Of all the tame animals in the world, the sheep is the most profitable. In a single year it gives back very nearly its own worth. A ewe, at the average price in our country, is worth fifty dahekan.1 In a year she gives one lamb, worth twenty to twenty-five dahekan. She gives two kash2 of cheese and two kash of butter, worth another sixteen to twenty dahekan. She gives one kash of wool besides, which at five dahekan brings the whole to forty-one. And if I count the zhazhik too, the whey-curd of the village table, it comes to forty-five.
The sheep is a truly blessed animal, gentle, home-bred and innocent. When John the Baptist, the hermit of the wilderness, saw Jesus, he called him the Lamb of God.3 And when Father Abraham had bound Isaac and laid him on the altar to kill him, the angel called out to him. Abraham looked up and saw a fine ram caught in the sabek tree. God had sent that ram to be the offering in Isaac's place, and Isaac was saved.4
Sheep multiply at an astonishing rate, and because they are small and quiet by nature you can keep them by the thousands in one place. The sheep is a delicate animal and a hardy one at the same time. The summer heat troubles it badly, especially when its pasture lies down in the plain, but the cool mountains and the upland meadows are the sheep's kingdom. Villages built on the plain, with wide meadowland, like our own, are not well suited to keeping sheep. The wet meadows in particular breed a sickness in the grazing sheep, a sickness they call kyapanak, which I think must be a Kurdish word.5
But in the mountain villages, which are mostly where the Kurds live, the profit of sheep-keeping runs very wide, because in this the Kurds are cleverer than we are, with a sharper eye for gain. They keep sheep by the thousands and they know how to tend them well. To begin with, their pasture grounds are enormous. Grassy mountains, valleys full of flowers, and glens with springs everywhere have fallen to them as their great share, and there the sheep graze all summer long. For the winter they can cut and stack as much hay as they please, in great mounds, and they give the sheep hay only when the snow comes down hard and covers all the mountains and the sun-facing slopes. When the snow is not so deep, and the wind sweeps it off the sunny mountainsides, the sheep can graze their fill. At night the flocks stay in the sheltered hollows of the mountains, where no wind reaches and the sun strikes full. The Kurds call these warm open-air places havshi. There are times when the flocks can go hungry in the havshi for as long as three days, until the blizzard passes. That is why I told you the sheep cannot bear the summer heat but stands up well against the cold of winter. The Lord God provided for it, and covered that poor creature's back with thick wool. And is it not that blessed creature's wool that warms our backs too?
We villagers, who keep only a few sheep to a house, shut them in the sheepfold in winter. By day we bring them out, give them hay on the snow, and shut them in again.
The sheepfold must be wide enough for the number of sheep, so that they can sit and stand without crowding. It needs vent-holes in the roof and the walls, because a sheep needs clean air more than anything. It is used to breathing the air of the mountains. The sheep likes to be clean and dry, so the floor of the fold must always be spread with dry, fine litter, gathered and stored in summer. The roof of the fold needs the same care, because drips do the sheep great harm.
In spring, from the middle of April, the sheep begin to lamb one after another, and once they are out they graze on the new grass and the old. In the evening the shepherd loads the newborn lambs and kids on his little donkey and brings them home to the village. In May, when the pastures come into their strength, the milking begins. At midday the shepherd brings the sheep to the peratekh, the milking-ground, and you will see the young wives and girls of the village coming out to it with their milk-jugs and pails, each one to milk her own sheep. Those happy milkmaids trim their heads, and the mouths of their jugs, with the colored flowers of spring, then shoulder the jugs and go back to the village singing joyously. And when the milking is over, the lamb-herd, who has kept the lambs and kids penned apart, lets them out, and then you should see the merry sight. The ewes bleat, the lambs bleat back. You would say the mother is talking to her lamb and the lamb to its mother. Hundreds of sheep and lambs get mixed up together until the lambs find their own mothers, because a real mother will never let a strange lamb nurse from her. And here is the marvel of the shepherd's craft. When a lamb goes astray and cannot find its mother, the shepherd catches it up at once and hands it to her. Do you know how he can tell? Seeing them once, at the birth, is enough for him. The picture of the newborn lamb and its mother is printed on his unschooled mind like a photograph, so that among hundreds of sheep, among lambs born early and late that are the same color as one another, his sharp eye picks each one out. Shepherds like that are very rare, and they are called pspor, which means keen-eyed and quick.
And we must not forget, Tornik, that the great wolf-throttling mastiffs matter enormously to the shepherd. We would be quite right to call them his bodyguard and his advance troops. They go ahead of the flock and watch all four sides. If they catch sight of a wolf far off, you should see how they charge in a pack until they have driven him away. Sometimes, if they overtake him, they seize the wolf and throttle him, and that day the shepherd gives his brave dogs a great feast of bread and butter, which they call chmur. The dogs' everyday food is milk. The shepherd pours it out for them freely into a big wooden bowl, a kot, and crumbles barley bread into it, and those well-mannered dogs make a ring around it and eat without fighting. Are they the starving street dogs of the city, to fight over a bone? The shepherd's dogs have a noble character, you must understand. They do not bark for nothing, but let a stranger come near the flock and they attack at once.
In short, Tornik, the mastiffs are of the greatest use to the flock. Without them the wolves would do the sheep great harm, and the shepherd cannot defend the flock alone, above all when the mist comes down. I do not know why it is. The books make much of the shepherd's name. Why do they never remember the dogs, which are the shepherd's helpers and his strength? Look after our sheep-dogs, Tornik. If they weaken and lose their strength, they can no longer drive off the wolves. Pay the shepherd his full wage as well, and take better care of him, and give the pspor shepherd a present now and then. Because a shepherd of sheep, you know, is not like the shepherd of a people, who shepherds without pay and puts up with it, the way the priests of our villages do.
I forgot to mention, Tornik, that the sheep must be given salt in season. Sheep love salt beyond anything, and if they get no salt there is no taste in their milk or their meat. Now, villages near the sea of Van or of Archak do give them sea-water to drink instead of salt, and that does them harm, because the water of those seas carries soda in it rather than clean salt. And quite apart from that, drinking too much of it hurts them. So salt is considered better and more wholesome.6
The shepherd's life, Tornik, is as innocent and happy a life as there is, though people imagine that shepherds are wretched men. Cut off from human company, living among animals that cannot talk, forever wandering the empty mountains, surely, people think, they must turn dull and slow-witted.
That opinion is quite wrong. Shepherds know their craft thoroughly. They know every kind of sickness a sheep can take, and they know the remedy and the treatment. And the power of every flower and every plant-root of the mountains, things still unknown to science, they know from experience.
The shepherd's life is a picture of the life of the old patriarchs, where we find not only men but girls keeping sheep, like Rebecca and Rachel.7
Those mountain-bred shepherds, yes, are happy always, and they never know sickness, because the air they breathe is the purest there is. And do you know what their natural, everyday food is? They milk the ewes, crumble bread into that foaming, unwatered milk, set it in a cold spring, and eat it with a spoon. They keep no hour and no season for their meals. Sometimes they milk during the night watch and set the milk aside in crocks until morning, and when you look there is cream a finger thick on the face of it. That is the shepherd's little breakfast. What he drinks is the clear water of those ice-cold springs. What he breathes is the scent of every kind of flower, a delight to his nose. His sleep at night is untroubled and still. He has no soft bed. He stretches out on the bare ground, puts a stone under his head for a pillow, pulls his felt cloak, his kapanak, over him, and sleeps, while the dogs stand guard over the flock. And his sleep is very light and very short. He half wakes as he sleeps, because in his heart there is always the suspicion, the fear, that the wolves will fall on the flock in the middle of the night. Sometimes it is a strange thing to watch. The shepherd sees packs of wolves in his dream, and he starts talking to himself in his sleep and urging on the dogs, and now and then he jumps straight up, bewildered.
The shepherd never came out of a school of fine arts, Tornik, but he is a born musician. He takes up his shepherd's pipe, sits down on a high rock and begins to play, and do you know how sweet, how lovely that pipe sounds? Sometimes the shepherd uses his pipe like a general giving orders to his flock. He gathers up the strays and calls them in, above all at salt-time. Then you should see how the flock presses forward all together toward the salt, which sheep would give their souls for.
That is the shepherd's life and work, Tornik. I have described it to you very briefly. But there is a question. We count the shepherd's life happy, wholly free of the world's noise. Does the shepherd count himself happy? Is he content with his life? A fable of the wise comes to mind here. Let me tell it to you. Listen carefully.
There was a rich shepherd who owned a great many sheep and cattle. One day, while his animals were grazing on a meadow near the sea, he turned his eyes to the water and saw the sea laughing, rippling under the soft breeze, and the merchants' ships coming in toward the harbor with their sails spread and full.
Our shepherd, who knew nothing of the world, was taken in by this vision of good fortune. He sighed, and began to complain about his lot. If only I were a merchant too, traveling from country to country by sea and by land, hearing things, understanding the world, making a name for myself as a merchant of standing. What sort of life is this of mine? Night and day I live among animals. The whole world is running after civilization, and I do not know the taste or the smell of it. True, my house is full of every good thing. I enjoy the good things God has given me. I lack nothing.
But is eating and drinking enough for a man? I am rich, and what good is it, when I have stayed unknown, a plain shepherd and nothing more? If I die, even my memory dies with me. Who ever saw a monument raised over a shepherd's grave? I want my name written up with the world's great men, so that the generation to come will read it and remember me.
That empty vision took our shepherd in. He went and sold all his animals, and it came to a great sum. He laid the money out on a quantity of goods and carried them off to sell in a foreign country. Our shepherd, who could not read and could not reckon, sat on board the ship in high spirits, doing sums in his head. I bought at this price, I will sell at that much higher price, and on this first venture I will make so much.
But while the shepherd was enjoying his reckoning, the sea, true to its nature, began a reckoning of its own. It raised a terrible storm, drove the ship onto the rocks of a coast and broke it apart, and all the goods spilled into the sea. The poor shepherd clung to a plank and barely got away with his life. He reached land, and afterward came home in another ship, stripped bare. He had been a master, and now he became a hired servant. Little by little he came to own animals again, and got back to where he had begun. One day he went out again to that pasture by the sea, and saw the sea laughing in front of him just as before, and the ships coming in loaded.
But our shepherd has come to his senses now. All right, he says, you cheating sea, I do not trust your laughter anymore. You ruined my house. But what you put me through taught me something. A shepherd cannot be a merchant. From now on I will be content with my lot and give thanks to God.
Do you see it, Tornik? Let this fable be a lesson to you, so that no empty fancy ever takes you in, and you never say to yourself one day, I will sell my sheep, and the gutan cattle with them, and sell all my fields, and it will come to a great sum, and I will go to Van and be a merchant, give up the villager's life and become a townsman, build fine houses, go up to Stambul now and then, and get the credit and the name of a great merchant, and so on. You do not know yet, Tornik. You have not been tried. The trials of city life are more ruinous than the trials of the sea, in money and in morals alike. Far, far from the city, and from the city people's way of living! The safe life is the village, and the honest living is farming. A tiller of the soil will not make a merchant, and a plowman will not make a sea-captain or a helmsman. God who provides has set every man in his own place to work, the townsman in the town, the villager in the village, the captain on the sea, the plowman in the field. People are happy when they are content with the position they find themselves in and do not reach for what is beyond their strength, beyond their measure, and out of their grasp. Do not take this to mean, Tornik, that when you want to get ahead I am putting a stone in front of your foot to keep you where you are. Not at all. What I mean is that you should get ahead inside the village life. Be a village headman, own a farmstead, own sheep by the thousands and thousands. But do not leave the village and the field. Remember our fable, and do not go near the water's edge.
That ends the long lesson I have given you on the care and keeping of sheep. Now I am going to talk about treating animals with compassion.
Notes
- Dahekan, the old Armenian coin-name, used here for the current silver piece of the country's reckoning. ↩
- Kash, a local unit of weight in the Van country. ↩
- John 1:29. ↩
- Genesis 22:9-13. The Armenian Bible renders the "thicket" of the Hebrew as the tree "Sabek" (the source prints "Sarek"). ↩
- Evidently Turkish kelebek, "butterfly," the liver-fluke rot that sheep take from wet pastures. ↩
- Lake Van and Lake Archak (Erçek) are soda lakes. Their water carries natron rather than common salt. ↩
- Genesis 24:15-20 and 29:9. ↩