A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)

The narrator and his girlfriend are picked up by the shepherd and driven up into the mountains. The shepherd tells the narrator that he has been unable to get through to the Rat by telephone, even though there has been no snowstorm recently, as far as he knows. While driving them up the mountain, he tells them some facts about sheep: that there is a pecking order among sheep, and that a stud ram is routinely picked to service a female “sheep harem” (270). In a more philosophical vein, he states, “The sheep change every year, it’s only me getting older” (268).

As the caretaker had warned the narrator, the road becomes too narrow, bumpy and damp for him to drive up past a certain point. He apologizes, and lets them out at a terrifying “dead man’s curve,” looking out on to a deep valley and made up of crumbling damp rock (275). The spot is not only frightening in its physicality but because of the mood that it exudes: “The caretaker was right: the place was bad luck. There was a feeling of doom that first came over my body, then went on to strike a warning signal in my head” (275).