Autumn

Autumn is the season of wind-shaken trees and falling acorns in Heather’s recollection of the flock’s road between pastures. Its brief image belongs to a recurring landscape rather than a separate plot event: set among spring, summer, and winter, it gives the flock’s journey a seasonal rhythm that continues in memory even as George Glenn’s absence makes the way back uncertain.

Autumn on the Road

Heather remembers the route through changes in the land and air. In spring, the air smells of damp earth; in summer, sparrows flutter through the cornfields; in autumn, wind shakes the trees and acorns patter down on the sheep; in winter, hoarfrost draws patterns on the asphalt. Autumn is marked not by a human activity or a change of destination, but by weather acting on trees and sending their fruit onto the road.

The acorns make the season tangible at the flock’s level: they fall among the sheep as the wind moves through the trees. The image is brief, but it gives autumn its own place in a sequence of sharply differentiated seasonal impressions, alongside summer’s birds and winter’s frost.

A Remembered Seasonal Cycle

Heather’s recollection occurs as the sheep consider the road to the other pasture and wonder whether they will ever see it again. The route had been wonderful to travel, but at the place where armed men waited, even George Glenn felt nervous. He greeted them and kept their dogs from coming too close to the sheep; without him, Heather thinks, the flock would never have got past them. Autumn therefore belongs to a remembered journey whose familiar seasonal signs are inseparable from the human protection that made the crossing possible.

The four seasons organize this memory as a cycle of recurring conditions, not as a dated chronology of the novel’s present action. Autumn occupies the middle of the sequence: after the damp earth and lively fields of spring and summer, the wind shakes the trees and acorns fall; winter then brings frost to the road. That ordered succession makes the journey feel repeatedly traversable, sharpening the contrast with the flock’s present uncertainty about returning.

Pastoral Landscape and Uncertainty

Elsewhere in the evidence, the flock’s surroundings are shown as materially useful and contested: the shepherd’s caravan stands beside a garden of vegetables, while people discuss the pasture as land that might be developed and used for tourism. These details do not establish that the autumn remembered by Heather is the season of those events. Rather, they distinguish the road’s seasonal landscape from the competing human claims on the land: the trees, wind, acorns, birds, and frost register a world the flock experiences through its passage.

The contrast is especially clear beside the account of Gabriel cutting grass with George Glenn’s scythe. That summer scene makes human action appear destructive to the sheep, as the scythe passes through grass they would graze. Autumn’s remembered image is quieter and cyclical: wind moves the trees, and acorns fall. In Heather’s thought, however, even this familiar seasonal world cannot answer whether the flock will travel that road again.