Narrator: Tom A. | Northumberland, England
I helped my cousin check his sheep one spring. At the far edge of a field, eleven of them stood with their noses almost touching a stone wall. They weren’t eating. There was no feed there.
He clapped and called them. Nothing. I walked round to the other side of the wall.
A woman’s voice said, “Leave them.”
It was close enough that I expected to bump into her. All I could see was the other side of the field and a line of bare trees. Then the voice said it again from within the wall, with a wet little intake of breath between the words.
I went back. My cousin was staring at a gap between two stones. He asked whether I’d been making a noise.
We brought the dog round and moved the sheep. Neither of us said anything about the voice until we were in his kitchen. He’d heard a man. I’d heard a woman. The words were the same.
