by Kurt Caswell
But I did. I turned and walked back to the horse. The band of sheep had moved on, and, now unencumbered, I took the lead rope and, with the horse, chased after them.
As I made my way to the band, I consoled myself. You’ve done the right thing. You’ve done the right thing. Hector would have abandoned the lamb, too. He had already abandoned that ewe a couple days back, her wool mostly gone, her face gaunt and tired, her last moments upon her. What was that night like for her, I wondered, the dark coming on, the temperature dropping, alone among the silent trees as the band moved farther and farther away, she calling out with no one listening, no one coming for her except the coyotes now, barking and calling to each other with excitement, one appearing out in front of her, another behind, a few more coming down off the hill, coming in on her from all sides. What was that moment like as the first coyote determined the ewe was alone and it was safe to come in. So in it came, circling a little and then circling back, just to be sure, because to be cautious is to be alive, and then when it was so close it had to, the coyote rushed in taking the ewe’s throat in its teeth, holding her in its bite, turning her neck back, twisting her until she went down onto her side. And once down, she waited to die, the teeth deeper in her neck where now she bled into the coyote’s mouth while other coyotes arrived, some pulling on her legs, the young ones leaping up around her in excitement and confusion. She made no sound at all, her throat clenched tight until the bleeding weakened her and weakened her, waiting for it to end, her breath slowing and slowing until it stopped and her eyes went stone cold black.
Where was Hector? He wasn’t anywhere. I walked down, descending with the horse into the sheep. Closer and closer now, the ewes and lambs calling out in the wet rain, until one appeared in front of me, and a few more, and I came to the edge of them. The great pine in front of me, dry beneath, looked like a good place to tie the horse. I wasn’t certain why I needed to find Hector now, except that I wanted him to acknowledge my choice and tell me it was the right thing to do, that no shepherd would have kept on with the lamb, that it was done for, and this is the way of things on the sheep trail. Some lambs don’t make it. Some ewes don’t make it. The dogs die out here, from time to time, the mules, the horses, the herders. But where was Hector? He wasn’t anywhere, and I became worried that now I too, like the lamb, had been abandoned in the rain, here under a great pine, the camp surely down the mountain by now and the tent erected there in a green meadow at the lake edge where Freddy and Edwin and Hector now relaxed near the stove with coffee and cheese and crackers. I turned off to the north, scanning the trees and the sheep band, then to the west, the south, and the east. I looked down for a moment, watching the rain run from my hat brim. I looked up, and there Hector was.
“The little lambs?” he said. “You bring the lambs?”
I pointed up the mountain.
I have been a wanderer too, a nomad, journeying out of Eden with the first man and the first woman, dying into the ground with Abel, and walking the pathless wastes into the cities with Cain. It is easier and stranger to love and yearn for home when I am wandering in the wet woods in a lightning storm with Hector, Edwin, and Freddy, two bands of sheep, a dozen dogs, and all the wild predators of the West. But this life, the life of the nomad, is mostly gone now, replaced by getting and spending, replaced by the city, which is built on an agrarian economy; and yet the world is full of wanderers, or people with wandering hearts. So what is a wanderer?
In his book Wandering, the German writer Herman Hesse writes, “I belong to those windy voices . . . who love only love.” Then, in the next paragraph, he offers the baseline of his being:
All of us wanderers are made like this. A good part of our wandering and homelessness is love, eroticism. The romanticism of wandering, at least half of it, is nothing else but a kind of eagerness for adventure. But the other half is another eagerness—an unconscious drive to transfigure and dissolve the erotic. We wanderers are very cunning—we develop those feelings which are impossible to fulfill; and the love which actually should belong to a woman, we lightly scatter among small towns and mountains, lakes and valleys, children by the side of the road, beggars on the bridge, cows in the pasture, birds and butterflies. We separate love from its object, love alone is enough for us, in the same way that, in wandering, we don’t look for a goal, we only look for the happiness of wandering, only the wandering.
So the wanderer’s condition is a love for the world. The bliss of being “lightly scattered” completes wanderers because it allows many places and experiences into their lives. An object of beauty in the wanderer’s path is not the object of love, but rather a reminder of the passion of love empirical that may be expressed in so many ways, among so many features in the land, among so many small pleasures, so many small freedoms. Whereas the farmer concentrates his love in one field, one place, one life, the wanderer leaves a little love in many fields, in many places, and lives many lives.
On looking at a small rectory, Hesse imagines becoming a priest. He imagines what kind of priest he would be, what kind of life he would have as a priest, and how he might live that way, content. He imagines it but then confesses a deeper truth: he will always be a wanderer. His fantasy of becoming a priest is the fantasy of a wanderer who steps into and out of possibilities, into and out of lives. It is not the priesthood that allows him to tremble, but the excitement he feels in its possibility. “I feel life trembling within me,” he writes:
in my tongue, on the soles of my feet, in my desire or my suffering, I want my soul to be a wandering thing, able to move back into a hundred forms, I want to dream myself into priests and wanderers, female cooks and murderers, children and animals, and, more than anything else, birds and trees; that is necessary, I want it, I need it so I can go on living, and if sometime I were to lose these possibilities and be caught in so-called reality, then I would rather die.
In these possibilities, in the many forms of love and of the self, Hesse feels most alive. Indeed, he knows that he cannot live unless he is free to feel so.
I expected some kind of judgment—I did. I still do. I expected that in every situation in the sheep herder’s life there was a right way and a wrong way. There was a protocol, or a procedure, or a system in place to determine what to do. Instead I think there was only what was possible and what was not possible, and what was possible for Hector was not necessarily possible for me.
“Show me,” Hector said.
We trudged up the muddy path in the rain, up the steep mountain to the tree. The lamb lay there still, curled into a shivering ball. Hector knelt there in the mud and whispered something to it. An apology, perhaps? He took it into his arms, cradling it like a child, then lifted it over his head, draped it around his shoulders like a shawl, and carried it down the mountain.
Through the rain and mist of that big blow, I saw smoke in the trees: Freddy and our camp. He had the tent set and a fire glowing in the woodstove. The rain continued to fall, and I saw a warm light from the flap door as Hector and I approached.
“You go in,” Hector said.
I went in, and inside it was warm and dry with the glow of the fire in the stove, and Freddy handed me a cup of hot coffee. Water streamed from my raincoat and fell onto the wet grass that was our floor. I lifted the cup to my mouth and drank, then stood at the open flap of the tent with the coffee in my hands and watched Hector work in the rain. He set the lamb down in the grass not far from the tent. Its legs would not work, and it lay there, unable to get up. Hector knelt beside it, put his hand on its head and then on its hindquarters, as if transferring some vital energy or offering it a blessing. Lifting his hand now, he rose and came away to the tent.
“It can’t get up,” I said to Hector.
“No. No walk,” he said, taking a cup of coffee.
“So it will die?”
“Maybe die,” Hector said. “But maybe live. Slowly, slowly, it can get up.”
We needed to be vigilant, Hector warned, please keep an
eye out, because the lamb, if it gets on its feet again, might wander back up the trail to return to our camp of the night before, and then back up the trail farther still, back to where it came from, wander into the dark wood where the wolves were surely waiting. All the ground we gained today, all that distance we traveled these past days crossing over the mountain, Hector cautioned, the little lamb might undo.
“This lambs maybe want to go home,” Hector said.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Go home where?”
“Go back to where born.”
Standing out of the rain with the hot cup in my hands, I imagined the homing instinct in that lamb, as broken and feeble as it was, the power of its desire to return pushing it beyond its body’s function, beyond its knowing of the way, a desire to retrace the route to its origin place. I thought then that this might be the expression of all living things, a journey back to one’s origin place, to the center, or to the edge, or to the end. I felt a surge of love for the day, for this day more than other days, for the day of hardships and trials and curses, for the rain and the storm and the little lamb, and the difference in being out of the rain and the storm with the little lamb: a shepherd’s life. I thought of the meal we would soon cook in the shelter of the tent, a dish of rice topped with a hash of carrots, potatoes, celery, garbanzo beans from a can, garlic, and Spam, salt and pepper to taste, as much as we wanted to satisfy who we were and who we would become. I loved the day, and I thought of those effusive lines of love from Wordsworth, those lines from a lost world from a poet who is the master of effusive lines from lost worlds, but what better lines with which to end a day?
I loved,
Loved deeply all that had been loved before,
More deeply even than ever.
“Now,” Hector said to me. “Freddy cook the lunch. I go in the sheep. You drink the coffee.”
“You don’t need help?”
“No,” he said. “You drink the coffee.”
Freddy filled my cup, and I stood in the flap door of the tent watching Hector on his way to the sheep in the rain and watching the little lamb just there, tottering on its weak legs in the wavering grass of spring.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Though my name alone appears on the cover, a book is a community effort, and this book rests on the guidance, advice, criticism, friendship, and love of the following entities and individuals: my family (hi Leah!); everyone at Trinity University Press, especially Barbara Ras and Steffanie Mortis, who have made me a better writer and maybe a better person; the staff and faculty of the Honors College at Texas Tech University, and my students there, who are an inspiration to me; the staff, faculty, and students of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I taught for a time and hope to one day teach again; the good people of Arborwear, makers of the best pants in the world, who generously supported and outfitted my journey through Iceland; the Office of Research Services at Texas Tech University, whose financial support made my journey through Iceland possible; James M. Hargett, who helped me understand Fan Chengda; Steven Churchill at Duke University for help with Neanderthal; Margaret Soulen and Joe Hinson for their generosity and support in my travels with their sheep herds; Bruce Walsh; Duncan Campbell; Barry Lopez, who has fathered my work, first unknowingly, and then knowingly, since I was fourteen; Curtis Bauer and Idoia Elola, who reviewed my Spanish and encouraged my journey in Iceland; Scott Dewing, who has been my friend now for thirty years, and who helped make many of these journeys possible; and Karen Clark, for her guidance, editorial interrogation, Canadian-ness, and love, especially during that dangerous summer in Saskatchewan in the never-ending rain, and the storm and sun on the road in, and on the road out. Thank you.
KURT CASWELL is a writer and associate professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches intensive field courses on writing and leadership. He has also been on the faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His other books include In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation; An Inside Passage, which won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize; and an anthology of nature writing, To Everything on Earth: New Writing on Fate, Community, and Nature, which he coedited. His essays have appeared in ISLE, Earthlines, Matter, Ninth Letter, Orion, River Teeth, and the American Literary Review. He lives in Lubbock, Texas.