Summer

Summer is the season of the novel’s green, apparently generous pasture, but it is no simple pastoral refuge: at midsummer, George Glenn is found dead beside the hay barn, and the flock’s summer world soon becomes one of uncertainty, conflict, and interrupted renewal.

Seasonal Setting

The opening scene places George Glenn on the green Irish grass, near the path through the fields and the hay barn. Dew wets the grass and the body, while a crow settles on George’s sweater; the image joins the season’s freshness to death rather than setting them apart. Miss Maple calms the flock partly by pointing out that, on such a rich pasture in midsummer, there is no need for hay. Summer’s plenty is real, but it cannot explain or undo the spade driven into the shepherd.

The next day, with neither shepherd nor sheepdog, the flock hesitates before leaving the barn. Then relief and exhilaration take physical form: the sheep race across the meadow toward the cliffs, stop short of the drop, and gallop back, until they are out of breath. Summer brings open air and room to move, yet the cliff edge marks a limit within that freedom.

Abundance and Its Uses

The pasture’s plenty extends beyond grass. Behind George Glenn’s shepherd’s caravan, his fenced vegetable garden contains lettuces, peas, radishes, cress, tomatoes, endives, buttercups, and chives. While George was alive, his watchfulness kept the sheep out. After his death, Lane pushes back the bolt, and Maude, Cloud, and Heather graze among the plants; within minutes, the beds are eaten bare. Their raid turns the garden’s apparent abundance into a question of access: the food was there, but it had belonged to a human plan and a boundary.

Summer’s grass also becomes the object of labor and threat. Gabriel takes George’s scythe from the toolshed and cuts grass at the foot of the hill. The sheep, accustomed to grazing, watch a human moving through the pasture with an iron blade: the grass lies flattened behind it, and the act appears to them as destruction rather than feeding. Under the summer sun, the green landscape is not untouched nature but a place where people decide what grows, what is cut, and who gets to eat.

Growth, Absence, and Land

For Zora, summer carries a different measure of time: the lambs that have not been born. She has had three lambs before, but none this year, and few of the other ewes have given birth. Only two inexperienced young ewes have produced lambs; Zora’s memory of her own first lamb makes the present quiet especially stark. Her reflection sets the season’s expected renewal against a meadow with few young voices. The Winter Lamb appears in that recollection as a separate, pointed exception, not evidence of a summer full of new life.

The flock’s summer pasture is also valuable to people beyond the flock. Harry the Sinner and Josh argue over whether George Glenn had hidden drugs and complain that his land, with its grand view, was being wasted on sheep; their talk connects the green landscape to tourism, development, and suspicion around George’s livelihood. Summer’s richness therefore intensifies competing claims to the same place: to the sheep it is food and home, while to the men it is a potential commercial asset.

Seasonal Contrast

Across these episodes, Summer supplies the conditions for apparent ease—long meadow days, abundant grass, a garden, and room to run—while exposing how fragile that ease is. George’s death interrupts the flock’s dependence on its shepherd; the garden raid reveals that abundance is governed by boundaries; Gabriel’s scythe makes the grass a matter of human control; and Zora’s account registers a season in which expected births have largely failed to come. The season’s significance lies in this contrast: the pasture looks most generous precisely as the flock confronts loss, ownership, and uncertainty about what will grow next.