And then I see her. In the lee of the cemetery hill. A pale round shape with glowing white eyes. I kill the engine and circle towards her slowly, despite the rain, the brutal and still rising wind. She must have got lost and sought shelter, although it’s unusual for any sheep to separate from the flock. I lower my light as I get closer, but she makes no move to run when I get to within her flight zone. She doesn’t acknowledge me at all.

The fear in me is old enough that it should be diminished. Neglected enough that it should be rusty and forgotten. But it has woken up in me as if the roiling Atlantic and the blazing sky are its alarm clock. The darkness makes me feel dizzy and disorientated, as if I’m somewhere else entirely. Somewhere far beyond the fence. In the utangarðs.

What shelter the hill offers is poor. The wind and rain are hardly lessened at all as I crouch to get within a couple of feet of the pregnant ewe. She’s lying down, front legs splayed. Her cheeks are tight and concave and her ears point down and back – she’s in pain. Her eyes flinch from the torch as she turns to look at me and her eyelids droop.

I set the torch aside as I touch her head, and then feel down each leg for breaks or swelling. When I press my palms against the soaked coat of her flank and swollen belly, she flinches, curls her lips. ‘Easy, girl.’

The rain gets heavier as I shine the torch back towards the ATV. Maybe fifty yards. But when I force her rump down against my braced knees to lift her, she goes rigid and lets out a baa, harsh and high and distressed. I let her go, sink down into the mud on my knees. She barely moves, barely registers my proximity, makes no sound at all as the sky bellows and lights up the island white and bright like a flare. And then all I see is red. In the following blackness, I pick up my torch and turn it onto us. Blood. Thick and wet and everywhere. Covering the ewe’s coat from shoulder to flank. All over my hands, my sleeves, my thighs.

I don’t need to put either of us through trying to find out where it’s coming from because it’s already far too much to matter. When she baas again, low-pitched and weak, I take the battering, panicking fear inside me and squeeze it down tight into a box, close its lid. I lift her head onto my knees, and she opens an eye long enough to look up at me.

‘It’s all right, girl,’ I say, stroking her head, those flat down ears. ‘It’s all right.’

She closes her eye again, her breath puffing shallow and fast, and I stay with her as the storm rages all around us, the rain streaming off the end of my nose, my chin; the lightning turning the land into a hellscape of dark shadows and silver-bright plains. The sea louder than even the thunder: a pounding roar that longs to grind us into sand and dust. I stay with her as her breathing slows, until I can only see the fog of my own exhalations. I reach down to feel for a pulse at the top of her back leg, but there’s none. I stay on my knees, stroking her head and ears for a few minutes more. Just to make sure. Dying alone is my greatest fear – greater even than being seen for what I am.