Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/221

Rh with the scenes of his birth, as if he had wandered away from home and didn't know the way back. He was lost and lonesome and unhappy, and he had been cheated from some glorious heritage that was rightly his.

He couldn't get used to the slow movements of the ewes and the other lambs. His muscles seemed to itch and burn when he was idle. He wanted to run, to dash up the rocky cliffs; and yet he dared not leave the flock. The gregarious instinct among sheep is too well ingenerated for that. Once weaned, he spent his surplus energies in running back and forth across the front of the band, ever longing for the lost land from which he had strayed.

In his dreams he always left the meadows far behind him. Even the forest itself was left too, and he was set free and joyful in a more familiar land: a place of jagged cliffs and sliderock, narrow passes and steep precipices, great rock crevices and snow-capped peaks. It was true that some of his band accompanied him. But they were all taller, all stronger, all active as himself. And a great blood-brother—whose word was immutable law in the pass—was always in the lead. It seemed, dim and deeply hidden from him, that he himself was ordained—when his full strength was upon him—to lead that band in their wild adventures over the cliffs and stretch his own irrevocable law over the ranges. But that was far off. In his dreams he was merely