Thus, the venturesome leader of the wethers found his detour had been in vain. There was no space between the cliff and the roaring river; no path whereby he and his forty-seven followers might continue their aimless climb.
Bridging the stream, just in front of them, was an uprooted tree; undermined, years earlier, by some freshet which had cut the dirt from its roots. Athwart the river, at this narrow point, lay the huge tree. Its branches had rotted away or had been broken off by successive hammering of freshets.
But the trunk still bridged the current, its top resting on the edge of a high bank of clay upon the far side. The bark had long since decayed. Worms and woodpeckers and weather and rot had been busily at work on the exposed trunk, for decades, until it was but a sodden shell of its former self.
The leading runaway apparently had no great desire to tempt a ducking, through continuing his escape by means of so fragile a path as the rotted log. Hence, he paused as he reached it. And the others piled up behind him, milling and bleating and as uncertain as he.
It was at this moment that Treve came charging up the mountainside; sweeping toward them, with a thunder of barking.
The dog knew every phase of sheep herding. He knew how to herd and drive a flock of lambs as tenderly as a mother would guide her child’s first steps. He knew the art of coaxing and soothing the march of a bunch of heavy ewes. But he also knew that a band of scraggy wethers, on the autumn roundup, can be dealt with in more tumultuous fashion, and that finesse is not needed in driving such strays back to the flock.
Wherefore, his furious charge, now; a charge planned to get the sheep on the run, in a compact bunch, and to gallop them back to the main body. But, unfamiliar with that part of the mountain, he knew nothing of the impasse which had halted them; nor of the log across the river.
At sound of the bark and of the oncoming rush of the pursuer, the wether-leader lost what scant discretion a sheep may have been born with. In fear of recapture and of fast driving down the mountain, he ran bleating out on the rotten log. Urged by the same fear, the forty-seven wethers followed him.
A sheep is not as sure-footed as a goat. But sure-footedness was not needed. Under the pattering hoofs the decayed surface of the log crumbled; leaving a soft and ever-deeper rut for the ensuing hoofs to tread.