[Sheet of ‘oscar the owl’ cut-out ‘toy’]

Dick woke on the floor, a blanket dangled off the bed and wrapped around his hips but not much else. The pale dawn light was filtering through the tiny bedroom window, a grey day to meet a grey dawn, if the little square of sky visible from the floor was any sign.

He found that he was still dressed, if now twisted. Meera lay sprawled on the bed, he could see the brown skin of her arm hanging above him. She twitched slightly but didn’t move. She was still asleep.

He stood, stiffly, and wondered how much of the night he’d spent with some part of his body on the floor. Meera’s sleeping form occupied the entire bed, almost comical how much space she could take up for someone so relatively small. He didn’t let himself linger, though, on the fact that there was a girl, mostly undressed, in his bed. The purple cast made her arm twist at an awkward angle, but she’d managed to get some sleep with it that way, so he decided to leave her be.

The farm was quiet, the sheep in the rocky pastures up near the crags this time of year, and so the immediate surroundings were empty. Even the motorway was silent still, none of the commuter traffic would be headed into the city for at least another hour, and the train’s first stop in the village wouldn’t be until after then.

He laced up his boots and slipped out of the cottage, moving the door as surely as he could to make the smallest squeak possible with the unoiled hinges. 

Five fat ravens sat on the gate to the low pasture, and their heads moved in unison as he walked past, like watchful guardians, a sort of ready tension should anyone do something they found objectionable in their presence. He wasn’t sure whether that was unsettling or reassuring.

The high pasture didn’t have a real gate, just a tangle of fence bolstered by a few boulders, and a few piles of rotting lumber formed a sort of fence from the makeshift gate to the first of the crags that towered above them. It was technically part of the commons, but the crags made it almost impassable in most places, and so the gate and fence lay sprawled there, in the middle of nowhere like cast-off pieces left to waste away, but in practice left the grasses behind the crags as a private pasture. It’s not like anyone else wanted to use it, Dick thought. There was only one path through the crags that didn’t take a serious scramble or a rope to get past, and even that was a steep and narrow path.

Dick climbed up the last of the path and stood on top of the crags, looking out at the expanse of the moors below, and the rough pasture on top of the crags.

The grasses on top were short and tough, but the sheep didn’t seem to mind. They’d huddle, though, whenever the wind picked up, the whole lot of them looked like a wet rag tossed in the middle of a barren field, plus the sound of worried bleating.

He counted. Sixty one. One missing. 

He paced the length of the pasture, hopping over the crevasses between the crags, peering into each one to make sure that the missing sheep wasn’t stuck in one. 

He made the round back to where he’d started when he spotted her, a little ewe standing perched on a tiny ledge, she’d been right over his head as he’d climbed past on the path. She started bleating miserably, not nimble enough to climb back up the way she’d gone down, and still too high above the path to be able to jump down. She alternated between stretching her head up, looking for a place to climb to, and then down, looking for a place to land or turn around, and not finding anything of the sort.

Dick wedged himself across the path and pushed himself up to her level -- just a few feet off the ground for him, but it did make it a ten foot fall for the little ewe, and she was having none of it. He tried to grab her, but she bucked his grip and slid down his body, leaving a trail of mud and bruises in the shape of hoofprints. He fell the last few feet, landing on his knees.

Sixty-two.

He groaned and climbed back down, and over the makeshift fence. He thought he saw a hint of the sun behind the clouds on the horizon. Maybe today it would actually make an appearance.