Connie Willis - Bellwether

There was nothing about skills except “Keeping sheep inside a fence is a lot easier than getting them back in,” but there was a lot of information about handling them that we could have used earlier.

You were never supposed to touch a sheep on the face or scratch it behind the ears, and the Australian shepherd advised ominously, “Throwing your hat on the ground and stomping on it doesn’t do anything except ruin your hat.”

“ ‘A sheep fears being trapped more than anything else,’ ” I read to Ben.

“Now you tell me,” he said.

And some of the advice apparently wasn’t all that reliable. “Sit quietly,” Sheep Management said, “and the sheep will get curious and come to see what you’re doing.”

They didn’t, but the Australian shepherd had a practical method for getting a sheep to go where you wanted.

“ ‘Get down on one knee beside the sheep,’ ” I read from the book.

Ben complied.

“ ‘Place one hand on dock,’ ” I read. “That’s the tail area.”

“On the tail?”

“No. Slightly to the rear of the hips.”

Shirl came out of the lab onto the porch, lit a cigarette, and then came over to the fence to watch us.

“ ‘Place the other hand under the chin,’ ” I read. “ ‘When you hold the sheep this way, he can’t twist away from you, and he can’t go forward or back.’ ”

“So far so good,” Ben said.

“Now, ‘Hold the chin firmly and squeeze the dock gently to make the sheep go forward.’ ” I lowered the book and watched. “You stop it by pushing on the hand that’s under the chin.”

“Okay,” Ben said, getting up off his knee. “Here goes.”

He gave the woolly rear of the sheep a gentle squeeze. The sheep didn’t move.

Shirl took a long, coughing drag on her cigarette and shook her head.

“What are we doing wrong?” Ben said.

“That depends,” she said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Well, eventually I want to teach a sheep to push a button to get feed,” he said. “For now I’d settle for getting a sheep on the same side of the paddock as the feed trough.”

He had been holding on to the sheep and squeezing the whole time he’d been talking, but the sheep was apparently operating on some sort of delayed mechanism. It took two docile steps forward and began to buck.

“Don’t let go of the chin,” I said, which was easier said than done. We both grabbed for the neck. I dropped the book and got a handful of wool. Ben got kicked in the arm. The sheep gave a mighty lunge and took off for the middle of the flock.

“They do that,” Shirl said, blowing smoke. “Whenever they’ve been separated from the flock, they dive straight back into the middle of it. Group instinct reasserting itself. Thinking for itself is too frightening.”

We both went over to the fence. “You know about sheep?” Ben said.

She nodded, puffing on her cigarette. “I know they’re the orneriest, stubbornest, dumbest critters on the planet.”

“We already figured that out,” Ben said.

“How do you know about sheep?” I asked.

“I was raised on a sheep ranch in Montana.”

Ben gave a sigh of relief, and I said, “Can you tell us what to do? We can’t get these sheep to do anything.”

She took a long drag on her cigarette. “You need a bellwether,” she said.

“A bellwether?” Ben said. “What’s that? A special kind of halter?”

She shook her head. “A leader.”

“Like a sheepdog?” I said.

“No. A dog can harry and guide and keep the sheep in line, but it can’t make them follow. A bellwether’s a sheep.”

“A special breed?” Ben asked.

“Nope. Same breed. Same sheep, only it’s got something that makes the rest of the flock follow it. Usually it’s an old ewe, and some people think it’s something to do with hormones; other people think it’s something in their looks. A teacher of mine said they’re born with some kind of leadership ability.”

“Attention structure,” Ben said. “Dominant male monkeys have it.”

“What do you think?” I said.

“Me?” she said, looking at the smoke from her cigarette twisting upward. “I think a bellwether’s the same as any other sheep, only more so. A little hungrier, a little faster, a little greedier. It wants to get to the feed first, to shelter, to a mate, so it’s always out there in front.” She stopped to take a drag on her cigarette. “Not a lot. If it was a long way in front, the flock’d have to strike out on their own to follow, and that’d mean thinking for themselves. Just a little bit, so they don’t even know they’re being led. And the bellwether doesn’t know it’s leading.”

She dropped her cigarette in the grass and stubbed it out. “If you teach a bellwether to push a button, the rest of the flock’ll do it, too.”

“Where can we get one?” Ben said eagerly.

“Where’d you get your sheep?” Shirl said. “The flock probably had one, and you just didn’t get it in this batch. These weren’t the whole flock, were they?”

“No,” I said. “Billy Ray has two hundred head.”

She nodded. “A flock that big almost always has a bellwether.”

I looked at Ben. “I’ll call Billy Ray,” I said.

“Good idea,” he said, but he seemed to have lost his enthusiasm.

“What’s the matter?” I said. “Don’t you think a bellwether’s a good idea? Are you afraid it’ll interfere with your experiment?”

“What experiment? No, no, it’s a good idea. Attention structure and its effect on learning rate is one of the variables I wanted to study. Go ahead and call him.”

“Okay,” I said, and went into the lab. As I opened the door, the hall door slammed shut. I walked through the habitat and looked down the hall.

Flip, wearing overalls and Cerenkhov-blue-and-white saddle oxfords, was just disappearing into the stairwell. She must have been bringing us the mail. I was surprised she hadn’t come out into the paddock and asked us if we thought she was captivating.

I went back in the lab. She’d left the mail on Ben’s desk. Two packages for Dr. Ravenwood over in Physics, and a letter from Gina to Bell Laboratories.

Flower child weddings [1968–75]

Rebellion fad made popular by people who didn’t want to totally rebel against tradition and not get married at all. Performed in a meadow or on a mountaintop, the ceremony featured, “Feelings,” played on a sitar and vows written by the participants with assistance from Kahlil Gibran. The bride generally wore flowers in her hair and no shoes. The groom wore a peace symbol and sideburns. Supplanted in the seventies by living together and lack of commitment.

Billy Ray brought the bellwether down himself. “I put it down in the paddock,” he said when he came into the stats lab. “The gal down there said to just put it in with the rest of the flock.”

He must mean Alicia. She’d spent all afternoon huddled with Ben, discussing the Niebnitz profile, which was why I’d come up to the stats lab to feed in twenties data. I wondered why Ben wasn’t there.

“Pretty?” I said. “Corporate type? Wears a lot of pink?”

“The bellwether?” he said.

“No, the person you talked to. Dark hair? Clipboard?”

“Nope,” he said. “Tattoo on her forehead.”

“Brand,” I said absently. “Maybe we’d better go check on the bellwether.”

“She’ll be fine,” he said. “I brought her down myself so I could take you to that dinner we missed out on last week.”

“Oh, good,” I said. This would give me a chance to get some ideas of low-threshold skills we could teach the sheep. “I’ll get my coat.”

“Great,” he said, beaming. “There’s this great new place I want to take you to.”