Free Three Bags Full by Leonie Swann Page A

drive away the mist and with it the silence. They even missed the crying of the gulls.
    The wind rose around midday, the gulls began screaming again, and Zora trotted over to the cliffs. She bleated, and soon all the sheep were standing as close to the abyss as they dared and gazing in amazement at the depths below. The butcher was lying there on a small patch of sand in the middle of a great many rocks. He was on his back, and he looked surprisingly flat and broad. Ritchfield claimed to see a red trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, but they weren’t feeling kindly disposed to Ritchfield today and didn’t believe a word he said. The butcher had his eyes closed and wasn’t moving. The sheep relished the sight. Then the butcher’s left eye opened, and their good mood instantly vanished. It looked at every single sheep, and even high up there on the cliffs they felt weak at the knees. The eye was searching for something, didn’t find it, and closed again. Cautiously, the sheep retreated from the cliff tops.
    “He’ll be washed away,” said Maude optimistically.
    The others weren’t so sure.
    “A young man always comes along the beach with his dog,” sighed Cordelia. Several sheep nodded. They knew that from the Pamela novels. “The dog finds the person. The young man is enchanted and takes the person away,” Cloud went on. She had always listened attentively. “At least he’ll be gone then,” she added. George had always told them, “The sea gives nothing back,” as he threw boxes from the caravan over the cliffs at high tide. The young men, on the other hand, soon grew tired of the people they had found, even the fragrant Pamelas, so you could easily work out how soon they’d lose interest in the butcher with his sausage fingers.
    “Let’s get Mopple the Whale to tell the story of Pamela and the fisherman,” said Lane. The others bleated in agreement: they loved the story about the fisherman because a gigantic haystack played the main part in it. Mopple told that story well, and when he’d finished they would stand in awed silence, imagining what they would do in the haystack.
    But Mopple wasn’t with them. They looked in the vegetable garden and in George’s Place. George’s Place was intact, and they felt ashamed of thinking Mopple capable of such a thing. The sheep fell silent, at a loss. Then Zora trotted back to the cliffs, tail wagging restlessly, to see if there wasn’t a round blob of white wool on the beach as well. Luckily Mopple wasn’t there, but the sheep’s assumptions had been correct. No less than three young men were putting the motionless butcher on a stretcher. Zora shook her head at such foolishness. She bleated at the others, but no one dared watch the young men taking their heavy burden away. They remembered the butcher’s eye.
    Gradually it became clear that Mopple wasn’t in the meadow at all.
    “Perhaps Mopple’s dead,” said Lane quietly.
    Zora shook her head energetically. “You don’t disappear immediately just because you’re dead. George was dead, but he was still there.”
    “He’s turned into a cloud sheep,” bleated Rameses excitedly. The sheep swiveled their heads to look up, but the sky was a uniform gray like a dirty puddle.
    “He can’t have disappeared,” said Cordelia. “It’s as if the world had a hole in it. It’s like magic.”
    Heather scratched her ear with one hind leg.
    “Perhaps he’s simply gone away,” said Maude.
    “You can’t go away just like that,” objected Rameses. “No sheep can.”
    They said nothing for a long time. They were all thinking the same thing.
    “Melmoth went away,” said Cloud at last. Heather lost her balance and fell over sideways. The other sheep looked away.
    They all knew the story of Melmoth, although no sheep liked to tell it and no sheep liked to hear it. It was a story that mother ewes whispered into their lambs’ ears as a warning. It was a story without any kind of haystack in it, an