You often had to search for the meaning in Grandma’s words. That seemed to be the case now. Father and Mother were silent and reflective. The conversation died down, and the argument disappeared. It had come to an end.

I learned to count the sheep. Some days I did it twice, in the morning when the flock still lay in its hürde, and in the evening when it returned from pasture. Grandma taught me the numbers. She had ten fingers, five on each hand. I had just as many, although mine were quite different from hers. If you added all of our fingers together plus an imaginary one, since we had no more fingers, that’s how many sheep we had. Two were wethers. They were big and fat, and we called them Grandma’s two thumbs. They were thought to be getting on, even though they were born more recently than Brother and Sister, who were still only children. Maybe Aunt Galdarak was right when she said: “You’ll never get this world figured out!”

When an animal was getting on, it had to be slaughtered. Rather than letting it get really old and perish, it would be used to feed the people who had raised and kept it alive all its life.

It was the same for our two wethers. First the older one was slaughtered. It happened in late autumn when a number of animals were slaughtered with an eye toward winter supplies. Grandma said the two of us should be self-sufficient: Why else did we have our own flock? I repeated her words often and to many people. To prove what I was saying, I would point first to the live wether and then to the frozen block of meat made up from small animals, which was clearly the biggest block of its kind: “Th se are the winter supplies for Grandma and me.”

As for the other wether, I will talk about him later. So far, twenty sheep were left. Twelve of them were ewes. All of them would lamb, and all their lambs would thrive. One or two of the ewes might give birth to twins. And one or two of the ewe lambs might already lamb themselves next spring. Such things did happen, sometimes. And so I calculated. My head was full of numbers. They were good, glorious numbers because they were obedient and always ran in the same direction, just as lambs always run toward their mothers. They complemented each other and complemented our flock. For the numbers were lambs, always lambs, stumpy-eared Blackface twin lambs, yearling lambs, second-birth lambs, and even lambs received as gifts. Yes, it was not unlikely that a daaj or a güüj would give me a little lamb as a present, and so might a neighbor or a friend or … oh, all this, all of it, was possible because it did happen often—did it not?—that lambs were given as a gift. Sometimes only tiny little kids were given, but of course I would prefer a lamb. Other times, the gift was a little yak calf or even a foal, but I’d be happy enough with a lamb, a tiny little lamb….