Sheep drive Gabriel away by feigning scrapie

George’s flock drives Gabriel and his flock from the pasture by feigning scrapie, converting the danger of disease into a weapon of deception. The plan begins with an observation about fear: Gabriel has enclosed and heavily fed his sheep, and the flock realizes that the threat most likely to make him abandon them is not a dog or a wolf, but the possibility that they are ill. Their performance persuades him to evacuate his animals and leave the pasture, though Miss Maple predicts that he will return.

Finding Gabriel’s Fear

The flock first considers the things that frighten sheep: large dogs, noisy cars, stinging ointment, wolves’ ghosts, and the scent of carnivores. None seems likely to drive Gabriel away. Their blankness changes when Melmoth tells them to pay attention and asks what human beings do when afraid. Miss Maple answers that they put up fences. Looking toward Gabriel’s flock, the sheep see its members staring hungrily through the wire netting. Heather bitterly points out that they are enclosed with all the fodder Gabriel throws to them every day.

Melmoth proposes illness as the weak point in this arrangement. Zora resists the idea because Gabriel’s sheep already have a hard enough time; Mopple the Whale, by contrast, immediately worries that they might pass an illness on to George’s flock. Melmoth then turns that fear around: what if George’s flock itself falls ill? The question makes the scheme possible. Gabriel’s care for his penned animals, seemingly a source of security, also gives him something serious to fear: an illness within the enclosure, or one that might spread beyond it.

Turning Knowledge into a Performance

Cordelia suddenly remembers the specialized vocabulary George taught her. Words such as prophylactics, foot rot, meningitis, and Creutzfeld-Jakob rush through her thoughts, recalled from a book about sheep diseases. The terms are not merely mysterious names to her now; they carry meaning that can be used. The flock soon has a plan, drawing on knowledge acquired from George rather than on brute force.

They disappear into the hay barn to rehearse. When they trot back into daylight some time later, even they are rather bemused by the terror they had conjured in the barn’s dimness. Their rehearsal matters because the deception depends on making illness visible and convincing. They intend to teach Gabriel to be afraid, not by attacking him, but by making him interpret their bodies as evidence of a dangerous outbreak.

The opportunity does not arrive at once. Gabriel is no longer sitting on the steps of the shepherd’s caravan; he is grazing again, cutting grass with his scythe. The flock shudders at the cold song of the blade and waits for him to finish. The scene sets their plan against the ordinary work of tending sheep: while Gabriel cuts fodder, they prepare to turn the possibility of sickness into a reason for him to stop tending his flock there.

The Feigned Outbreak

As Gabriel works, he calls to Ham, asking whether he will attend the Smartest Sheep in Glennkill contest the day after tomorrow. Ham does not answer or turn toward him. Sweating and panting, he wheels his chair faster through the grass and takes the path across the fields. Gabriel grins after him, satisfied that he has finally understood the old man, and raises his scythe again. That small exchange leaves Gabriel momentarily focused elsewhere, just as the first sheep begins to stumble.

The animal is a Blackface sheep. Gabriel initially grins at the sight, treating its difficulty getting up as a contradiction of what people claim about the sure-footed, domesticated breed. But it falls again after only a few steps, and a second sheep stumbles behind it. A fat ram rubs his head against the wall of the hay barn as if possessed. Gabriel’s grin freezes; his blue eyes lose their icy certainty, and the scythe falls into the grass. The flock’s strange, shaky, unnaturally high-stepping movements continue even after he stops watching them. They are not ill: they are enjoying the effect of the performance.

Gabriel identifies what he believes he sees as scrapie. He whistles up his dogs at once and tears a gap in the wire fence he had put up only a few days earlier. The reversal is sharp: the fence that had held his flock in place is now opened by Gabriel himself, as he responds to the danger the sheep have manufactured. His dogs drive Gabriel’s flock out in perfect order, without panicking any of the animals. George’s flock witnesses the dogs’ mastery of herding, while the apparent outbreak succeeds in making Gabriel remove his own sheep.

Departure and Its Limits

Within minutes, dust on the path and the empty, wire-fenced enclosure are the remaining signs of Gabriel and his flock. Heather is happy to conclude that Gabriel will not be seen again. Miss Maple disagrees: she expects to see him at noon, the time of short shadows, beneath the old lime tree, where perhaps something will come out. Her prediction qualifies the apparent completeness of the victory. The flock has driven Gabriel away from the enclosure, but the scene does not establish that the wider matter is settled or that he will stay away.

The episode makes attention, rather than physical force, the flock’s decisive resource. Melmoth recognizes a fear that the others have overlooked; Miss Maple connects fear to fences; Cordelia’s remembered learning supplies a language of disease; and rehearsal turns that knowledge into an act Gabriel believes. The sheep’s success depends on his reading of the signs, not on their actually being sick. Their performance briefly makes the flock that was penned and watched into the side directing events, while Gabriel—alarmed by what he thinks he sees—opens the barrier and sends his own animals away.