Many have asked me if I would do it again this summer as a shepherdess at Maisonneuve Park. I found with great satisfaction my woolly friends met last year: Rémi, Madrid, Thérèse, Kit Kat. And Serge Bouchard, black ram born of white parents the day after the death of the writer-anthropologist, the name of an exceptional man for an exceptional sheep.
Some have changed a bit (neutered, Rémi is better company), others have remained the same (discreet Kit Kat, charming Madrid). A trail of lambs and ewe lambs with laughing eyes and fluffy wool have joined the herd—these are hard to tell apart, I might get there by the end of the season. Sixteen sheep in total, sixteen stuffed animals that look like cumulus clouds.
I remember that when I started out as an urban shepherdess, I was amazed at the lack of a fence to contain them. The sheep are free to come and go wherever they want, according to their desires of the moment: clover flowers, dripping leaves after the rain, tender shoots, weeds bursting with chlorophyll, the first crabapples. No fixed boundaries to the territory, a few blissful shepherds who follow them… We are living fences.
One of the first things a shepherd learns is to quickly count the moving sheep to make sure that a greedy one has not been forgotten in a small wooded enclave. Confidence of a shepherdess: it often happens that there is one more. We prefer that to one less.
Like that time when, at the end of the day, we had brought the flock back into the sheepfold… Leaving a sheep behind us despite ourselves! When she emerged from a bush, panic seized her. The sheep, which has neither fangs, nor claws, neither speed, nor power, is fundamentally gregarious. The strength of the number and the benevolence of the shepherd towards him constitute his only protections. Not easy to tell a terrified sheep to take the ramp to access the sheepfold and find his family… An experienced shepherd suggested bringing out the whole flock so that she can reintegrate it and return with the group. Winning strategy.
The non-hierarchical nature of the small sheep society fascinates me. It is not always the same person who governs. This varies over walks through the park, between two rumination sessions.
When I started to be a shepherdess, I had just spent three years in a job where rigid hierarchy took precedence over common sense. Observing the way the sheep watch over each other while remaining united and humble came to temper something in me. As Thierry Pardo points out in his delightful Little praise of the sheep, published this spring by Editions du Passage, they “walk in an elastic herd. No one commands and no one obeys without this tarnishing the harmony. It is a community without power (an-archie).
The Biquette organization, which is behind this wonderful eco-grazing initiative, also gives us the opportunity to experience volunteering. Which authorizes us, a bit like sheep, to put in his place a colleague who is a little too quick to want to lead his equals. I watch over sheep who take care of me in turn. They soothe me and make me laugh, entertain passers-by in addition to mowing the lawn and fertilizing the soil, allowing humans to bond with each other. Isn’t it said that planting trees and herding sheep are the two most peaceful activities in the world?
When you watch the little clan graze, sometimes this vision takes on the appearance of a Renaissance painting. We can’t believe that so much beauty, nature and animality can exist like that, freely, in the city without fences or collars. Then “we can return to the world of men with more tender dispositions”, notes Pardo in his little work which has the color of wool, since the behavior of sheep “irrigates our soul and makes our presence in the world more beautiful” .
That’s why we come back to our sheep.