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taking them on like an angry dog. He looked the part, too, with a loping stride like some Russian wolfhound, a gaze of regal and indifferent contentment on his face until he pounced, usually to avenge someone weaker who had no means of defending himself, but often enough simply to fight anyone who wore his strength like meanness on a sleeve, and then there was no way of escaping Zlee’s lupine determination to stand and strike,
until someone dropped and stayed down.
    By the time Lent began, the villagers were grumbling and talking of running Zlee out of town (although he did have a strong advocate in a father whose simpleton daughter had wandered outside of the house one day and along the main road to the village store, where a couple of boys thought they might have some fun with her, until Zlee showed up, having been sent on an errand to buy flour). So, Zlee went with us into the mountains the following spring, as he had, in a way, foretold, and set right to the work of shepherding like a hired hand who’d been missed during a brief sabbatical but who had returned well rested and in form, and in time my father and I wondered how it was we had ever gotten along without him. And I don’t know if the letters stopped coming, or if my father had stopped giving them to him, but Zlee never received another word from his mother, and he seemed to accept this turn away from one and toward another kind of life as one might accept a change of season.
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    IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE TO CONSIDER NOW, BUT AS I THINK BACK on that time, I was, like all the rest, afraid of Zlee that first winter he arrived. I wasn’t sure who or what was behind the mask of the dog, and yet I can’t say that I had any reason to believe that he’d turn on me. In the village, I shadowed him, mostly out of curiosity, but otherwise left him to himself, which he seemed to prefer. I was as intrigued as I was cautious of the way in which, seemingly without any effort or intent, wherever he walked or traveled or emerged, he became the center to which all things weakened or antagonistic were either drawn or from which they fled, and I wondered how long a man—a boy, rather—
could live this way until that center no longer held and the world he sought either to protect or punish broke apart before him and he was left to wander and search for a new world wherein nothing of the old one that had shaped him remained.
    When my father took him into the mountains with us, though, I watched what I thought was that change come over Zlee. He accepted his role of novice to the husbandry we plied as a trade with an equanimity and gratitude, working side by side with me, asking for help and direction when he was given a task he hadn’t done before, and my father acting as though it were unfolding all as he had planned. Perhaps it was. I could have led those flocks by myself, so well trained and used to that life had I become, but it had taken me some time to come into my own. And yet, by midsummer Zlee had picked up even the skills of shepherding that bordered on the instinctual (when to separate a ewe who had aborted; when milk would and wouldn’t bring a lamb to thrive), as though having remembered them after a long time of toiling away at another kind of work, one that didn’t suit him and clouded his sense of purpose, until someone told him to stop, brought him back to where he had begun, and placed in his hand an instrument he had never seen before but which he knew immediately he had been missing, and knew how to use.
    The only time I ever saw Zlee caught off guard or seem in any way uncertain was when we had turned the first corner on the switchback that climbed for a good long mile on the path we had cut through the forest and up to the first of the springs where we and the animals watered, and my father told Zlee in English to tighten up the load that a new mule we had brought with us that
season was carrying. He made no