The Boy Who Would Not Sleep

The Sleepy Shepherd.

Chapter 1: The Boy Who Would Not Sleep.

There is a hill at the edge of the world — or so the children of the valley say — where the grass grows soft as wool and the sky at night holds more stars than a person could count in a lifetime of looking.

At the top of that hill, every evening without fail, a boy named Eli spread his old wool blanket on the ground and watched the sun go down.

He was twelve years old. He had brown eyes and a serious face and hands that were already rough from rope and weather. He had a flock of twenty-three sheep — he knew each one by name — and a dog named Fig who slept so deeply that sometimes Eli had to check to make sure he was still breathing.

Eli did not sleep deeply. Eli, in truth, barely slept at all.

It wasn't that he didn't want to. Every night he lay down on his blanket, pulled it up to his chin, and closed his eyes. He listened to Fig snoring softly at his feet. He listened to the sheep settle — that gentle collective exhale they made when they decided, all at once, that the day was finished. He listened to the valley below, where the village lights went out one by one like candles being pinched between careful fingers.

And then his mind began to work.

What if a wolf comes from the northern wood? What if the weather turns before morning? What if Marta — the old ewe with the bad front leg — what if she wanders in the dark and can't find her way back?

The thoughts came in a queue, patient and orderly, as though they had been waiting all day for him to be still enough to hear them.

And so Eli would sit back up. He would wrap the blanket around his shoulders. He would watch the stars wheel slowly overhead — Orion tipping toward the west, the Plough pointing north as it always did — and he would wait for morning, which always came, but never quickly enough.

His mother said he would grow out of it. His father said a tired shepherd was a careful shepherd. The village elder, old Damos, said that some people were just made for the night — that the world needed watchers, and Eli was one of them.

None of this made Eli feel any better. He watched his father sleep the moment his head touched the pillow. He watched his little sister curl into a ball and vanish into dreams between one breath and the next. He watched Fig, and the sheep, and the rabbits in the long grass, and even the birds tucked into the hedgerow — and all of them had something he did not.

The ability to let go.

That was how he thought of it. Sleep was a letting go — of the day, of the worry, of the watching. And Eli did not know how.

On the night this story truly begins, Eli had been awake for three nights running.

Not entirely — he had dozed once or twice, slumping sideways on his blanket for an hour before some small sound startled him upright again. But properly asleep? No. His eyes felt like they'd been lightly sandpapered. His thoughts moved slowly, like river water in a cold month.

He sat with his knees drawn up to his chest and looked out over the valley. The village was dark. The fields were silver with moonlight. Somewhere below, the river made its low, continuous sound — not loud enough to hear exactly, but there, underneath everything, like a held note.

Eli counted his sheep. He always counted his sheep when he couldn't sleep. It wasn't because he thought one would be missing — it was just something to do with his mind.

One. Clara, the oldest. Sleeping on her side, her wool rising and falling.

Two. Brother, who was not actually anyone's brother but had that look about him.

Three. Bell, named for obvious reasons.

Four. Pip, the smallest, tucked against Clara's flank.

He got to twenty-three — all present, all breathing — and then he looked up.

And there, at the edge of the flock, where the long grass met the shorter grazed patch, stood a sheep he did not recognize.

She was silver.

Not white — all sheep are more or less white in the moonlight. Silver, properly silver, the color of a spoon or a still pond or the underside of a birch leaf. Her wool was dense and soft-looking and it seemed, somehow, to catch the light from somewhere other than the moon.

She stood very still, watching him.

Eli got to his feet slowly, the way you move around animals you don't want to spook. Fig lifted his head, looked at the silver ewe, and then put his head back down with a small sigh, as if she were nothing to concern himself with.

"Where did you come from?" Eli said quietly.

The ewe looked at him. She had dark, calm eyes — the kind of eyes that seem to be thinking something gentle and unhurried.

Eli looked for a mark — a paint brand, an ear tag, some sign of who she belonged to. There was nothing. Just the silver wool and the calm eyes and the strange, sourceless shimmer.

"You can't stay," he told her. "You're not mine."

The ewe sat down, folded her legs beneath her, and rested her chin on the grass.

Fig snored.

Eli stood there a long moment, not sure what to do. Then, because there was nothing else to do, he sat back down on his blanket. He wrapped it around his shoulders. He looked at the stars.

He was still awake at dawn when the light came gray and slow over the eastern hills. He counted his sheep again.

Twenty-three.

The silver ewe was gone.