Shepherd

Justo tells me that the dogs dispensed with a coyote, Sunday night, as it circled his flock of sheep.
The coyotes have been bold, too bold, of late. Justo and I, standing in the field, tell the sheepdog she is very good for this.
A duty, a sorrow and a rightness.

As they wander, the hundred head of sheep accomplish far better scattering of grass seeds than I have, ever. Their hooves tramp down the seeds into a warm blanket of mud, for later, for the spring. Their droppings leave a trail of nutrient dense pockets across the soil too. 

In this they are far more advanced than any machine could ever be: Eating, planting, completing their part in the great seasons’ circles.

They will all be gone next week. Justo tells me this as we stand in the field

with sunshine warm upon our backs and the blue promise of the chilly nights ahead. Justo knows exactly when the season comes to ripeness.

Justo asks what day it is today. He shakes my hand. 

He remembers the osha root tea I brought him for his cough last year, he remembers the cervezas that John gave him back in 2020. He hails the sheepdogs out to round the flock back to us as we speak, a sure sign that we have been standing here for nearly twenty minutes and the sheep have scattered out too far as they seek pasture.

I take my leave and walk across the shaggy, half-shorn field, thinking of scattered seeds and scattered blessings. When I am far enough away, I sing a song for the land:

“Soy el fuego que arde tu piel, soy el agua que mata tu sed…”
Behind me the bellwether rings her sonorous harmony of guidance. 

Small flitting birds lift up from where they, too, have been noticing the scattered grains. The nearly-autumn sun floods over the land, warm and honeyed. “Tuyo será,” goes the song, “Tuyo será…” I am yours, I am yours.

The land is not mine, nor the shepherd’s. It does not even belong to the groves of aspens or the herd of elk that will come back next week when the sheep have gone. The land belongs solely to itself, and we belong to the land, all of us here beneath the wide-brimmed bowl of sky.

In the hoof-beaten soil, grass seeds are waiting for their curtain call: to sleep for winter, to arise in spring. On the fringe of the field, a coyote carcass turns to earth again, to feed an osha plant, to bloom in spring and be devoured by bears and deer, to put down sweetness into its roots, to be harvested, to soothe the throat of a traveling shepherd. The season swings around again.

Great and inexorable, earth being earth, and us merely the fleeting humankind upon it.