Gabriel takes over caring for the flock

Gabriel takes over caring for the flock after George Glenn’s death, becoming both the new shepherd on the pasture and, under George’s will, the prospective authorized representative for the sheep’s journey to Europe. His arrival restores the routines of human care, but it also introduces a different kind of management: the sheep gain an apparently competent shepherd while confronting boundaries, commercial breeding, and a legal arrangement whose protections depend on a human representative.

The vacancy George leaves

George’s death creates an immediate practical and moral crisis. He is found beside the hay barn with a spade through his body, and the sheep first worry about who will bring them hay. Miss Maple calms them and argues that they owe George the effort of finding out who killed him: he had sought the culprit when a fierce dog took one of their lambs, and, as their shepherd, he had no right to be murdered. The flock is therefore not simply left without routine care; it is left with a murder to investigate and a relationship to George that makes his absence matter.

That relationship had been built through ordinary, repeated acts. George came to the meadow early, separated the sleeping sheep with Tess’s help, and urged them down to work while he tended the vegetable garden or made repairs. Later he read aloud to them by the steps of his caravan. His care had included work, stories, and a familiar presence. Gabriel inherits the flock after this particular pattern of attention has ended.

Arrival and the first boundaries

At dawn, Gabriel drives his own sheep toward the meadow. The flock sees him as a tall figure in a slouch hat among the animals; his arrival marks a new order on land that had been without a shepherd. Soon he fences his sheep together at one side of the pasture. The wire enclosure reduces the area available to George’s flock, and Maude objects especially to the loss of the patch where mouse weed grows. The sheep dislike the restriction, though they also find Gabriel’s animals strange enough to prefer keeping their distance.

The newcomers look markedly unlike George’s flock: short-legged and long-backed, heavily built, pale, and covered not with a full fleece but with dense, curly down. Their restless eyes and nervous, lifeless smell unsettle the other sheep. The contrast raises a question the flock cannot yet answer: why keep sheep that do not grow ordinary wool? Gabriel’s management thus begins not only by dividing the pasture but by bringing into view a different purpose for sheep.

Care, work, and what the flock can perceive

Gabriel soon takes George’s place on the steps of the caravan, where George used to smoke his pipe. Tobacco fumes mingle with the smell of wool and conceal Gabriel’s own scent so thoroughly that even Maude can discern little about him. Yet the sheep take comfort from the visible fact of his presence: he seems an efficient shepherd, and they look forward to hearing the stories they expect him to read. His care is registered through both practical competence and the prospect of a new daily ritual, though the flock cannot fully know the man behind the smoke.

The limits of that reassurance become clearer when Gabriel works with George’s scythe. He retrieves it from the toolshed and cuts grass at the foot of the hill, on the side facing away from the sea. The sheep have seen George polish the blade, but not a human use it in the pasture. To them, the scythe passes through the grass like a gigantic iron claw; the cut blades lie flat, and the act looks like destruction even though Gabriel is gathering food for sheep. The scene reverses their accustomed view of grazing: a human appears to graze, but does not eat what he cuts.

Gabriel’s own flock is hungry, and Eddie remarks on it while eating. Gabriel says they eat a great deal but do well on the feed and have to be fattened. His explanation places the unfamiliar animals in a husbandry system directed toward weight gain. What appears to George’s flock as provisioning is therefore also evidence of their different fate: Gabriel cares for them as animals to be fattened, not as wool-bearing companions like the sheep he has taken over.

Appointment and the terms of care

The later reading of George’s will turns Gabriel’s practical role into a formal one. George leaves the rest of his fortune to his sheep so they can go to Europe as he had promised. The lawyer explains that the money will be administered for them and that they need an authorized representative to accompany them as shepherd; the representative’s rights and duties are set out in the will. Those duties include reading aloud to the sheep for at least half an hour each day, with the lawyer checking compliance as a third party.

The provisions also restrict what can be done to the flock: none may be sold or slaughtered, and dense fleece is to be the prime concern in breeding. The arrangement is not economically neutral. The representative receives a salary that decreases whenever a sheep dies; if all the sheep die, a final premium is paid and further payments end. Gabriel steps forward to take the job. Although the villagers look over the terms and at him, no one else offers. The sheep read the silence through their own social logic: once a lead ram has taken something on, another does not challenge him.

A divided meaning of shepherding

Gabriel’s assumption of the role joins forms of care that do not sit easily together. His presence answers the flock’s need for a shepherd, and the will makes him responsible for reading, protecting the sheep from sale and slaughter, and representing them on the journey George intended. At the same time, his fenced-off flock and his frank account of fattening show that shepherding can serve an outcome the animals would not choose. The scythe gathers food but looks like violence; the legal contract offers protection but entrusts its execution to a human appointee. Gabriel’s takeover therefore gives the sheep security and a route toward Europe while making the terms, motives, and consequences of human care newly visible.