eads up
wind it is not as a rule hard to discover them. If the moon is covered
by a cloudy sky they will often camp down again.

The hardest days for the shepherd are cold ones, when it blows strongly.
For then the sheep travel at a great pace, and will not go quietly
until the sun comes out of the grey sky of the chilly norther, which
perhaps moderates towards noon. But in such weather they do not care to
camp at noonday, and instead of spreading they will travel onward and
onward. They doubtless feel uncomfortable and restless. After such a day
they are uneasy at night, especially when there is a moon.

It is my opinion, after experience of both conditions, that unherded
sheep do much better than those which are closely looked after. In
Australia our percentage of lambs was sometimes 104, and any squatter
would think something wrong if his sheep on the plain yielded less than
90 per cent. increase. But in Texas, where the mothers are watched and
helped, the increase is seldom indeed 75 in the 100, much oftener it is
60. I used to wonder whether the losses by wild animals would have
equalled the loss of 25 per cent. increase which is, I believe, entirely
due to the care taken of them. For herding is essentially a worrying
process, even when practised by a man who understands sheep well. The
mothers are never left alone, and must be driven to a corral at night.
Consequently they often get separated from their lambs before they come
to know them, and one of the most pitiful things seen by a shepherd is
the poor distracted ewe refusing to recognise her own offspring even
when it is shown to her. We used in such cases to put them together in a
little pen during the night, hoping that she would "own" it by the
morning. But very often she would not, and then the lamb usually died.
If, indeed, it was one of a more sturdy constitution than most, it would
refuse to die and became a kind of Ishmael in the flock. The milk which
was necessary it took, or tried to take, from the ewe, who, for just a
moment, might not know a stranger was trying to share the right of her
own lamb. Such an orphan rarely grows up, and most of them die quickly,
as they are knocked about and cruelly used by those who take no interest
in the disinherited outcast of that selfish ovine society. And yet its
real mother is in the flock, reconciled to her loss after a few days of
suffering.

In spite of my present very decided disinclination to have anything