Fence Repair

Steel sky, he led us out, nine of us, Scouts, in a line. “Fence is down, boys, you gotta fix it.” The weight of tin snips, the scratch of bailing wire against the young of our skin. “You see all that green?” gestured with the thin of his hand, broken and twisted from years of shearing and fence repair, out towards the woods beyond the fence. “Them sheep, they see that green too. Them blackberry bushes. Them weeds all thick and stuff. Them cool places, under the oaks. Boys, you see their yard?” Mud and scraggly remains of weeds. Arcane tracks in the dirt of a million hoof stamps. The lean of generations of sheep, running the same paths, chewing the same weeds, all under the same azure stamp of sky. “So them sheep, they sit there, day after day, seeing that green compared to their own dirt, just chewing, thinking of all that green. Then what happens when the fence goes down? They get to taste it, the wild, the thick and rich green. They get to thinking that’s their life, out there, beyond the fence. They think they can just eat them blackberries. They think they can eat that ivy. Fill them bellies with rich shoots and weeds. They think they can just eat and eat on all that green, forever. But them sheep, boys…” He rested his hand on the steel of a T-post, “them sheep don’t know about them gopher holes that break a leg. Them sheep don’t know about them coyotes that circle them up. Them sheep don’t know about them cougars, the worst, the ones that come in the dark of night. They think they can just keep eating and eating. I tell you what, boys, you learn to keep the fence up. Not to keep stuff out. Because them sheep don’t know what happens when they are out there, with all that green and the sky and nothing they’ve known before.” We worked the snips, we worked the wire. “Out there boys, beyond the wire, in all that green, with the cougars… out there, ain’t nothing but death. Gotta keep ‘em here, safe, with the others. Behind this here fence.”