George Glenn is murdered by a spade attack

George Glenn’s apparent murder by a spade is the event that turns his flock from bewildered witnesses into investigators. The sheep first find him dead beside the path, with the tool still in his body; they call the death murder and feel responsible for finding out who did it. The later revelation of George’s secret relationship with Rebecca gives that seemingly clear crime a more tragic and complicated meaning.

The discovery and the flock’s response

George’s body lies in the green Irish grass beside the hay barn, near the path through the fields. A crow has settled on his Norwegian sweater, while a rabbit sits nearby. Farther away, the sheep meet near the cliff edge, where they cannot smell the blood. They are proud of having kept calm, although their first alarm brings fears about who will bring them hay and whether a wolf is nearby. Miss Maple steadies them: it is midsummer on a rich pasture, and a spade driven into a body is not the work of a wolf.

The sight is difficult to reconcile with the ordinary rhythms of the pasture. Maude recalls that George was healthy the day before, but Sir Ritchfield points out that he did not die of an illness. The spade makes the death look like an act of violence rather than a natural ending. Heather resents George for docking her tail, and Cloud recalls his preference for Norwegian wool, so the sheep do not begin from uncomplicated affection or reverence. Their gathering instead holds grief, grievance, and uncertainty together.

Why the sheep investigate

Miss Maple gives the flock a moral reason to pursue the case. George had tried to find the culprit when a fierce dog took one of their lambs; now, she argues, they owe him the same effort. He was their shepherd, and no one had the right to put a spade in him. Othello, whose youth in Dublin Zoo has made him attentive to human violence, agrees that the attacker must have been human, or perhaps a very large monkey. The flock’s investigation begins not with a plan for punishment, but with a demand to identify what kind of person could do this.

The missing garden spade sharpens that question. The day after George’s death, the sheep raid the fenced vegetable garden behind his caravan. Lane opens the gate bolt, and Maude, Cloud, and Heather eat through the buttercups, peas, and tomatoes. When the beds are stripped, Othello draws Miss Maple’s attention to the place where George’s gardening spade usually leaned: it is gone. The flock’s impulsive act of eating has unexpectedly made the absent tool, and its possible connection to the body, harder to ignore.

Human suspicions and the pasture’s tools

Later, talk among the people of Glennkill offers competing explanations for George’s life and death without establishing who attacked him. Harry the Sinner and Josh argue over whether there is contraband hidden on the land; Tom O’Malley describes boats bringing something ashore at night and George carrying it away in his old vehicle. They also recall that George kept developers and tourists off the pasture, even firing a pistol to frighten them. These are human suspicions about his affairs and the value of his land, not a demonstrated solution to the killing.

The spade also belongs to a larger contrast between the sheep’s experience of pastoral life and the human tools that shape it. Later, Gabriel takes George’s scythe from the toolshed behind the caravan and cuts grass for his sheep. The flock sees a human grazing with an implement that slices the pasture without eating it: the grass falls flat, and the act appears to them as senseless destruction. The episode does not identify George’s attacker, but it deepens the significance of the tools around his death. To the sheep, a familiar implement can be both part of shepherding and the means by which human violence or damage reaches the pasture.

The death’s later re-reading and consequences

At the reading of George’s will, the consequences of his death become concrete. He leaves his fortune to his sheep so that they can go to Europe as promised. The will requires an authorized representative to accompany them as shepherd and sets out protections: the sheep are not to be sold or slaughtered, and stories must be read aloud to them every day. The lawyer is to oversee the conditions. When the villagers hesitate, Rebecca volunteers; Othello leads the flock away from Gabriel and toward her, and the others gather around her in turn. George’s death therefore leaves the sheep not only without their shepherd, but with a legal route toward the journey he had promised them and a choice, expressed through their own action, about who should guide them.

Rebecca’s later story supplies the most intimate re-reading of George’s end. She tells of a girl with a secret father and an unsecret one, of a quarrel followed by a long silence, and of a letter saying that the secret father planned to travel to Europe but wanted to see the girl first. She hid her joy and kept him waiting; he waited himself to death. The story identifies George as Rebecca’s secret father and links his hoped-for journey with the flock’s promised journey to Europe. It shifts the meaning of the death from a self-contained crime scene toward a failed reunion and a grief that had remained unspoken. The sheep’s early certainty that someone had murdered their shepherd thus belongs to the mystery as it first appears, while Rebecca’s account exposes the personal history that makes his death more than a question of who wielded a spade.