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brought up on a farm; he believed in the covenants. The wild covenant that destroys no habitat and hunts only to live, as the wolf or the puma hunts. The farmer covenant among mankind and those he houses and feeds. Out of millennial history, each owed to each, though the animals kept their accounts better than man did. Milk and meat and wool on the animal side, food and care and a life kinder than that of the wild on man’s side. In return for a place by the fire and the leavings of the table, stalking cats owed surveillance of the granary, and horn-throated hounds paid their way with keen ears and keener noses, assuring that no traveler, of whatever intent, should approach unheralded.
    As now, from up the hill, a sudden ruckus of dogs!
    She could distinguish Fancy’s yap, Fandango’s bay, Hector’s deep roar; an annunciation, fervid but without rancor; a canine alarm signifying someone they knew. Thank heaven it was friend or relation, for she was sick to death of the strangers who’d been haunting the doorstep lately: millenarians, trumpeters of Armageddon, Bible-thumpers by the pairs and half dozens, all determined to share their message.
    Presumably tonight’s visitor knew enough about the place either to wait for her or to come looking. She moved toward the barn door, stopping momentarily to fill her pocket withrolled grain. When she went out, a dark shape materialized against the fence across the lane. She fished in the grain pocket, held the rolled oats between the wires, felt them snuffled up by soft lips that went on nibbling after the oats were gone. Hermes. A wether. Orphaned at birth, hand reared, kept as a pet, both for his lovely fleece and for his peoplish habits.
    She leaned over the fence and scratched his head between the horns, murmuring in her secret voice, sheep sheep—sheep sheep, peering across the shadowy form at the crouched blots near the watering tank. The rams: one pitchy black; one not so pitchy, the dark-coppery moorit; one light, the white one; and two intermediate shades that daylight would reveal as gray and a dark-faced tan. Five. All.
    A voice from the top of the hill: “Mom? Are you down there?”
    â€œComing,” she called, brushing her hands together and turning her back on the sheep.…
    Â â€¦Â the sheep, which became amorphous, like a cloud, like a rising pillar of mist, fading, tenuous, expiring on the air with a whisper of sound, like an echo of a door closing in some far-off place. Carolyn, unseeing, stopped suddenly, rubbing her brow fretfully, as though at some elusive but shocking thought, then shook her head and trudged up the hill toward her daughter.
    Stace came toward her, huge glasses making an owl face in the last of the dusk, threw her arms around Carolyn, and squeezed. Carolyn carefully extricated herself, getting the sore arm out of reach.
    â€œLord, Mother, you look like a witch. Or a Norn, or something.”
    â€œI just washed my hair,” Carolyn confessed, running a hand down the flowing gray tresses. “I didn’t want to braid it while it was wet.”
    â€œAnd you were drying it in the barn?”
    â€œThere’s a lamb.…” Her voice trailed off as she turned, peering back down the hill. Something. One of those elusive ideas that disappears before one can grasp it. A minnow thought, glinting, then gone.
    â€œNow your hair smells like sheep,” Stace said firmly, bringing Carolyn’s attention back to the moment.
    â€œIt doesn’t, really. It’s my jeans.” She looked ruefully at the sodden knees. “Let’s go in. I’ll change.”
    They went through the side door into the mudroom, where Carolyn shuffled off her sandals before leading the way past the kitchen and pantry into the small one-time maid’s room she’d been using for a bedroom since Hal had attempted to scale the woodpile and broken his leg in the process. During the lengthy, complicated