George Glenn's bond with his flock

George Glenn’s bond with his flock is more than the practical tie between shepherd and animals: it is formed through repeated acts of care, reading, and attention, and endures after his death as the flock seeks justice and carries out his promise that they will go to Europe. His will gives that attachment a material consequence, while the sheep’s response makes clear that they understand themselves not simply as dependants but as companions who owe their shepherd a response.

Daily Life and Mutual Familiarity

George Glenn spent much of his time in the meadow. He came early, when the sheep were still gathered together and sleepy, and his arrival began the day’s work. Tess had to drive the flock apart; George laughed and urged them to work as they grazed. The sheep might feel aggrieved at first, but the routine was familiar, and they grazed while he tended the vegetable garden or made repairs.

The relationship also included a regular, more intimate ritual. In the afternoons the sheep gathered by the steps of George’s caravan to hear him read. He shared 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 flock remembered not only the reading itself but its particular habits and subjects, including George’s strong reactions to the red-haired heroines and his complaints about his own wife. Their memories make the caravan and the time spent beside it part of a shared domestic history.

George’s garden marked a boundary within that everyday life. He fenced it off, and his watchfulness prevented the flock from eating its vegetables. After his death, the sheep pushed open the gate and ate the lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. Their raid ended in shame, and Othello then noticed that the spade usually kept beside the caravan was missing. The scene joins familiar details of George’s care and work to the absence that sets the flock’s inquiry in motion.

Care, Work, and the Pasture

For the flock, George’s care was not abstract: he maintained their surroundings, read to them, and acted on their behalf. Miss Maple argues that they owe him an investigation because, when a fierce dog took one of their lambs, George tried to find the culprit. The sheep therefore understand their own search as a reciprocal duty. He had protected members of the flock; now they must discover who killed their shepherd.

The pasture also shows how different shepherding practices could carry different meanings. George kept a scythe in the toolshed and polished its blade, but he had said that people who kept sheep could spare themselves its use. When Gabriel later took the scythe and cut grass for his own flock, the sight unsettled George’s sheep: they saw a human harvesting their pasture in a way they associated with destruction rather than ordinary care. Gabriel explained that his sheep needed substantial feed to be fattened. The contrast makes George’s bond with his flock legible through the way he worked the land: its value was not simply as a resource to be exploited, but as the setting of their shared life.

George’s land also had an economic meaning beyond the flock. People in Glennkill suspected that he had made money through illegal trade and resented that he had kept the attractive site from development. Their accusations set the sheep’s attachment to the pasture against human ambitions for tourism and profit. For the flock, however, George’s place is bound to the person who tended them, and its significance cannot be reduced to its potential commercial use.

Education and a Future Beyond Glennkill

George’s influence extended beyond routine care. In the evenings behind the caravan, he taught Othello how to lead a flock, remain composed while moving, and guide others carefully past or over obstacles. Othello later understands the promised journey to Europe as the chance to use those lessons. He is delighted that the flock will travel, though George will not be there; he regards Rebecca as a capable person to accompany them. George’s teaching has thus prepared one of the sheep to take responsibility within the flock, even as the journey makes his absence newly apparent.

That future is secured by George’s will. The lawyer announces that George has left his remaining fortune to the sheep so they can go to Europe as he promised. The money is to be administered by the lawyer, and the flock will need an authorized representative to accompany them as shepherd. Gabriel volunteers for the position, but the sheep’s later response makes clear that their future shepherd is not merely an administrative matter: they anticipate going with Rebecca. The provision turns George’s promise into a practical arrangement while leaving the flock’s choice and trust central to what follows.

Loss, Loyalty, and the Unfinished Promise

The bond is tested from the moment the flock finds George dead in the grass near the hay barn. Their first alarm concerns who will bring them hay, but Miss Maple quickly redirects their attention from immediate dependence to the question of responsibility. The sheep conclude that a human killed him and that the flock has a duty to find out who did it. The investigation grows out of their history with George: because he searched for those who harmed his sheep, they will not accept his death as an event to leave unexplained.

When the will confirms the journey to Europe, joy does not erase grief. Othello thinks of what George taught him and of the future they had been promised, then recognizes that the killing was never exposed. Cordelia similarly connects George’s readings and the provision in the will with the fact that he should have been travelling with them. The flock insists that they cannot simply depart while his death remains unanswered. Their repeated demand for justice binds the promise of a new home to the memory of the shepherd who made it possible.

Rebecca’s later story about a girl with a secret father gives the flock another way to understand George’s absence. The tale reveals a daughter who kept her joy hidden and delayed a meeting until her father had waited himself to death. It frames the lost journey as a personal separation as well as a material promise, and places George’s affection and the cost of estrangement within the flock’s remembered world. When Othello insists that George kept defending himself, the flock’s understanding of him remains active even after his death: he is not only the shepherd they have lost, but a person whose choices and unfinished relationships they continue to interpret.

Significance of the Relationship

George Glenn’s bond with his flock gives the novel a measure for distinguishing care from control and stewardship from possession. His authority appears in ordinary acts—setting the day’s rhythm, tending the garden, maintaining the meadow, and reading aloud—but the sheep remember him as more than the source of food or direction. Their attention to his habits, their decision to investigate his killing, and their insistence that he belonged in the future he arranged for them make the relationship reciprocal in their eyes.

The flock’s journey to Europe is therefore both the fulfilment of George’s will and a departure made under the pressure of his absence. His practical provision enables them to leave Glennkill, while their demand for justice refuses to let the promise replace remembrance. The relation ends not with a completed reunion but with a legacy the sheep carry forward: lessons for leading one another, a promised destination, and an obligation to the shepherd who once looked after them.