“You who punishes us so severely! Oh, what have we done? Have we not lived in constant fear and infinite awe of you? Ah? Why do you punish us so cruelly and needlessly? Eeh? We’d be better off renouncing you and listening to others, we’d be better off urning our backs on you!”

And on it went. It was as if somebody had hurt her deeply and now she was quarreling with him.

Father and I stayed with our sheep, continued our work, kept on singing. I tried to come up with beautiful, difficult words for my song so I wouldn’t have to listen to what Mother yelled or rather screamed at the blackish-blue night sky. But the words I needed seemed to hide behind the sheep, and I could not find them. While I relaxed a little even as I searched desperately for words to fill the lines of the toega, I listened and watched helplessly what was happening next to me. I had to admit that Mother was not entirely wrong with her outburst. Father, meanwhile, was endlessly repeating his song about the little ears and the little mouth and the little legs and the little tail. Maybe he felt the same way I did?

Time passed, and Mother must have had second thoughts. Her threats gave way to pleas. In the end she got up and went to look for the ewe that had escaped from her. She was staggering. I would have liked not to have seen her stagger, but I couldn’t take my eyes off er.

That night was long and filled with struggle. The sheep were obstinate. The clouds were sinking lower and lower. The world turned as dark and as narrow as if we were stuck in a hole. And all was silent. I felt as if we had been abandoned with the stupid, stubborn sheep, condemned to sing forever in an empty, dark world.

The following night snow fell as expected. But we had not expected the sun that afterward shone on the snow-covered world. Already in the morning the snow began to melt on the southern slopes of the cliffs. Delicate, dark edges appeared around the rags of snow on the blue rock, spread, and eventually touched. “Any wind now, and we’ll be done for!” Father said, his voice breaking. Mother cowered and whispered a prayer, her eyes turned to the sky. There were fear and remorse in her eyes.