“The scholar asks me what it is. I do not know and I have never needed to. I ask three questions. Does it breed true, does it keep to its ground, and can it be turned from the lambing. Three yeses and it is a beast. One no and it is something else, and what the something else is called can be settled by better men than me.”
As the dales tell it
A visitor came up onto the fells in 4613 with a notebook, found Isaac Greetland at his fold, and asked him what the things were that the dale called turned. The shepherd said he did not know and had never needed to. He asked three questions instead. Did it breed true? Did it keep to its ground? Could it be turned from the lambing? Three yeses and it was a beast. One no and it was something else, and what the something else was called could be settled by better men than him. The visitor wrote it all down, which is why the dale can still quote him.
The rest the dale tells as it always has. The first sign was a sour lamb in a fold. Then something came onto the pasture that did not answer the dogs the way a wolf would, and the next time anybody saw it, it was forty miles off. Nobody went after it. The shepherd moved the flock, lit the fold, and worked the dogs at the edge of his ground rather than at the thing, so that his pasture was the least convenient place in the dale to be. Then he waited, and the waiting was counted in seasons.
The old men say the art is to be unrewarding rather than victorious. They say it with a nod towards the priory, whose bounty sits largely unclaimed.
What is known
Turned stock is the upland’s word for stock that has gone over, and to turn a beast is also to drive it off the pasture. A creature that answers Greetland’s three questions is a beast: a wolf that has taken to a bad belt still breeds true and keeps a range, and is handled with dogs, lamps and a bounty at Harrowgate. What has stopped holding a range is not handled at all. What has gone over breeds, and after four or five generations there is a population rather than an incident.
The graziers can name the belts, date some of them, and say which valleys were clear within living memory and are not now. The Collegium writes of a degenerate lineage and a strain; the parish clergy write vitiate stock. The shepherds accept the learned explanation without much interest, since it changes nothing they do. It is a trouble of the high wold and the northern fells, not of the settled shires.