort to discover who killed him because he had tried to find the culprit when a fierce dog took one of their lambs.

The change in shepherding also alters the flock’s material circumstances. With George Glenn gone, the sheep discover that his fenced vegetable garden is no longer protected by his watchfulness and eat its lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. That brief freedom does not replace the care they have lost. Later, Gabriel O’Rourke fences his own sheep into part of their meadow, reducing the space available to George Glenn’s flock. He explains that his sheep eat a great deal and must be fattened. The flock thus encounters a different human relationship to sheep: not George Glenn’s daily work and reading, but a system organized around raising animals for slaughter. These contrasting experiences shape what the flock is choosing when it rejects Gabriel as its shepherd.

The Flock Chooses Rebecca

When the lawyer asks for offers to shepherd the flock, Gabriel O’Rourke steps forward first. The people of Glennkill remain silent, but their hesitation does not mean the sheep have no preference. Rebecca Flock speaks up as a candidate; the lawyer then places her and Gabriel apart and asks the sheep whom they want to accompany them to Europe. The decision is put to the flock because George Glenn’s will has made their choice relevant, though the lawyer must find a way to interpret an answer from animals who cannot speak in human language.

Maude calls for Rebecca, followed by Lane, Cordelia, and Mopple the Whale. The lawyer does not understand their bleating, and the sheep fall silent, uncertain how to make their wish legible. Gabriel’s Gaelic murmuring still has a charm for them, but it does not settle the choice. Othello steps forward, looks at Gabriel, turns, and trots to Rebecca. The others follow, clustering around her until the lawyer recognizes their response as unanimous. The flock’s movement, rather than a human argument about qualifications, decides who will shepherd it.

The choice is also a rejection of Gabriel’s particular claim. He can manage sheep, and some people present consider that practical ability sufficient, but the flock’s experience gives it reason to prefer someone else. The sheep have seen his fence contract their meadow and watched him cut grass with George Glenn’s scythe for his hungry flock. Their alarm at Gabriel’s methods stands against their memory of George Glenn’s care. When the lawyer announces the decision, the flock returns to the meadow knowing that Europe is part of its future; it imagines the destination as a vast pasture with apple trees. The vote therefore secures Rebecca’s place with them while tying their new relationship to a journey they expect to make together.

Rebecca’s Arrival and the Work of Trust

Toward evening, Rebecca comes up from the village on foot with a small suitcase. Identified as George Glenn’s daughter and the flock’s new shepherdess, she says that she will live in the caravan until they go to Europe and that she will not remain in the village. She tries the door, works at the windows, and fiddles with the keyhole using a hairpin, but cannot get in. Sitting on the top step with her head in her hands, she resembles George Glenn, who used to sit there motionless and alone. The sheep recognize her sadness; Melmoth hums into the wind. In this first meeting after the choice, the flock does not yet see a confident caretaker. It sees a grieving daughter in a place marked by her father’s absence.

The sheep nevertheless expect her to perform the obligations they associate with a shepherd. When Rebecca appears tired, Heather insists that the will requires her to read aloud and calls her a bad shepherdess for failing to do so. The flock joins in demanding a reading. Their insistence shows how quickly they measure the new relationship against the routines George Glenn established. It is not enough that Rebecca has been selected; they want the familiar practice through which their former shepherd had spent time with them.

Rebecca eventually answers that demand. She says she will read to them and takes a book into the caravan, opening it in the middle rather than at the beginning. The sheep notice the breach of their understanding of how reading should proceed, but accept it because she has begun the ritual. She reads aloud, then closes the book because the story is too sad and continues without it. Her approach is imperfect by the flock’s standards, yet the act itself reconnects the caravan steps with George Glenn’s readings. Rebecca begins to inhabit the role through an action that the flock can recognize and value.

Estrangement and a Shared Story

Rebecca’s improvised story makes the family history beneath her appointment more legible. She tells of a little girl with two fathers, one secret and one public; the secret father and daughter were fond of each other, but after a quarrel they stopped speaking. When a letter came saying that the father planned to travel to Europe and wanted to see her, the girl hid her happiness and kept him waiting. He waited until he died. Set beside the fact that Rebecca is George Glenn’s daughter, the story reveals the painful estrangement that had separated them and her part in their failure to reconcile before his death.

The story also binds Rebecca’s private history to the flock’s immediate future. Europe is both the destination named in the letter within her tale and the place the flock expects to reach with its new shepherdess. The sheep do not need to understand every implication to hear that Rebecca’s own connection to George Glenn is involved in the journey. Her account does not undo the quarrel or restore the father she lost, but it allows her to speak to the flock about that loss while beginning to care for it.

Rebecca’s relationship with George Glenn’s flock therefore develops through a double inheritance. She takes on a practical role made possible by the sheep’s collective choice, and she enters a set of routines that her father had created through work in the meadow and readings at the caravan. At the same time, the flock becomes an audience for the story of her estrangement and regret. Its acceptance is expressed first in the vote, then in its attention when she reads; her early shepherding, in turn, begins not with mastery but with the effort to meet the flock on ground it already knows.