Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

of roasting rabbit filled the house, and for a while there our troubles
were forgotten, lost in the anticipation of a full belly and the absence of
hunger. Our plates were licked clean, with no-one to scold for lack of
decencies; decency a thing which had been forgotten when want came to
call.
10
One year before we had harvested what little there was to harvest, and
looked to this time, this harvest time in His year 1846 as a point on which
our thoughts could dwell; but in a night the parties were ruined, the stalks
firm and green but the leaves scorched black, and the waking to a new
dawn that day brought cries of anguish from those who were first afield.
Across a whole country came recognition of the misery which was to
come, and for some the knowledge of it was too great. The boughs of
the forest trees bore fruit of a wretched kind: the old who saw no point
in further suffering; and the young ones – whose killers took their own
lives when the writhing of the others had ceased; and none of them with
strength enough to watch the others suffer. Acts of kindness to which no
eulogy could ever do justice.
Amidst the hunger and the dying there was those whose hearts could
not be touched, even by the hollow-eyed gaze of the frailest infant. For
their concern lay not in the welfare of the tenant farmers and their kin,
but in the profits gleaned from the sale of that which was produced, and
the rent in money or kind that brought the tenant families to their knees
in the paying. Some of these profiteers were old and we, the earth-bred
and the hungry, wished them a swift and painful death; but some were
younger, enriched by bequest, whom we hated with a passion that, for
the most part, remained unspoken. While the harvest was good and
SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 8