Bringa knew the Fence well. She’d known it since she was a lamb, since the first time she’d brushed too close and felt the tug of the wire against her fleece. It had stood there for as long as any sheep could remember, a thin and winding thing stretching across the hills, neither friend nor foe, just there.

 

It was a strange sort of thing, the Fence. Not like the crooked walls with their nibbly nooks full of tenacious tufts of grass. Those could be clambered over here and there, where the stones had slid all higgledy piggledy, never demanding anything. But the fence always took a toll.

 

Over the years, Bringa had given it much of herself: soft, downy tufts in her youth, thicker hentilagets as she grew. It had always seemed a small price to pay for passage to the Other Side, where the long grass grew and the moss was soft beneath her hooves.

 

Now, she was old. Her coat was coarser, her gait slower, her time spent watching more than wandering. And so, when new lambs came to her full of questions, she answered them as best she could.“Why does the Fence take our wool?” asked a sprightly one, nosing at a weathered post. The tiny curls of its fleece, still untouched by mud and rust, trembled in the breeze.

 

Bringa lifted her head from grazing, staring sagely through the wires.

 

“The Fence marks the line between worlds, little one. Between what’s allotted to us folk, and the abundant Other Side. Only the bravest dare cross it in this lifetime, for it doesn’t make travelling easy. It pulls and it tugs to keep us in line, and we always leave something behind.”

 

The lamb blinked, uncomprehending. It had not yet felt the scratch of bramble, the sting of the rain, the slow unspooling of oneself into the landscape.

 

“How do you know?” another piped up, this one with a streak of peat-mud down its side.

 

“I know because it tells me. You pay attention, and on a stormy day you’ll hear it whistling, humming low in the wind, with its wool tufts waving like streamers. It sings of all the wool it has stolen, all the sheep still bound to the border.”

 

“But where does the wool go?” the first lamb butted in.

 

Bringa drew her slot-eyed gaze across the long expanse of wire. Ghostly wisps clung to the fence, neither this side nor that. Some were fresh, soft and bright, while others had been there for months, ragged and weathered, their fibres fraying into nothingness.

​

“The wool’s what keeps the fence strong,” she said. “It takes a lot of power, keeping this world from that, and the fence takes its power from the fleeces of those that pass too close to it or manage to squeeze through. But once the power’s all used up from the wool, the wind’ll snatch it up, and carry it away to the Other Side, never to be seen again.”

​

The lambs huddled closer, slot-shaped pupils widening. They were too young to understand what it meant to lose parts of themselves, too innocent to contemplate the price of trespass, too full of life to think about the slow unraveling that years of adventure would bring.

​

That night the wind rose, tearing at hentilagets with restless fingers. Bringa stood near to the fence, feeling it hum beneath the force of the gale. A great tuft of matted wool gave way from it, tumbling into the darkness beyond. She watched the space where it disappeared for a long time, wondering where it would land. Where all those parts of her had ended up, and whether the rest of her would follow it one day.

​

Morning came, golden and still. The lambs played near the fence, yesterday’s questions already forgotten, but Bringa’s thoughts lingered. As the sun climbed she spotted movement in the heather: a small bird, no bigger than a thistle head, flitting from stalk to stalk. As she watched, it darted to the Fence, snatching at the woollen tufts, only to disappear into the gorse, a soft, pale strand in its beak. 

​

Curious, Bringa nosed after it, ignoring the scratch of gorse against her face. There amongst the spiny branches sat a nest, woven from twigs and grasses, and lined with soft wool.

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For a long moment Bringa stood still. Then, with a satisfied sigh, she turned away.

​

There would always be fences. Choices and bargains, things lost and left behind. But there would also be things felt and found, and wound back into the fabric of life. 

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In nests and on fences, in the very soil itself, she would linger on.