Melmoth’s escape on the fifth night and discovery of McCarthy’s body

Melmoth’s escape on the fifth night and discovery of McCarthy’s body is the point at which his solitary trial collides with the concealed violence of the human world. Pursued into an old stone quarry, he finds a human leg protruding from the stones; moments later, George and Ham uncover the corpse of Weasel McCarthy nearby. The encounter links Melmoth’s wager with a murder that George fears may expose his own affairs, and sets concealment against the later decision to leave evidence where it can be found.

The wager and the promised absence

The sequence opens in flight, but Melmoth’s thoughts carry it back to the challenge that began his absence. Sir Ritchfield dismisses the idea of spending a night or two lost in the fields as something any suckling lamb could manage. Melmoth rejects the shorter measure and names five days and five nights. He turns the number into a playful song about five suns and moons, blackbirds and nightingales; Sir Ritchfield, initially baffled and then infected by Melmoth’s high spirits, joins him in romping around the meadow. Neither expects anyone to hunt for Melmoth. The cheerful exchange gives the adventure a clear measure, but its lightness also sharpens the danger of the fifth night, when he is running for his life.

Melmoth’s decision is personal rather than a challenge issued on behalf of the flock. When Sir Ritchfield says he would not dare, Melmoth realizes he has not even asked whether his twin would dare: the question concerns only Melmoth himself. He looks toward the hills beyond the meadow and says that he would. His later flight therefore fulfills a resolve made in defiance of his older twin’s scorn, even as the danger overtakes the independence he had imagined. The episode does not present his departure as a communal expedition; its central contrast is between the solitary sheep’s declared daring and the vulnerability of being alone.

Flight to the quarry

In the present of the scene, Melmoth runs over winter ground while the butcher’s dogs howl behind him and the butcher follows. The repeated rhythm of stick, stone and bone becomes a mental device: Melmoth cannot remember when he learned the words, but they help him avoid thinking about his pursuers. At first he tries to keep his breath steady and to make the butcher irrelevant by continuing to run. The body, however, defeats that intention. Cold air fills his lungs, the stones make running harder, and his breathing no longer holds its earlier steadiness.

Rock walls close around him in the old stone quarry, leaving a cul-de-sac rather than an open route forward. Melmoth attempts to climb a less steep slope made of loose debris. Pebbles give way beneath his hooves, and the climb proves impossible. Hearing the butcher call off the dogs, Melmoth understands that the animals are no longer needed and that the pursuer is approaching on foot. He first accepts that he has been defeated, then makes up his mind to face the butcher bravely. Trembling, he descends the slope again. The decision marks a change from flight to a deliberate attempt at courage, but the danger is interrupted by something he has not yet understood: a human leg bone sticking out of the stones displaced during his escape.

Earlier, cold and alone on the moor, Melmoth had caught a cold after spending his first night huddled in a prickly hawthorn hedge, scarcely protected from the icy November wind. In daylight he roamed the gray-green moorland, cautiously nibbling coarse grass. From a hill he could see the blue strip of sea on the horizon. He searched the distance for white woolly shapes, at first pretending that he was only getting his bearings, but found no sheep and no cloud. His brief euphoria at the scale of his isolation gives way to panic, and he gallops away through the empty hills. This earlier loneliness makes the quarry’s threat more than a test of nerve: Melmoth has chosen separation, but cannot make the landscape or its dangers answer to his choice.

The corpse and the first decision

Melmoth climbs over the exposed human leg and reaches firm ground, then listens from the shadows. The dogs are panting; the butcher says that Melmoth is in the quarry and that they have him. A familiar voice answers. The butcher’s light moves over the rocky walls and up the slope before swinging away from Melmoth and settling on the bone. George, lagging behind, asks whether anything has happened and begins to object to the pursuit at night, then falls silent when he sees the leg. The light has turned the hunters’ attention from the escaping sheep to the more startling discovery in the quarry.

George puts on work gloves and pulls at the leg. As stones fall away, a larger body emerges. The butcher identifies the dead man as Weasel McCarthy. George sees the corpse’s stiff limbs and, after the butcher hauls it clear, the two examine the back of McCarthy’s head. The butcher points to an apparent blow and then to a spade that has clattered down with the body, identifying it as the sort George uses in his vegetable garden. George calls the scene a real murder. The discovery is thus not merely a body in Melmoth’s path: it is a corpse accompanied by an apparent weapon, and George recognizes the exposure and suspicion that may follow from reporting it.

The butcher says they ought to go to the police, but George stops him to think through the consequences. They consider who might be suspected of killing McCarthy, with the butcher naming several people and George adding others. Their exchange reveals how quickly a public murder would pull a wider circle into scrutiny. George objects that a report could bring searches of their homes and the caravan, and says he will not risk ending up in jail because of McCarthy. He decides to leave the corpse for the next person to find. George marches away, and the butcher whistles for his dogs and follows. From beside the body, Melmoth watches the butcher retreat from a dead man, a reversal that would have seemed impossible to him before the chase.

Concealment, evidence, and the severed key

The choice to leave McCarthy in the quarry does not remain the final plan. George later reasons that the police should find the body promptly and asks Ham to make copies of a video showing the relevant date. They will hide the cassettes so that, if anything happens to them, the information will come out. Ham responds by proposing that the material be placed with a lawyer and that his will be opened at his death; George insists that the information must become known soon enough to be useful. The shift is consequential: the men who first walk away from the corpse out of fear of investigation begin arranging a safeguard against the danger they believe surrounds them. Their response converts the quarry discovery into part of a deliberate effort to preserve evidence.

Melmoth does not go with George. When Ham asks whether he can help, George says that Melmoth does not want to come. George then takes a knife and searches the fleece beside Melmoth’s throat for a buried thread. He cuts it, and a smooth, shining key falls to the ground. Melmoth remembers the day George tied it around his neck because he was the wildest of the sheep—not Sir Ritchfield, despite his proudly raised horns. George picks up the key, sighs and walks away without looking back. The episode closes not with Melmoth’s return to the flock but with the removal of an object George had entrusted to him. That small, physical severing extends the scene’s pattern of separation: Melmoth is alone in the quarry, McCarthy has been concealed beneath the stones, and George leaves carrying the key and the knowledge of the body.