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Alfred de Vigny, it seems, wrote a poem of stoic intention called La Mort du Loup, in which he apostrophised in his eloquent way that particular among other sublimes animaux. I have never read a line of it myself, but can well understand, when Sainte-Beuve regrets that it should have been written too much from the standpoint of seeking in nature at all costs subjects of meditative poetry, that Sainte-Beuve may have been right. The pathetic fallacy is a stumbling-block to the egoistic travellers we are. De Vigny on his dead wolf may have been lifted as far, or nearly as far, as Sterne on his dead donkey. Personally, I am busking for a short excursion on a dead sheep; but although there were elements of the high sublime in the climax, and of the horrid in the anti-climax of the tragedy, it is not on their account that I wish to relate it; rather because it seemed to me at the time to be representative, exactly to prefigure the countryside in which I saw it all done. It may stand up as type, or as symbol, of the fells and the life lived there; it has in it much of their lonely grandeur and savagery, of their harshness and plainness, of their entire absence of amenity; in a word, of their Nordic quality which does not so much insist as take for granted, in a way disconcerting to the Southerner, that neither man nor woman, dog nor sheep more or less makes one straw’s worth of difference to the day’s work, but that we are all alike rolled round, as Wordsworth said, “with stocks and stones and trees.” He himself, Nordic to the bone, saw nothing amiss with it; and no doubt it is all right.

The sheep must have died rather suddenly in the late afternoon. When I went down the fell-side, at six, to fish in the river there was nothing but greenness to be seen; when I came up again, round about eight o’clock, I saw, or thought I saw, a grey rock where had been no rock before. It was the sheep, and quite cold. She must have felt her time at hand, withdrawn herself from her companions, and descended the hill deliberately to be alone with fate. Then, as I see it now, she stood there, facing down the hill, which in health her kind never does, and awaited the end of all things. Then, as the chills crept up, she lay down and put her muzzle flatlings to that rooty earth which in life she had so diligently sought, and with the scent of it to comfort her (the best thing she knew) given up what ghost she had. She looked, as I stood over her, to be asleep—asleep with large, bare eyelids covering her blank amber eyes—and grandly indifferent to me and the rest of us. I left her, a warrior taking her rest. There she lay all night; and in the morning, her former mates feeding all about her, there she was. A windless silver rain was falling, straight as rods of glass. The fell was blanched with it, as with hoar frost; but she took no notice of the rain. A crow or two wheeled about, and bore off in the haze as soon as I showed myself. I went down to look at the sheep. She lay easily, her nose to the ground, while others of her nation gazed at me, foolishly serious, heaving at the side. Whatever had taken place at that supreme hour of yesterday evening, it had changed this corruptible into something other than a sheep. Sheep-nature had gone; she had not a sheep’s face any more. Her dead eyes looked wiselier through their lids than their empty ones unveiled, and fuller, too, as if charged with weightier news. Sterner, too, she appeared—with her lips curled back; the rabbit-look gone.

There she lay in the wet all forenoon, very dignified and at ease in death. But distresses were at hand. After mid-day I saw a thin white dog, come out of nowhere, high-trotting over the grass, his tail feathering, his nose in the wind. He tacked to the corpse, sniffed at it from a spear’s length, then spurned it after the manner of his race, and slowly retired. Not for very long. He had discovered a hankering as he went, which became irresistible, and drew him back to satisfy it. I watched him. This time he came, not adventurously, but as on secret errand, furtively, creeping cat-footed by the stone wall—much, I thought, as Amina would have skirted the graveyard. When he had to take to the open he approached by broad tacks north and south, and at the last came on with a rush. I saw him attack the silent thing, pull out large tufts of wool, from which he fiercely shook himself free. He did more than that before I shouted, and threatened with my hand. Then he slipped rapidly away, at a loping gallop, with many a look behind to where I stood on the brow. He was only the first. Looking out again, I saw a black-and-white dog, with his head busy in the carcase, and down by the river another on the way. I had seen in my day jackals about a dead camel, and did not want that sort of thing rehearsed in Eskdale. In my own country we feed our sheep-dogs, and should discourage them from helping themselves to braxy mutton, lest they might acquire a taste for meat of their own killing. Besides, I respected what had seemed to me a dignified end of days. So I drove off the two ghouls and went down to do what I could. I was too late. She had suffered the last indignity. She was dragged over on to her back, her head was awry, her lips riven apart to show her teeth; and she was disembowelled. However, I did what there was to do, covered her with a loose field-gate, heaped upon that coping-stones from the wall, made a kind of cairn. Then I went over to the farm to see the farmer’s wife.

She said—merely humouring my queasiness—that the remains should be shifted. And they were. A leggy young thrall made short work of my defences, and dragged the sheep by a hind-leg into a spinney of sycamores near by. Thereabouts I saw the dogs gather themselves together at shut of day, and I heard their snapping and snarling over their uneasy meal. I heard it far into the night, where under cover of dark the dead sheep was consumed with obscene rites. Nothing but bared bones will be left; but they will remain undisturbed to gleam in the murky wood for a season, inchmeal to be resumed into the soil.