The Goatherd

The morning had kept close to the river the whole while, the road doubling back along low ground thick with gnats, the water never far but never in sight either behind its own reeds. By the time the ground began to lift the wayfarer had walked what felt like half the day for a stretch that could not have been half a morning, and wanted only to be over the hill and into the market town before dark closed the road.

The slope above the river was open and dry, goats scattered across it in twos and threes, and a man sat on a flat stone near the path with a long stick across his knees, not doing anything the wayfarer could see except watching them.

"How far to the top from here," the wayfarer asked, not slowing much.

"Half the afternoon at a steady walk." He did not turn his head from the flock while he said it. "Sit if you are stopping. Walk if you are not. Either is fine by me."

The wayfarer sat, mostly to get the boots off a stone that had been working through the sole since noon, and asked how anyone kept track of that many animals scattered over that much hillside.

"You do not keep track of all of them." His eyes had not moved from one spot on the slope, a graying yearling favoring a foreleg near the edge of a patch of scree. "You watch the one that needs watching, and let your own eye tell you when it is time to move to another. Right now it is that one. An hour ago it was a doe about to drop a kid behind the rocks."

The wayfarer looked where he was looking and then looked at the whole slope instead, trying to hold all the goats in view at once the way a person watches a crowd. Within a few breaths they had become one moving gray-and-brown smear, impossible to count, impossible to say which had moved and which had not. Nothing about it could be held. The eye kept sliding off the whole of it and finding nothing to land on.

"That will wear a person out faster than the hill will," the Goatherd said, not unkindly, still watching the yearling. "The flock is not a thing you look at. Every goat in it is."

They talked goats while he watched. Which ones drifted toward the rocks and had to be turned back before they were hurt for it. What the kids would bring at market if the buyers came early enough in the season, and how a wet spring meant thinner fleece and worse prices whichever way the fall went. He asked whether the wayfarer had passed anyone selling cheese below the crossing, and was told no, and said that was a shame, because his own would be ready before the wayfarer reached the market town and there was no way to send it ahead.

Once, mid-sentence about the price of hides, he stood without hurrying, walked a short way up the slope, and turned the yearling back from the loose edge of the scree with a low word and a touch of the stick against its flank, nothing more than that, then sat back down on the same stone and picked the sentence back up where he had left it. His eyes had never once left the animal, not while sitting, not while walking to it, not while talking through the whole business of hides.

The wayfarer got up eventually, boots back on, and thanked him, and started up the last of the climb while the Goatherd stayed where he was, because the flock was staying too. The path cut away from the river here and went over the shoulder of the hill in the open, no shade, gaining height in long slow turns.

At the top the road leveled onto a shelf of bare ground before it dropped again toward the market town, and from there the whole lower country lay open below, the river swung wide across it in loop after loop, small at this distance and the color of an old knife blade. Somewhere down in that tangle of loops was the low, gnat-thick ground the wayfarer had grumbled about since sunrise, the stretch that had eaten half the morning and given nothing back for it. From up here it was one curve among a dozen others exactly like it, no longer than any of them, no harder to look at than any of them, gray water going where gray water goes.

The wayfarer stood there longer than the view required and then went on, down toward the market town, while behind and below, on the hillside, the Goatherd sat on his stone in the last of the daylight, watching one goat, and then another.

This is a teaching-story. It happened nowhere, and it happens all the time.