A hill farmer in mid Wales finds bite marks on her pregnant ewes and a trail camera in the hollow behind the mountain shows her the answer: her best young sheepdog, flawless on the trial field, works quite differently wherever she cannot be seen. A trialist offers eight thousand pounds and promises the dog will never be out of his sight.
by Bostromian Existential Risk, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
At the January scanning the ewe with the blue mark on her left shoulder had been carrying twins. On the ninth of March she was carrying nothing, and there was a crust of dried blood in the wool behind her right hock where something had held on.
Mair Prosser turned her over against the pen hurdle and parted the wool with her thumbs. Four punctures, two above and two below, the upper pair a finger's width apart. She measured the gap against her own little finger, because she had no ruler in the shed and because she would want the number later. Then she let the ewe up and wrote in the lambing book, under the day's date, Blue 41. Slipped twins. Bitten R hock. 4 holes.
It was the third. She turned back two pages to be sure of that, and it was the third: a gimmer with a torn ear in the last week of February, which she had put down to wire, and a ewe on the first of March who had slipped a single and had nothing on her at all, which she had put down to nothing, because ewes slip lambs and not every loss has a cause you can find. A flock of two hundred and ten Welsh Mountain ewes on the hill above the Irfon would lose four or five pregnancies in an ordinary spring. Three by the ninth of March was not yet out of the ordinary. The holes were.
She sat on an upturned feed bucket in the shed with the book on her knee. The shed smelt of iodine and wet straw and the diesel from the quad. It was four degrees outside and not much more inside. Mot, who was thirteen and had been her father's dog before he was hers, lay across the doorway with his chin on the concrete. Cadi was in the kennel by the yard wall; Mair could hear the chain move when she shifted.
Something had held a pregnant ewe by the leg hard enough to go through the skin, and long enough for the ewe to lose the lambs, which meant a chase, or a fright, or both. There were not many things on the mountain that could do that. She wrote them down the side of the page, because a thing she had written down she could not afterwards pretend not to have considered.
Fox. Gethin's lurcher. Something else. Ours.
A fox took lambs, newborn, and would go for a ewe cast on her back. It did not run down a fit ewe in March and bite her above the hock; a fox that tried would be dragged. She put a short line through Fox, not a long one.
Gethin Bowen's lurcher had been loose twice the previous autumn and had been found both times in the Bowens' own silage clamp with a rabbit. It was a big dog and a fast one and it had never, to anybody's knowledge, looked at a sheep. But a dog that had never looked at a sheep was a dog about which nobody knew anything, and that was a different thing from a dog known to be safe. She left Gethin's lurcher as it was.
Something else was a heading and not a hypothesis, and she knew it, and she left it because the list ought to have somewhere for the answer to go if it turned out to be none of the others.
Then Ours. Mot's teeth were worn to the gum on one side and he had not gripped a sheep in eleven years, including the time a ram put him through a gate. That left Cadi.
Mair looked at the word for some time. Then she wrote a number beside each line, as her father had done in the margins of his stock book when he was pricing a sale: not what he hoped, but what he would bet. The numbers came to more than one the first time, and she did them again.
Cadi was two years and seven months old, a black-and-white bitch with one ear that stood and one that folded, by a Cumbrian sire whose stud fee, four hundred pounds, was the most Mair had ever paid for anything that was not a vehicle. At the nursery trial at Abergwesyn the previous September Cadi had run ninety-one out of a hundred and beaten dogs handled by men who had been on the television. The judge, writing on a clipboard in the front seat of a Land Rover with the window down, had taken two points off on the outrun, one on the lift, four on the drive where she had overflanked at the second gate, and two at the pen. Nothing for anything else. At the pen she had held three wild Speckle-faced ewes in the mouth of it with her body flat and her eyes up, and had not moved a foot until Mair moved, and when Mair moved she moved the same distance, as if the two of them were on the ends of a rod.
The thing about the trial was that there was nowhere to hide on it. It was a flat field of about forty acres by the river, mown for the day, with the post at one end and the sheep let out at the other, and from the post a handler could see every yard of it. The judge could see every yard of it. The people sitting on the bank with flasks could see every yard of it. At Abergwesyn Cadi had done nothing that anyone could see that anyone would mark down.
The hill was not like that.
The Prossers' hill ran up from the in-bye fields behind the house to the top of the Garn, fourteen hundred feet, and then fell away on the north side into a long hollow the maps called Cwm Clyd and her father had called the back. You could not see the back from anywhere on the front of the Garn. To gather it, you stood at the gate on the lane with the sheep somewhere behind the hill, three quarters of a mile away and out of sight, and you sent the dog, and the dog went up the shoulder and over and was gone. Four minutes, six, eight. Then sheep came over the skyline at the low saddle at the bottom end, and after them the dog, and from the skyline down to the gate you could see everything and whistle everything.
What happened in the back, you knew from what came over the top.
Mair turned the book to the front and went through the gathers since Christmas. She had not written down gathers as such, but she had written down anything that went wrong, and the days things went wrong were the days the sheep were handled. She found the dates of five. The torn ear was two days after one. The first slipped lamb was the day after another. Blue 41 had come off the hill with the rest on the morning of the eighth, the day before.
She had watched that gather from the gate. It had been a clean gather. The sheep had come over the top in a long easy string at a walk, which is the pace you want, and Cadi had come over behind them wide and quiet and had dropped at the first whistle. At the skyline, before she came down, Cadi had stopped and turned her head and looked at the gate. Mair remembered that, because she had been pleased by it. A young dog that checked back to the handler was a dog that wanted to be handled.
She wrote that down too.
Emlyn Pugh telephoned on the twelfth. He ran dogs out of a farm near Tregaron and had won the Welsh National twice and been reserve for the International once, and he talked on the telephone as if he were at the post, in short pieces with gaps between them for the other person to obey.
"Still got that bitch."
"I have."
"Seven thousand."
She said nothing, which was not a tactic. She was working out what seven thousand pounds was: it was a new quad, or it was the roof on the Dutch barn, or it was nineteen months of the interest on what she owed the bank for her brother's share of the farm when their father died.
"I saw her at Abergwesyn," Emlyn said. "I saw her at Rhayader too. She's got more eye than anything I've got at home. I'll run her in the open next year. Seven and a half."
"I'll think about it," Mair said.
"Think quick," he said, and put the phone down.
She went out to the kennel. Cadi stood up when she came round the wall and stood with her tail low and moving and her eyes on Mair's face, not on her hands. Mair crouched and held the dog's head and looked at her teeth. They were white and clean, a young dog's teeth, the canines sharp at the tips. She put her little finger across between the upper pair. It was about right. It would also have been about right for the lurcher, and for a fox, and for most of the dogs in Breconshire.
She let go and Cadi licked her wrist, once, and sat.
The trail camera cost eighty-nine pounds at the farm shop in Builth, in a camouflage-print box with a picture of a stag on it. It took an SD card and eight AA batteries and would take a photograph and a twenty-second film whenever something warm moved in front of it, by day in colour and by night in black and white, by the light of infrared lamps that gave off hardly a glimmer. The girl at the till said people bought them for badgers.
Mair drove up the forestry track to the top gate on the Saturday afternoon, when the sheep were on the front, and walked over into the back. The hollow was wet at the bottom and dry on the sides, heather and bilberry on the east slope, rush and sphagnum along the stream. The sheep, when they were in the back, lay up under the rocks at the head of the cwm, and when the dog came over the ridge they would come down the east slope and along the stream to the saddle, and up over the saddle onto the front. Anything done to a sheep in the back would be done on that line.
There was a wire fence along the stream, old, with half its posts leaning, where her grandfather had once tried to keep the back as a separate grazing and given up. She strapped the camera to a post about two-thirds of the way down the line, at knee height, facing across the path the sheep made. She tested it by walking in front of it, and it clicked. She walked the line back up to the head of the cwm with her hands in her pockets, trying to see it as a dog would see it, and could not.
On the Tuesday she put the ewes out onto the back. On the Thursday she gathered.
It was a clear morning after a frost, still, with the valley full of mist below the house and the Garn standing out of it. From the gate on the lane she sent Cadi on the left-hand side, away, and watched her go up the shoulder low and fast in a long pear-shaped curve and cross the skyline and drop out of sight. Mair looked at her watch. She did not whistle; there was nothing to whistle at.
Six and a half minutes. Then the first ewes came over the saddle end-on, then more, and the bulk of them in a thick spill, trotting, a little faster than she would have liked, and behind them Cadi, wide, came over the skyline and stopped. Head turned. Looking down at the gate.
Mair gave her the walk-on whistle and she came down behind the sheep as if she had been drawn on a slate, and the sheep went through the gate, and Mair counted them in: two hundred and six. Four still in the back, which was usual for a first gather after they had been let out, and nobody's fault.
That afternoon she went back over to the camera. There were forty-one pictures on the card. She could not look at them there; she had no way to look at them there. She put the card in the breast pocket of her shirt and buttoned it and walked down with her hand over it.
The laptop had been her brother's, left behind when he went to Cardiff, and it had a slot in the side for the card. She sat at the kitchen table with it and her tea going cold, and she put the book open beside it, so that she would write down what she saw and not what she remembered seeing.
The first thirty pictures were from the nights before: a fox, twice, trotting, not looking at anything. Ewes, singly, grazing along the stream in grey infrared with their eyes lit up white. A hare. A ewe scratching herself on the post, and the picture tilted.
At seven fifty-one the pictures started to come close together.
The first film showed the sheep coming down the stream line at a run, not a trot, bunched, the wet ground thrown up behind them. They went through the frame in four seconds. Then for eleven seconds nothing. Then a single ewe, heavy, a twin-carrier by the size of her, labouring, her mouth open, and after her Cadi, low and very fast and entirely silent, and in the last second of the film Cadi took the ewe by the hind leg above the hock and the ewe went down on her side in the rushes.
Mair stopped the film. She wrote down the time. She played the next one.
It started four seconds after the first had ended. The ewe was up. Cadi was standing off her, two yards, head low. The ewe stood with her legs spread, panting. Cadi walked towards her and the ewe turned and went on down the stream line after the others, at a stagger, and Cadi went after her at a walk, beautifully, wide, the way you teach a young dog to walk up on a single sheep.
There were five more films. In two of them Cadi turned back ewes that had broken up the east slope by running straight at them and gripping at the face, and in one she caught an ear and the ewe screamed; there was sound on the films, and Mair heard it in her kitchen with the kettle ticking as it cooled. In the last film the whole bunch was at the bottom of the frame towards the saddle, milling, and Cadi came along the top of the frame at a gallop and stopped, dead, and lay down.
Then she got up and went round them very wide and very slow, and they drifted up out of the frame towards the saddle and the skyline, and at the edge of the frame, before she followed them, the dog stopped and lifted her head. Not towards the camera. Up the saddle, towards the lane and the gate beyond it, three quarters of a mile away and out of sight, where Mair had been standing.
Mair played that one four times.
The ewe that had gone down by the stream was one of the four that had not come in. She went up for it in the afternoon on the quad with Mot on the back, and found it in the rushes, alive, on its side, with its lambs still in it, and got it onto the quad, and it slipped the lambs that night in the shed. She wrote it down.
Then she went back to the margin of the page for the ninth of March and crossed out the numbers she had put beside Fox and Gethin's lurcher and Something else, and beside Ours she did not write a number at all, because there was no longer anything to bet on.
It would have been simpler if the dog had been bad at it.
A dog that gripped out of wildness gripped everywhere. It gripped in the in-bye field, in the yard, in the trial field in front of a judge in a Land Rover; it was disqualified at its first trial and sold on for a few hundred pounds to someone with cattle, where a bit of bite is not a fault. Mair had known dogs like that. Her father had shot one, in 1998, a dog called Glen, in the field below the house, after it pulled down a ewe in front of him for the second time. That had been a hard day and not a complicated one.
The films showed a dog working. She gripped the ewe that was slowing the bunch; she gripped the ewes that broke; she stopped gripping at the place where the ground began to rise to the saddle, the last place on that line from which the gate on the lane could not be seen. And every time, at the skyline, she looked at the gate.
Mair did the sums that evening at the kitchen table, because that was what you did.
Losses since the new year: three ewes slipped, five lambs, at what the lambs would have made as stores in the autumn; one torn ear, which was nothing. Say four hundred pounds. Say, to be fair to the dog, that some of those would have been lost anyway, and call it three. Set against that: Emlyn's seven and a half thousand, or three years and more of good work on the hill before the dog was ten, against the wage of a man for the days a slower dog wasted. On the numbers the dog was worth keeping, and worth a great deal more selling.
But there was a number that was not on the page, and she knew it, because it was the reason her father had shot Glen and not sold him.
The back of the Garn ran out on its western side above the old Cefn quarry. The quarry face was a hundred and twenty feet, with a fence along the top that the Prossers kept up at their own expense, and in the snow in February 2009 a pair of loose dogs from the council houses at the bottom of the valley had got onto the hill and run the Bowens' ewes, and thirty-one of them had gone through the fence and over the face in the dark. Mair had been twenty-six. She had helped Gethin's father drag them out of the quarry pool with a tractor and a chain. There had been nothing wrong with the fence. Sheep that are being run do not see fences.
On any given gather, the chance that Cadi, gripping in the back, turned a bunch west instead of east in a mist or a snow and ran them at that fence: she could not have said. Small. One gather in a hundred, one in a thousand. She did not know, and not knowing was no comfort; not knowing was the thing she would be betting with. She gathered the back forty times a year. The bet was not the three hundred pounds. It was all of them, some day, all at once, on a morning she would have no way of knowing was the morning, on ground where she could not see.
She wrote quarry at the bottom of the page and underlined it and shut the book.
Emlyn came on the Sunday in a pickup with a dog box in the back. He was a short man in his sixties with a flat cap and a very clean waxed jacket, and he walked round the yard looking at everything with the same attention: the Dutch barn, the quad, the kennels, Mair.
She showed him the films at the kitchen table. He watched them through once without saying anything. At the ewe going down by the stream he breathed out through his nose.
"Well," he said, when it was finished. "She's a working dog."
"She's a gripper."
"Out of sight. Some of them do a bit out of sight. You didn't know?" He looked at her, not unkindly. "Look. I don't run her on the hill. I've got a hill, I've got dogs for the hill. This one's for the trial field. Flat field, every yard of it in front of me, judge in a car. She'll never be anywhere I can't see her. You saw her at Abergwesyn. Perfect. She knows the difference, that's the point. She's clever enough to know the difference. That's what you want in a trial dog."
"And when you've a gather on and she's in the box doing nothing?"
"She won't be."
"You've five hundred ewes on the Mynydd."
"Six hundred." He smiled. "Eight thousand, then. For your trouble."
Mair looked at the laptop, with the last film stopped on the frame where the dog's head was lifted towards the gate.
"She knew where I was," she said. "She's never been in the back with me. Nobody showed her you can't see the gate from the stream. She worked it out."
"That's eye," Emlyn said. "That's what I'm paying for."
She said she would ring him. He drank his tea and went, and on the way to his pickup he stopped by the kennel and looked at Cadi for a long moment over the wall, and Cadi lay flat in the straw and looked back at him, perfectly still.
She moved the camera on the Monday, down to the saddle itself, onto the gatepost there, pointed up the line the sheep came. She told nobody. There was nobody to tell except Emlyn, and Gethin, and her brother, and the vet, and each of them would have told her to do something, and all the things would have been sensible, and none of them was what she was trying to find out.
She gathered on the Friday. Seven minutes. The sheep came over the saddle at a walk, all together, the ewes' heads up, and Cadi came over the skyline and stopped and looked at the gate, and came down like the dog in a book. Two hundred and nine. She counted them twice. Two hundred and nine and a ewe missing that had been lame, and when Mair went up for it that afternoon it was lying under the rocks at the head of the cwm with the wool pulled out of its britch in a tuft the size of a fist and the skin under it scored.
The card in the camera had twenty-six pictures on it.
In the morning ones, the sheep came up to the saddle past the gatepost at an easy walk, bunched and quiet. In one film Cadi came up behind them. At the gatepost she stopped.
She stood with one forefoot lifted, and she looked at the camera. It went on for nearly three seconds: a black-and-white bitch with one ear up and one ear folded, standing in wet grass, looking into the lens. She had passed that gatepost two hundred times in her life. There was a new thing strapped to it at knee height, the size of a paperback, with the smell on it of the shop in Builth and of Mair's hands.
Then she put the forefoot down and walked on after the sheep, wide and quiet, out of the frame.
Mair sat back in her chair.
She thought about Emlyn's flat field, every yard of it in front of him. She thought about a trial dog in her third season, and her fourth, running in the open with a lot of money on her, on a course in a new county with a dip in the middle of the outrun that nobody had noticed when they set it out, and a judge in a Land Rover who had to look down at his clipboard to write.
She did not ring Emlyn.
On the second Friday of April she asked her nephew Aled, who was fifteen and staying for the Easter holidays, to take Cadi to the gate on the lane at eight o'clock and send her away, left-hand, and whistle nothing until the sheep came over the top. He said, "Where'll you be?" and she said, "About," and he looked at her as fifteen-year-olds look at aunts, and said he would.
She went up the forestry track at half past five in the dark with a flask and a feed sack to lie on, and walked over into the back by torchlight. She did not go to the stream line or the saddle. She went up the east slope to a place about halfway along it where the heather grew deep over a peat hag, a little above the line the sheep would take and a long way from anywhere she had ever stood with a dog, and she lay down in it on the sack, on her front, with her chin on her arms, and put out the torch.
It got light slowly. There was a cold wind down the cwm from the north that she felt through two jumpers. The ewes were under the rocks at the head of it, grey shapes getting whiter, the first of the lambs among them. A curlew went over, calling. Her hip went dead, and then her arm. At ten past eight by her watch she lifted her head and watched the ridge.
Cadi came over it at the top of the cwm three minutes later, at full stretch, low along the skyline in a curve that took her right round behind the sheep, and the ewes stood up all together and bunched, and the dog dropped into the heather above them, and the whole flock began to move down the east slope towards Mair at a trot, then faster.
They came past her at twenty yards. She could hear the lambs. She could smell them. A heavy ewe on the outside of the bunch dropped back, and Cadi came off the top at an angle, fast, silent, her head going down —
Mair sat up in the heather.
The dog stopped. She stopped the way she stopped at a trial, as if her feet had been nailed through, and then she was down, flat, belly to the ground, in the bilberry six yards from Mair, with her head up and her eyes on Mair's face.
Neither of them moved. The ewe that had dropped back caught up with the others. The bunch slowed to a walk, then stopped, forty yards down the slope, and turned to look back up at them, and began one by one to graze.
Mair stood. Her legs had gone and she had to wait for them. Cadi did not move. She lay with her ears flat and her eyes on Mair, not frightened, not guilty, not anything Mair could put a word to; attentive, the way she was at the pen when she was waiting to be told the next thing. Then, very slightly, while Mair watched her, she turned her head and looked along the slope: at the rocks at the head of the cwm, at the stream, at the saddle with the camera on it, at the skyline. And back at Mair.
Mair picked up the feed sack. She put two fingers in her mouth and gave the walk-on, and the dog rose out of the heather and went down behind the sheep, wide and slow and perfect, and took them along the stream and up to the saddle and over.
Mair walked down after them. At the saddle she stopped on the skyline. Below her, on the front of the hill, the flock was strung out towards the gate and the boy, and the dog was behind it, and as Mair watched, the dog turned her head as she went and looked back up at the skyline, and went on, and a little further down turned and looked again.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quārtum Kalendās Octōbrēs (28 September 2026), ā Perīculō Exsistentiālī Bostromiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
Bostromian Existential Risk, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org
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