Operation Polyphemus

Operation Polyphemus is the name George Glenn used for journeys that concealed his smuggling work in the rhythms of ordinary sheepkeeping. Its discovery connects the strange packets the sheep once carried to a commercial network operating through Glennkill, and reveals that the apparently modest life of a shepherd concealed a specialist’s role in a larger enterprise.

The operation behind the name

When George drove the sheep to another pasture for a few weeks, he announced that they were going away under the name Operation Polyphemus. The sheep did not know what the name signified. Each carried a small packet tied beneath its belly and buried deep in its fleece; the packets smelled of nothing, so the sheep had no reason to recognize them as cargo. Only after Rebecca later uncovered similar packets did they understand that they had been carrying what humans called grass—and what they themselves understood, with characteristic directness, as something edible.

The contrast between the sheep’s view and the human business around them is central to the operation’s concealment. To the flock, their journeys were another unexplained human arrangement; the cargo was invisible among their wool and its contents were unknown. To the firm, George’s movements formed part of an organized trade. His simple announcement gave the trips a name without giving the sheep any clue to their purpose.

Local suspicions and the landscape

The operation had long been entangled with arguments over George’s land. After his death, Harry and Tom feared that a search of his caravan would expose drugs and damage local plans for a dolmen attraction, pony rides, a cultural center, whiskey businesses, and a seaside hotel. Their alarm was not proof of every accusation, but Tom supplied a more concrete account of the suspected route: boats came to the beach at night, goods were taken up to the caravan, and George drove away in his old car the next day. He also recalled George resisting tourist access and firing a pistol to scare people away.

George’s private wealth had likewise appeared out of keeping with his visible circumstances. Beth described his small house, land, and flock as an unlikely source of riches, then recalled that he sometimes possessed very expensive things, including a watch no one in Glennkill could afford. She remembered him wearing it while sowing radishes. That image joins the ordinary work of the garden to the unexplained money that later makes the smuggling allegations plausible, though the watch itself does not establish where his wealth came from.

The operation also sits beside other uses of the same land and its produce. George kept a vegetable garden behind his caravan, while Gabriel later cut grass with George’s scythe to feed sheep he was fattening. The scythe’s destruction of the meadow makes grass appear as both nourishment and commodity; the cache beneath the dolmen gives the word a second, illicit meaning. These forms of use are not interchangeable, but together they show how the apparently open pasture is crossed by competing interests in food, land, tourism, and trade.

Rebecca uncovers the cache

Rebecca found the hidden goods beneath the dolmen and collected them in her skirt, which she held out as a makeshift bag. Many small packets came to light, along with a larger, square package and a file of papers. She carried the collection back to George’s caravan. The sheep recognized the small packets as resembling the ones they had once carried, and the discovery transformed an old, baffling routine into evidence of George’s concealed work.

The cache was not complete by the time it was examined. During the gathering, Mopple the Whale swallowed the contents of an open packet Rebecca had left nearby. Later, when the visitor counted the packets, he tallied twenty-three and treated one as missing because a sheep had eaten it. The sheep’s appetite thus interrupts the firm’s accounting: to the humans, the absent packet is a shortfall in a delivery; to Mopple, its contents are simply food.

George’s place in the firm

A quiet man came to the caravan and questioned Rebecca about what she had found. He identified George as one of the firm’s best workers, its specialist for consignments involving Ireland and Northern Ireland, and described him as inventive and free of incidents. Asked what the cargo contained, he explained that it was mainly grass, sometimes cigarettes, and sometimes other goods according to market demand. George’s operation was therefore not limited to a single substance, although the evidence in the cache and the sheep’s past journeys makes grass its most visible cargo.

The visitor counted the packets, gathered them into his coat pockets, and confirmed that the file was present. He warned that the information in it could deal the firm a severe blow. His conduct turns Rebecca’s discovery from an archaeological find into a confrontation over records and control: the company’s representative wants the goods and papers back, while the evidence itself suggests that the file could expose more than the packets alone.

He also took the rectangular package, which Rebecca identified as a videocassette. He said he had never heard of it, yet pocketed it with the other material. The tape’s contents remain undisclosed in this encounter, but the difference between the file he recognizes as dangerous and the cassette he does not recognize leaves an unresolved element in the cache. After collecting everything, he kissed Rebecca’s fingertips and drove away without saying goodbye.

Exposure and consequence

Rebecca’s discovery also carries a family revelation. Before the visitor arrives, she tells the sheep a story about a girl with two fathers: one acknowledged and one secret, with whom she had been fond but estranged after a quarrel. The story ends with the secret father waiting for his daughter and dying before their reunion. In the scene’s aftermath, George is identified as Rebecca’s father, tying the operation’s exposure to the personal history behind his daughter’s return to the caravan.

The recovery of the cache does not publicly resolve every question about George’s business or the firm. The representative retrieves the counted packets, the file, and the unexplained videocassette, while the sheep remain aware that their former journeys had made them unwitting carriers. The scene nevertheless changes the meaning of George’s ordinary shepherding: the pasture, caravan, and wool that once seemed to contain only the flock’s familiar life are shown to have concealed a route into a wider trade.