by Thomas James Hardman, Jr
Once upon a time, there was a village which kept sheep for their meat and wool. The pastures were some distance from the village and the adults were all very busy with their own labors near to town, and they sent a boy to watch over the flock. They told him that if he were to loudly cry, "wolf, wolf", many men would abandon their labors, seize up weapons, and come running to defend the flock.
Wolves are quite intelligent and they learn quickly and have good memories as well as a talent for tactics and strategy. These particular wolves also had the novel ability to speak among themselves and to plan. More importantly, they could tell stories and pass information from one generation to the next. These wolves had an additional element of culture not far from that of humans, which they considered the bane of their existence, standing between them and the stupid sheep as they did.
"You will recall," said the Alpha Male, "that in the past the boy guarding the flock was timid and easily bored, and would cry for assistance with little or no provocation."
"We remember this well," sang the subordinate wolves.
"This boy is less the subject of whimsical desires," growled the Alpha Male. "It will take direct provocation to cause him to repeat the mistakes of his predecessor, yet with enough effort I expect he will be no less tasty. Let us make our plans."
With many fawning gestures and much licking of each others' chins, the subordinates agreed, and fell to their work.
When the boy first saw the wolf lurking in the tree line at the edge of the pasture, the boy was quick to remember that where there is one wolf, usually there are many. Should he cry wolf? Perhaps with his bow he might send an arrow to the heart of that wolf, for he was within range and the boy was a fine archer. Yet he had not yet counted the number of the wolves, and his supply of arrows was limited. To cry wolf would bring the men of the village, yet he remembered the fate of his predecessor who had on too many occasions raised a false alarm. That one's bones had been found cracked for the marrow and this boy had no desire to teach the men of the village to ignore his cries as the idle pranks of a bored and spoiled child.
Yet he also did not wish to teach the wolves to fearlessly come for the sheep. How, then, to proceed? He nocked an arrow to his bow.
"Rat!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.
The wolf continued to stare balefully at him.
"Dog!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. The wolf continued to stare at him and was promptly joined by another wolf.
"Cow!" shouted the boy, not expecting much to happen, but as his voice died away he thought he heard growling behind him, and when he turned and saw the Alpha Male gathering up to leap, he put an arrow into the path where the leap would take the wolf, and quickly nocked another arrow as he saw the wolf fail to pounce. The Alpha Male backpedalled and ran a broken pattern until he was almost out of range, and the boy turned the circle to see that no others were creeping up behind. None did, other than to close in a bit more on the sheep, with more appearing from the trees with every second. That did it. The boy cried "Wolf!"
In only a minute villagers began to arrive. Of course, the noise of their arrival had scattered the wolves, all but one, which hung off at the extreme limits of sight, watching them. The villagers began to gripe about the boy's predecessor and to voice their hopes that this wouldn't be more of the same, them being almost out of sheep, boys, ideas, and patience. Yet the boy led them to the footprints of the wolves, and the villagers were satisfied that they had indeed saved the sheep. To the boy it seemed that, in the distance, the remaining wolf grinned at him as it turned and trotted away.
The weather was quite dry that summer, not so much so that the pasturage failed, but dry enough so that there were no puddles and no mud anywhere except near the small river that watered the village. The boy stood watch again for the wolves, and with that rush of adrenaline coming along, he saw them again. He nocked arrow to bow and began to circle. The wolves knew he was watching, for as he turned, he saw before him the barest hint of tails vanishing into the shrubs, and heard the rustling of emergences from the brush behind him. None came to menace the sheep, which were blatting in the way they always did regardless of their circumstances. No, decided the boy, it's me they want. Once I am gone they shall have the sheep at their mercy and they seek to frighten me. The wolves were rather successful at this, but the boy stood his ground until the wolves emerged and began to circle to the sheep. Turning to guard his back as he went, the boy edged closer to the sheep and the circling wolves. As many arrows as he had, there were more wolves, for this was a large and healthy pack. As he fired his shots, the wolves waited and dodged, and he could no longer fire without killing sheep. He had no choice, then. He cried, "Wolf! Wolf!"
As he spoke, the wolves ran through the center of the flock, scattering lambs and ewes in every direction, and then the wolves vanished back into the forest. Before the sound of the villagers' feet obscured it, the boy heard a curious scratching sound, loudly at first, then fading as with distance, and then came the villagers.
"I see the sheep milling, but where are the wolves?"
The boy said, "They were here, but you have frightened them off and they returned to the woods". Men went to check, and returned.
"We did not go far into the woods," said one of the villagers, "but we went far enough, and we saw no tracks of wolves. We saw only dry dust on packed earth, as if blown there by the wind. It was a false alarm."
In the deepest distance, the boy thought that for a moment he glimpsed the grin of the watching wolf, but that vanished instantly before he could point to it. He had no supper that night.
Sleepless with hunger, the boy decided upon a plan. He would take his neighbor's dog, a faithful one if really not very bright nor heedful, to help guard the flocks the next day. In the morning, he told his neighbor that if the dog should come rushing home, it would mean that the wolves were back.
When the wolves came, he sent the dog running with a strong "run home, boy" and the cheerful dog barked happily and set off for the place of his master. He never arrived, not ever. The disconsolate owner remonstrated with the boy, coming near to cursing him, but no sheep had been lost. Nor had wolves been found, when at last the boy dispaired of the dog bringing help and raised his voice to cry wolf.
As the villagers departed, in the distance the boy saw the wolf, definitely grinning, with a branch of fluffy pine frond held in its jaws. It swept the ground a few times to make sure he got the message, and vanished like swept-over wolf-tracks before the boy could point to him. Yet that dog had never returned, and it had been a large and powerful dog, if a bit dim and friendly, and it was thought that nothing but a wolf, or several wolves, could have taken him without a trace.
Irate, the boy took a shovel with him and dug pits on the perimeter of the pasture. He was almost able to sink an arrow into the haunch of the wolf who stopped to sniff at, and then mark, the pits which the boy had thought cleverly hidden. He hadn't recalled the abilities of the wolves to sniff out any trace of the hands of man. Furthermore, the sheep tended to wander far too close and cluelessly to the pits, and unlike the wolves, they had almost no sense of smell and nearly fell in even though those pits were clearly marked with the scent of their enemies.
The boy knew he was at the limit of the patience of the villagers. He'd had them up there three times, probably had gotten his neighbor's dog killed and eaten, and the wolves were growing increasingly brave. They had taken to lying in a circle around the edge of the pasture, seeming to be quite relaxed. Occasionally they made noises, which sounded to the boy to be -- though not in any language of man -- suspiciously like conversation. It was.
"We know that with enough false alarms, his people will stop responding to the calls," said the Alpha Wolf.
"How many repetitions must we make?" inquired one of the subordinates, of another. (Directly questioning the Alpha Male is a bad idea.)
The Alpha Male "interrupted" and "remarked" that they would know when the right signal was given by the boy.
Every day, the contest continued. The wolves were not so hungry as to charge in and kill a sheep and attempt to drag it off, only to be driven away by enraged villagers. In any case, they had no intention of killing any single sheep; they wanted the entire flock. Besides, their overarching goal was to discredit the boy in the eyes of the villagers. Once that was done, he could cry wolf all he liked and nobody would come.
The boy used the wolves for target practice. The wolves used the boy's target practice to discover the range of his weapon and the times of flight of the arrow depending on the distance. By this time, the boy knew most of the wolves by sight and had started giving them names. The wolves learned their names, and everyone knew that it was all nothing but a game, however high the stakes. No sheep were taken; that the boy would not allow. Nor was any alarm given, though the pasture practically seethed with wolves. The sheep were at the point by now where they were beyond the capability of fear; no wolves had actually harmed them, and the wolves had discovered that lying amid the lambs, the boy would not shoot at them, unless they got too close. When the wolves got a bit too close to the lambs, the boy would rush in and fire fast flat shots that nicked the wolves as often as not, though they had long since learned never to run in a straight line, or the boy would send a leading shot into their paths. One of the beta females had discovered that the hard way, though the shaft had found nothing vital and had worked free of the flesh over time.
The boy had of course decided that it was pointless to discuss any of this with the villagers. First, they had no others to spare to guard the flock against wolves which they believed had made one appearance only and had then moved on. Secondly, the boy was reluctant to tell the villagers that the wolves were engaging in a long-term strategy of deception combined with bellying-up to their intended prey. It was bad enough being stuck out here with an impossible job outnumbered by a very clever foe showing increasing disrespect. Being stoned out of the village as demented would be worse. At least the wolves were only "talking" amongst themselves, and had only the combined strategy of getting him to let down his guard against them, while failing to keep up his guard against the plan of the wolves to get him to discredit himself on their behalf. Had the wolves been capable of talking to the villagers, who knows what tales they might have told.
But what to do? -the sheep were getting very fat and almost too lazy even to graze, and judging by the depth of their fleece, winter would soon come, and the lazy games of soft summertime would become a bit more serious when the plentiful rabbits began to hibernate and the wolves would have little choice as to prospects for the menu.
The boy considered simply walking away from the job. But there were no others to do it. Even had there been others to do the job, the boy was convinced that the course of action to which he would not let the wolves drive him, might well and quickly be the course of first resort for any replacement shepherd. To see the sheep lost after all of this time would be a blow in its own right. No, he would stay until the wolves came for him, and he would not on his own cry wolf to his own discredit.
Or need he do that? For in the end, the wolves would come. The sheep being generally too fat to easily drag away, it would be for himself that the wolves first came. He had many arrows, and they were fast and his aim was fast and true, but the wolves by now knew the times of flight and the range as well as did he; and both parties doubtless knew that at least ten of them could be on him though fifteen went down... if times were sufficiently desperate.
And so the boy began to bring the flock home at night, and to trade his dinner portions to the other villagers who had less than his own family. He traded food for worked goods and traded those worked goods for other things from which he made, while in the pasture, clever trifles and toys which made for even better trade within the village, although by most standards that village was rather poor. By the time the leaves turned and the frost was making the rabbits sleepy and the sheep winter-wooled, the boy had gathered enough of stock in trade to announce a Scavenger Hunt, with a prize for the winner to be collected at the pasture.
The wolves had never much frequented the outskirts of the village, even when they had not been plying their deception of utter absence. And why should they risk blowing their game to follow the boy on the night he made his annoucement? None heard of the great Scavenger Hunt, nor the prize, nor the gift, nor the map. Nor other than the hunt itself, would they have had the concepts, and in any case as they were wolves, they did not understand much of the speech of Men.
And on one fine day, the wolves saw something which they had not seen before. The leaves were mostly gone from the trees and shrubs and the rabbits mostly gone to earth. A few days before, the boy had not brought the flock to pasture, but had ranged widely through the woods. Mostly the wolves had not let themselves be much seen as he wandered through a great circle rather a good bit beyond sight of the pasture. They had followed him, of course, and with some disdain had reviled his habit of dropping things next to various landmark trees and rocks and failing to take them with him when he left. Those things stank of the hand of man, and the wolves left them where they lay.
On another fine day, shortly thereafter, they saw something new again. At pasture with his flock, the boy went about his business as usual, occasionally loosing a shaft at one or another wolf which seemed to be relaxing a bit closer than it ought to lay. At that range the wolves had nearly two full seconds to stand and run a short jagged course to take them outside of probable paths.
Suddenly the wolves seemed a bit less at ease. Their postures were far less relaxed and they were a bit more upright and stiff. Their ears occasionally twitched as they attended to sounds in the distance. They seemed to be getting a bit nervous. And for the first time, when they regarded the boy, he was grinning at them. They respected his arrows, but how dared he show them his teeth? All at once the boy heard what had unnerved the wolves, the sounds of shouting in the distance.
These shouts were boisterous shouts, the shouts of people coming to claim their prizes, men and women and children, for the boy had made enough clues and prizes -- however small and cheap -- to turn out the entire village for his scavenger hunt. When he had cried of wolves, perhaps a mere five percent of the village had seized up arms and run to the defense of the flock, for as a rule that was the number that it took to set a pack to rout. Today, at least four score of persons ran towards him all at once, because he had set his clues farthest from pasture where closest to the village, and closest to pasture where farthest from village. All had found their prizes at about the same moment and all would arrive right about the same time, in a well-formed circle closing on the wolves from without.
The wolves were on their feet, looking to each other for ideas, getting ready to bolt, and the boy ran pell-mell into the midst of the flock and shouted "wolf!" at the top of his lungs.
As to the sheep? They ran outwards a bit, practically into the jaws of the wolves. But it's not the nature of pack wolves to attack a charging prey animal, especially not when it has horns. Wolves prefer to stalk and chase. The wolves turned tail and ran, right into the closing circle of villagers suddenly alerted for them. No villager left the village except under arms, and today was no exception. But three wolves escaped the clutching hands and stabbing blades of the villagers.
When the melee was concluded, the villagers gathered to see to the health of their fat sheep, and once that had been done, to not incidentally collect their prize.
"I have the gilded trinket", said one, a smallish man who was the brewer's apprentice. He held out a carved toy which had been painted with pyrite dust. "Give me my prize, then!"
"I shall," said the boy. He began to march off into the woods and many villagers, including the apprentice, followed along. Presently the boy halted, smiling widely.
"And where is my prize, sirrah?" asked the Brewer's Apprentice.
"Your blade, if I may, sir," asked the boy of one of the larger villagers, who produced the bloody blade and handed it to the boy. The boy bent to his task and much hacking ensued. He rose, and turned to the apprentice.
"Here sir, is your prize..."
"The pelt of an Alpha wolf."
Rockville MD, March 27 2007.
Copyright 2007 all rights reserved by Thomas
James Hardman, Jr.