Ritchfield’s memory loss

Sir Ritchfield’s memory loss becomes more than a failure to recall: the sheep experience it as a growing opening through which fragments of memory, identity, and the past seem to run out. The episode begins with Miss Maple’s uneasy sense of a dreamlike, incomplete flock and culminates in the apparent doubling of Sir Ritchfield. The flock’s attempt to help him restores his familiar manner for a moment, but the scene’s deeper revelation is that one of the two rams is Melmoth, returned after his disappearance.

First Signs and the Half-Sheep Memory

At dawn, Miss Maple is the first sheep in the meadow. She cannot remember having slept, and the feeling troubling her seems less like a dream than a memory of one: she senses the scent of many sheep, but it is strange and incomplete. She initially thinks of Gabriel’s sheep, then rejects the comparison. Their flock has a flat, uniform scent; this imagined gathering carries distinctions of age and experience, from old rams and mother ewes to lambs, youthful energy, and innocence. It seems like a whole flock, yet somehow not a complete one. This sensory impression sets the terms for the memory loss that follows: what is missing is not simply a single recollection but the coherence that makes separate experiences belong to one life.

Miss Maple finds Sir Ritchfield standing motionless on George’s Place, with three crows perched on his back. The birds make him look so unlike a living sheep that she briefly thinks he is dead. The image is unsettling precisely because Sir Ritchfield is normally the flock’s lead ram, a familiar presence whose stillness alone would not be unusual. The crows transform that stillness into an apparent sign of absence, foreshadowing a scene in which the old ram seems present and not fully present at once.

A Double and a Fragmented Past

The encounter presents two rams facing one another like reflections, except that the crows do not appear in the other ram’s reflection. Miss Maple remembers a fairy tale in which the dead have no reflections. The two rams lower their horns, clash them together, and lift their heads again. One, accompanied by the crows, says, “I did dare,” and the other agrees, “You did dare.” The exchange gives the apparent doubling a shared history, though the passage does not explain the remembered dare in detail.

The ram without crows then seems bewildered by the flock’s rule that no sheep may leave it. He recalls that George came back smelling of death and regrets having kept quiet. His words make the memory disturbance seem connected to more than confusion in the present: an old recollection surfaces, but it arrives with distress and an awareness that he should not have spoken. The crows’ presence distinguishes the two figures, while their mirrored posture and shared words make it difficult to treat them as wholly separate.

The ram without crows turns and trots toward the cliffs. The other watches him with affection; the crows rise together, and only one Sir Ritchfield remains in the meadow, shaggy and carrying the scent of the incomplete flock Miss Maple sensed at dawn. Miss Maple anxiously watches the bewildered figure wandering along the cliff tops and runs after him. The scene does not offer a clinical explanation for the doubling. Instead, it makes Sir Ritchfield’s uncertainty visible through two apparent versions of the same ram, a flock of crows, and a scent that combines incompatible ages and experiences.

The Memory Hole and the Flock’s Response

The other sheep cannot make sense of Sir Ritchfield’s words. Lane observes that they do not sound like him, while Maude describes his altered scent in a sequence of contrasting identities: a sick sheep, a one-horned young ram, an experienced mother ewe, a thick-fleeced young sheep that has not seen winter, and a very old ram who will not see another. None of these comparisons quite accounts for him; Maude’s conclusion is that he is somehow “half.” The flock’s understanding of memory is thus expressed through scent and sheep-like forms rather than through an abstract explanation.

Mopple the Whale cries that Sir Ritchfield is “running out,” and the flock recognizes the image as an explanation: the hole in Sir Ritchfield’s memory has grown so large overnight that possible and impossible memories are escaping through it. The comparison gives the episode its governing metaphor, while also conveying the flock’s helplessness. Sir Ritchfield is their lead ram, but they cannot expect him to solve a problem that has overtaken his own memory. Miss Maple has disappeared, Othello is nowhere to be seen, and Mopple the Whale moves away because he fears the hole might be infectious. Zora flees to her rocky ledge. Faced with a crisis they cannot define or repair, the sheep first have no plan at all.

Rameses finally takes the initiative, leading the flock away so Sir Ritchfield cannot hear them discuss what to do. The solution they devise is collective and deliberately extraordinary: all the sheep lie on their backs in front of George’s Place with their legs in the air, bleating as loudly as they can. Sir Ritchfield stops grazing to watch. When he asks, “What’s all this nonsense?” the flock hears his familiar voice again and exchanges triumphant looks. They scramble upright, flustered but proud, as he trots over from the cliff tops and demands order. Their performance has interrupted the bewildering episode, but the return of his usual voice does not erase the distinction between the two figures: the sheep still see one Sir Ritchfield on the cliffs and another before them.

Recognition and Significance

Miss Maple resolves that final uncertainty: the ram who has appeared beside Sir Ritchfield is Melmoth. His return throws the flock into an uproar, for he is not merely a ram who disappeared but a figure made into a legend by his absence. The sheep associate him with warnings about leaving the flock, approaching the cliff tops, and ignoring the mother ewes’ bleats. His reappearance beside Sir Ritchfield therefore brings the flock’s remembered stories into the same scene as Sir Ritchfield’s failing memory.

The episode leaves the mechanics of the doubling unexplained, but its sequence is clear: Miss Maple senses an incomplete flock; Sir Ritchfield appears divided; memories and identities seem to spill from a widening hole; the flock acts together; and Miss Maple recognizes Melmoth. The memory loss is both an affliction of the lead ram and a disturbance to the flock’s shared sense of order. Its significance lies in the way the narrative turns forgetting into something the other sheep can smell, witness, fear, and respond to—without pretending that their ingenuity can make the past whole again.