When Grip gets among the sheep, their hereditary traits come out in a
very different manner. They are by nature and descent timid mountain
animals, and they have never been accustomed to face a foe, as cows and
buffaloes are wont to do, especially when in a herd together. You
cannot see many traces of the original mountain life among sheep, and
yet there are still a few remaining to mark their real pedigree. Mr.
Herbert Spencer has noticed the fondness of lambs for frisking on a
hillock, however small; and when I come to my little knoll here, I
generally find it occupied by a couple, who rush away on my approach,
but take their stand instead on the merest ant-hill which they can find
in the field. I once knew three young goats, kids of a mountain breed,
and the only elevated object in the paddock where they were kept was a
single old elm stump. For the possession of this stump the goats fought
incessantly; and the victor would proudly perch himself on the top,
with all four legs inclined inward (for the whole diameter of the tree
was but some fifteen inches), maintaining himself in his place with the
greatest difficulty, and butting at his two brothers until at last he
lost his balance and fell. This one old stump was the sole
representative in their limited experience of the rocky pinnacle upon
which their forefathers kept watch like sentinels; and their
instinctive yearnings prompted them to perch themselves upon the only
available memento of their native haunts. Thus, too, but in a dimmer
and vaguer way, the sheep, especially during his younger days, loves to
revert, so far as his small opportunities permit him, to the
unconsciously remembered habits of his race. But in mountain countries,
every one must have noticed how the sheep at once becomes a different
being. On the Welsh hills he casts away all the dull and heavy serenity
of his brethren on the South Downs, and displays once more the freedom,
and even the comparative boldness, of a mountain breed. A
Merionethshire ewe thinks nothing of running up one side of a
low-roofed barn and down the other, or of clearing a stone wall which a
Leicestershire farmer would consider extravagantly high.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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