Doris Counts the Sheep

On Hill Farm there was a hen called Doris, and Doris counted everything.

She counted the eggs in the nesting boxes, which was useful. She counted the puddles in the yard, which was less useful, because they kept joining up. She counted the buttons on Farmer Tom’s coat every morning when he came out with the corn. There were eight. There had always been eight. She counted them anyway, just in case.

Doris kept her counting pebbles in a dented tin, which she pushed all over the farm with her beak. She could not bear a thing she hadn’t counted. It made her feathers itch.

Every evening the sheep came down the round green hill to the gate below the farmhouse, and Farmer Tom leaned on his bedroom windowsill and counted them, to help himself get to sleep.

“Right then,” he said each night. “Let’s see how many of you there are.”

“One,” he said. “Two. Three.” By six he was yawning. By eight his eyes were closing. At about nine he was fast asleep with his chin on his arms. And down in the henhouse, Doris would put her head under her wing and itch.

He had never once got past nine, and he had no idea how many sheep he had.

It did not help that one of the lambs was called Also. She loved being counted so much that the moment she had been counted, she ran round the back of the flock to be counted again. Farmer Tom could never remember whether he’d already counted her. “And that one,” he would say, nodding off. “Have I counted her? Well. Also her.” So that was her name.

The animals of Hill Farm talked among themselves, the way animals do when the farmer isn’t listening. Every night Doris heard Also bouncing at the back.

“Count me!” said Also. “Count me again!”

Farmer Tom’s birthday was on Saturday. Doris knew because she had counted the days since his last one, and there had been three hundred and fifty-nine, which left six. He did not need an egg. He had plenty, and she knew exactly how many. What he had never had, in all his years at that window, was the end of the count.

So Doris decided. For his birthday, she would give Farmer Tom the number.

* * *

On Monday she pushed her tin up the hill.

Doris stood at the top and counted the sheep going down, and got seventeen. She went to the bottom and counted them going up, and got thirty-one. Then most of the flock wandered over the far side of the hill, where the grass was better, and she counted four.

“Will you please stand still,” said Doris.

“We are standing still,” said a sheep with its mouth full, walking away.

Also was in the seventeen three times. She was in the thirty-one twice. She was one of the four. Doris went home and sat on her tin.

On Tuesday Doris had a better idea. Farmer Tom kept a stub of blue chalk by the barn door, for writing down the eggs. He usually got it wrong. That evening she took the chalk to the gate, and as each sheep came down she counted it and gave it a blue stripe on its back. It was perfect.

The sheep did not mind. They said it tickled. Also came round four times and ended up with four stripes, like a little gate of her own.

Then the moon came up, and the flock went off up the hill with twenty-six sheep striped and the rest not.

That night it rained. It rained warm and steady until morning, and when the flock came down to the trough, every sheep on the hill was as clean as a pillowcase.

“We’ve never been so clean,” said the sheep.

“Count me!” said Also. “I’m a new one! Count me as a new one!”

Doris sat on the edge of the trough with her tin and did not count anything at all, which for Doris was very bad indeed.

* * *

Old Bess came down to the trough for a drink. She was the oldest ewe on Hill Farm, slow and sensible, and always chewing, even when nobody could see what. She looked at Doris for a long time.

“What’s the matter with you, hen?” she said.

So Doris told her: the birthday, the number, the seventeen and the thirty-one and the four, and the rain.

Bess chewed some more.

“Why don’t you ask us?” she said.

“Ask you what?” said Doris.

“To be counted,” said Bess. “We’re sheep. People have been counting us to get to sleep since before there were gates. We know how it goes. One at a time, over the top, nice and slow. You only had to ask.”

You may be thinking that a whole flock of sheep can never agree on anything. In fact sheep agree on everything. That is what makes them a flock.

So that night, the third night, the moon came up round and bright, and the whole flock lined up on the far side of the gate. Doris stood on the trough with her tin. Up at the window, Farmer Tom was already snoring. He had got to about nine.

The first sheep backed up, took a little run, and jumped. It sailed over the gate in the moonlight, white and woolly, legs tucked up, exactly like the sheep people count in their heads.

Plop went a pebble into the trough.

“One,” said Doris.

The next sheep jumped. Plop. “Two.” And the next. Plop. “Three.” The sheep jumped and the pebbles plopped and Doris counted, and nobody went over the hill for better grass. It was the most beautiful counting Doris had ever done.

At twenty-two, Also jumped, and she was so delighted that she ran straight round the flock to get back in the line.

“Count me!” said Also. “Count me again!”

Old Bess was waiting at the very back. She did not hurry. She simply sat down, and Also was underneath her.

“Oh,” said Also, from under Bess. “Hello.”

“Hello,” said Bess, and chewed.

Bess sat there until every other sheep had jumped. Then she got up, and Also bounced out, quite flat but very cheerful. Bess went over the gate last of all, the way an armchair might jump a gate if it put its mind to it.

Plop.

“Forty,” said Doris.

Forty! There they all were in the trough, forty pebbles shining under the water. Not one of her feathers itched.

“Forty-one,” said Also, “if you count me twice.”

“I am not counting you twice,” said Doris.

“But I’d like it ever so much,” said Also.

The next day Doris fished the pebbles out of the trough, which got her face very wet, and counted them seven times. Forty, every time.

* * *

On Saturday night, the birthday night, Farmer Tom leaned on his windowsill.

“Right then,” he said. “Let’s see how many of you there are.”

And the first sheep jumped the gate.

Farmer Tom sat up. He had never seen one of his sheep jump the gate before. Then another one jumped, and another, round and white in the moonlight. Below, on the trough, a hen clucked very firmly in time.

“One,” said Doris. “Two. Three.”

“Well, I never,” said Farmer Tom. He smiled, and counted along. “Four. Five.”

By six he was yawning. By eight his eyes were closing. At nine he was fast asleep, chin on his arms, smiling all over his face.

The flock jumped all forty anyway. Bess said it was rude to stop halfway through a present.

Then Doris flapped up to the windowsill with one pebble in her beak, and down again, and up again with the next. It took a great many flaps. She laid the pebbles along the sill, right under Farmer Tom’s nose, forty of them in a straight line. Then she looked at them for a while. It was his birthday, after all, and Also had asked all week.

So she fetched one more pebble and put it at the end, a little apart from the rest.

* * *

In the morning Farmer Tom woke up at his window with a crick in his neck and a row of pebbles under his nose. He counted them, slowly, with one finger.

“Thirty-nine,” he said. “Forty.” He looked out at the flock by the gate. “Forty sheep. I’ve got forty sheep!”

Then he saw the one pebble on its own at the end. Down by the gate, a lamb was bouncing up and down at the front of the flock.

“And Also,” said Farmer Tom, and he laughed so loudly that the hens came out to see.

That morning, when he came out with the corn, Farmer Tom gave Doris a whole extra handful. She counted every grain.

Down at the trough, Old Bess chewed.

And that is why, to this day, Farmer Tom still counts his sheep from the window every night, and still falls asleep at about nine, and doesn’t mind a bit. He knows how it ends now: forty, and Also. And down in the henhouse, Doris puts her head under her wing and does not itch at all.