The flock feigns scrapie to drive Gabriel away by turning a disease they know about into a convincing performance. The episode reverses the usual direction of herding: instead of being driven by human fear and force, the sheep recognize what frightens Gabriel and use it to make him abandon the pasture. Their deception depends on attention, shared rehearsal, and the sight of sick-looking bodies moving through grass.

A pasture without its former shepherd

George Glenn’s death leaves the flock in a changed landscape. He had been found beside the hay barn, and the sheep had to face a world without their shepherd or a sheepdog. Gabriel’s arrival brings a different kind of human presence. He tends his own sheep in an enclosure separated from the flock by wire netting, while his actions on the pasture make clear that he is not simply taking George Glenn’s place.

One decisive image is Gabriel using George Glenn’s scythe. George Glenn had said that people who kept sheep could spare themselves such a tool; Gabriel nevertheless cuts grass at the foot of the hill, on the side facing away from the sea. To the sheep, the scythe becomes a huge iron claw, cutting down grass that Gabriel himself does not want to eat. They see destruction where he sees a task. The enclosure and the cut grass establish the material pressure around the later trick: the sheep are watching a human reshape their pasture and keep another flock behind wire.

Recognizing what frightens Gabriel

The plan begins when Melmoth challenges the flock to pay attention to what Gabriel fears. Miss Maple identifies fences: human beings put them up when they are afraid. The sheep look toward Gabriel’s enclosed flock, whose members are staring hungrily through the wire. That glance connects the insight to the visible barrier already dividing the animals. The flock does not need to overpower Gabriel physically; it needs to make him respond to the danger he believes he sees.

Melmoth then proposes a more unsettling possibility: what if the flock itself falls ill? Zora objects that Gabriel’s sheep already have a hard enough time and that she does not want them to become ill. Mopple worries that disease could pass to his flock. Their discussion keeps actual illness and its consequences in view even as the scheme turns toward imitation.

Cordelia supplies the vocabulary that makes the performance imaginable. Names she learned from George Glenn surge through her thoughts: prophylactics, foot rot, meningitis, and Creutzfeld-Jakob, among other terms from a book about sheep diseases. The remembered words are not merely labels. They give the flock a repertoire of feared conditions and help transform an idea into a plan. A short time later, the sheep have decided what to do.

Rehearsing an illness

The flock withdraws into the hay barn to practise. When the sheep emerge into daylight after a considerable interval, they are themselves bemused by the terror they had conjured in the dimness. The episode makes rehearsal part of the action: their illness is not a spontaneous accident but a collective performance, prepared out of sight before being presented to Gabriel.

The chosen appearance is scrapie. As Gabriel works with his scythe, one Blackface sheep stumbles and falls. It struggles to its feet, takes a few steps, and falls again; another sheep stumbles behind it. A fat ram rubs his head against the wall of the hay barn as if possessed. These separate gestures accumulate into a pattern that Gabriel recognizes as disease. The flock’s acting is comic in its deliberate artificiality, but its effectiveness depends on a real vulnerability: scrapie is frightening precisely because the symptoms seem to announce a danger the flock cannot control.

Gabriel abandons the enclosure

Gabriel’s reaction confirms that the disguise has worked. He cries out that it is scrapie. The sheep continue reeling and picking their way through the grass with shaky, unnaturally high steps, even after he has stopped watching them; now they are enjoying the performance. Their amusement sits beside the seriousness of the consequence: Gabriel immediately whistles for his dogs and tears a gap in the wire fence he had taken such trouble to build.

The dogs then drive Gabriel’s sheep out of the enclosure in orderly fashion, without panicking them. This is a sharp contrast with the flock’s deliberately disordered movements. The dogs demonstrate the controlled herding Gabriel can command, while the sheep’s deception has already prompted him to dismantle the barrier and remove his own flock. A few minutes later, dust on the field path and the empty fenced enclosure are the remaining signs of Gabriel and his sheep. Heather is pleased to think they will not return; Miss Maple expects to see Gabriel again at noon, under the old lime tree, when the shadows are short. The trick wins the immediate contest, but the flock’s expectation of a further meeting leaves its consequence open.

Reversal through attention and performance

The episode turns knowledge into action without giving the sheep human tools or human authority. They observe a fear, connect it to the wire fence, recall the language of disease, and use their bodies to make an imagined illness persuasive. Gabriel’s response completes the reversal: he is the one who breaks the fence and moves his sheep away, while the flock that performed sickness remains on the pasture.

That reversal belongs to a broader contest over land and care. George Glenn’s garden behind the caravan had been fenced against the sheep, and Gabriel’s wire enclosure likewise separates hungry animals from grass and pasture. The sheep’s tactic does not settle the larger conflict by force; it exploits the human impulse to contain and protect by making containment seem unsafe. Their triumph is therefore both strategic and theatrical. They do not become ill, but for a time they make the pasture look as though illness has taken command.