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beasts of prey. No sheep can stand up to that. They weren’t really frightened—they’d been herded thousands of times before—but all the old discomfort had come over them.
    Then they saw the way that other dog was moving, and their nervousness really did become fear. The gray wolfhound looked as if he were doing the same as the sheepdogs: crouching low before approaching. But something was wrong. He didn’t bark, he didn’t hesitate. For a moment the whole flock held its breath: they were being hunted for the first time in their lives. The dog began to run.
    Unbridled panic broke out. The flock dashed off in all directions, carrying the startled sheepdogs away with it. Mopple ran right through the crowd of human beings and knocked Harry the Sinner over. Zora took refuge on her rocky ledge. From there, she was the only sheep who could see what was really going on.
    The hill was empty. At its foot, close to George’s Place, lay two dark bodies, Othello and the dog. They were both just rising to their feet again. Othello attacked first. Zora had never seen a sheep go on the attack before; Othello should have run for it. The dog hesitated. It was a moment before he recognized the black figure of Othello racing up to him as his prey. Then he took off. But before they collided he lost his nerve, braked, and swerved aside. Othello immediately changed direction, moved in a slight curve, and galloped back toward the dog again. Zora stared incredulously at the hill. It was clear to her that Othello was faster than the dog. The dog seemed to realize it too. He crouched on the ground, teeth bared, ready to leap at the ram from below.
    Zora quickly closed her eyes and thought about something else. That was her way of dealing with the bad moments in life. She thought of the day when she brought her first lamb into the world, she thought of the pain, and the anxiety later, because the lamb had been brown as earth, even after she had spent ages carefully licking the blood off his coat. Brown as earth, with a black face. Later the brown would turn a woolly white, but Zora wasn’t to know that at the time. She had wondered why she was the only sheep in the meadow not to have had a white lamb. But then the lamb had bleated, tiny and brown as he was, and he had a more beautiful voice than any of the other lambs. He had smelled good too. And Zora knew she would defend him against the whole world, whether or not he was the brown color of earth. She had taken him to the cliffs that very day to show him the gulls and the sea.
    Zora relaxed. She had had three lambs so far, and they were the bravest and most sure-footed sheep anyone could imagine. She hadn’t brought a lamb into the world this year, and hardly any of the other ewes had had lambs either. Zora realized why she had found meditating on her rocky ledge so hard recently, and why she was further than ever from becoming a cloud sheep. She’d missed the lambs all summer. Only two inexperienced young ewes had produced lambs, in an excited, clumsy sort of way, and George had sworn when each of those lambs appeared. And then of course there was the winter lamb…Zora’s nostrils flared scornfully. She listened. She would have liked to hear a few young creatures bleating just now, but everything was unnervingly quiet, except for the cries of the gulls, and Zora did not take any notice of those anymore. The human beings were buzzing away in the distance like a lot of insects.
    Zora heard a terrifying scream. Her eyes opened, even though she was trying hard to keep them closed. Instinctively she looked back at the hill. A dark body lay on the ground. Feet were twitching in the air as if they wanted to go on running. She shuddered. The dog had got Othello. Only a moment later did she see that it was the wolfhound lying on the ground. There was no sign of Othello.
    The shaggy wolfhound was trying, unsuccessfully, to stand up. His master came along: one of the young men who had laughed in