Leaderless, Sheep are Lost

This is the way that it was in the south: the snow fell fine and beautiful, with a soundless flake. There was the sense of mothering come to a drowsy child, someone tucking the world to sleep. Animals were thankful for the featherbed.

But in the north, those several nights, the snow was a dissatisfied hag: bitch-winter beating the earth with her stick. Bitter crystals blew hard and horizontal so that the Animals lowered their heads and turned away. If someone tried to see where he was, his eyeballs stung for the trouble, as though punished for looking—and he saw nothing anyway.

So the Sheep simply stopped on a hillside—the lee side, they hoped, but they didn’t know. They were leaderless, and their own poor senses had been whited out. They pressed together in a flock, all of them hanging their heads, not one of them lying down, for fear that he might be covered and smothered and lost forever. Or, maybe Sheep were just too stunned to think of lying down. They’d walked into this weather standing up; they’d wait the weather standing up still. They stood, leaderless. They stood like plain cattle in the blizzard. They packed their tails against their anuses and stood motionless. And this is how submissive the Sheep were: they didn’t so much as shake the hoarfrost from their faces. Their own breathing bearded them; their exhalations froze, and the white beards grew, because no one told them to move.

It is a perilous thing to be leaderless and obedient at once. When there’s no command to obey, then “No” becomes the only command, and a heartless one: No to instincts, no to boldness, no to newness even in this witching weather; then no to survival, and no to life. Don’t move! How do you know your movement isn’t for the worse? Then stand still and hang your heads, Sheep, Sheep! And the harder the storm blows, the meeker the Sheep. The worse the conditions, the more they yearn to obey. Therefore, this blizzard fixed them.

Leaderless, there was nothing to do but nothing.

Leaderless, they just stood still, and the Hag shrieked all around them, cursing them, beating them with her stick.

Leaderless, Sheep are lost.

-Walter Wangerin, The Book of Sorrows