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We woke that morning to find a sheep in our backyard. The gate was shut and there were no gaps in the fence, so the kitchen table became a conspiracy corkboard, throwing up theories from group hallucination to alien teleportation. Times being what they were, we dismissed the idea of a student prank, even though our house backed onto the university. Outside, while we cleared the table and salvaged the coffee dregs, the sheep chewed on the mound of clover that ringed the Hills Hoist. We typed things that sheep eat into a search engine and discovered that clover is a legume. We also discovered that white clover is a good snack for a sheep, so we let it graze to its heart’s content.

We named the sheep Pan, after the god of the pasture, and set up a makeshift stable under the house with some of the wood shavings we kept for the firepit. We printed flyers to stick on power poles beside the pictures of missing Ragdolls and Jack Russells, but no one who called offered a convincing description of the sheep. Pan, who seemed in no hurry to leave, set to work eating the grass, which needed a trim, and producing manure to fertilise the pumpkin vines we’d trained along the back fence.

On the other side of the fence, in one of the grey, draughty buildings of the university, professors sat at circular tables, crafting slide decks and talking points, debating our future. The sickness had passed, but so had a percentage of the population. Prices were rising, supply chains falling. Economists were quoting Hobbes. Things were limping along, but there was a feeling—a zeitgeist—about this place. We’d reached a waystation, shabby but still functioning, one or two stops from the junction where the signals flickered and tree trunks laid rotting on the tracks. The more we thought about it, the more we agreed that Pan must have come to us for help. By the time we found the sheep in our backyard, mutton had become a luxury good.

*

During the winter, we turned off the fridge to save on electricity. We dug a hole under the house to store butter and cheese. When we came to collect them, Pan would trot over from the stable, plump with fleece, and we’d feel the warmth of wool and the tackiness of lanolin brush against our cold hands. Pan was curious about the stout pats of butter and rounds of cheese, but seemed to know these foods were unsafe for sheep, and munched on pumpkin leaves instead. We typed ways to cook pumpkin leaves into a search engine and discovered that humans could eat them. We fried them over the firepit in butter and salt and topped them with slivers shaved from our dwindling wedge of pecorino.

By the time the pumpkins were ready to harvest, we’d become accidental farmers. We planted carrots and silverbeet, which grew year-round, and tomatoes and chilis for colour. We traded jars of chili jam for eggs with a neighbour who kept chickens. We began to like our chances of making it through the coming crisis, whatever shape it took. There were fewer trips to the supermarket: a grubby place, with empty shelves and bewildering price tags. We borrowed gardening manuals and read about seasonal foods and edible flowers. We learnt that nightshades were toxic to animals, but Pan already knew to avoid the tomato patch, as well as the daffodils which were budding, green and yellow, in the grass near the vines.

Since that first morning in the backyard, Pan had behaved with prudence. We became adept at reading ovine body language: a steady gaze indicated a question, a twitch of the nose meant a moment of satisfaction, a tap of the front hoof an expression of impatience. One day, we heard a knock at the back door and opened it to find Pan on the landing, quietly staring at us. We stood aside and let the sheep move into the house. Something had shifted; Pan had simply been the first to feel the movement.

*

We met the brownouts with torches for light and fire for food, and the hope that at least the plumbing would endure. At night, the rolling hills of the campus over the fence were as dense as slate, across which shadows moved with menace. The days were warm, so we gave up on butter and cheese and stored our pumpkin crop under the house instead. With Pan installed in the study nook, a family of magpies made use of the wood shavings in the old stable to build a nest by the pumpkin silo. They shored up the nest with a handful of bird spikes we imagined they’d stolen from street furniture along the way.

Compared with Pan, the magpies were inscrutable. We shared our oats with them as often as we could, but they failed to sound the alarm when our pumpkins disappeared overnight. The tomatoes were gone too, and a number of under-ripe chilis. We suspected students had scaled the campus fence under cover of darkness. When our neighbour lost her chickens, we understood why the magpies stayed silent, and were glad that Pan had moved into the house.

The supermarket queues were long and fruitless, the carparks outside turned to boneyards for abandoned SUVs and platforms for spontaneous uprisings. We kept to ourselves, except whenever a pet owner knocked on our door, brandishing a picture of their missing dog or cat or canary, frantic with rumours it had been stolen for food. We would always open the door, but made sure Pan stayed hidden at the back of the house.

*

We woke that morning to the sound of a coal train: faint at first, working towards a crescendo as the rhythmic strike of wheels on tracks joined with the raucous tolling of the crossing gates. The citronella candle we’d lit to ward off mosquitos had burnt out, leaving us with the smell of straining engines and the clamour of half-filled wagons rocking past the platform. We’d walked the day before, and slept under the awning of the deserted station, cramped on splintering platform seats. The tent we’d bought back when we fancied we’d go camping was propped against the ticket window. We were glad to be spared the effort of putting it up that first night, when our bodies twinged and throbbed from our longest hike since the sickness began.

Pan had borne the march without protest. The sheep was no longer safe with us, but we’d dithered at our front gate, with no notion of where to go. Pan simply pushed past us and started munching on the nasturtiums that grew along the verges, nose twitching at the unexpected treat. We knew by then that nasturtiums gave a spicy edge to a salad, and we enjoyed the buzz on our tongues as we bit down on the flowers.

We set out in a circle with Pan at the centre, shielded from casual sight. It was just light, and the few people we encountered seemed as anxious to ignore us as we were them. We had no compass; as the houses grew sparser and squatter and we began to glimpse the horizon, we resolved to be guided by the train tracks. When we roused ourselves the next morning, on that platform at the edge of the built environment, we fell in beside the tracks, following in the coal train’s wake.

*

We pitched the tent on a ridge and clambered down to the river to wash our faces and refill our flasks. Pan negotiated the slim footholds and slippery underbrush with goatlike grace. We didn’t talk about what we’d do if Pan fell. Would we burn the body or bury it? Perhaps, amidst the music of the river, beneath the lengthening shadows of the ghost gums, we feared we’d do the expedient thing, and salvage the flesh for protein.

*

The pattern of our days: rise with the dawn chorus, collapse the tent, eat a mouthful of oats left to soak overnight in a tin can, secure water bottles to backpacks and trudge on our way, pausing only to let Pan lick salt from the rocks on our climb into the hills. The old oak sleepers were still in use, but long intervals passed between trains, and we grew bolder about navigating the network of tunnels as we learnt to predict the traffic. No safe place, the signs outside each tunnel warned us. Still, we pressed on, looking for the tell-tale aperture, the pinprick of light to guide us to the other side.

*

The tunnel that stalled our progress was wedged between a sandstone precipice and a sheer drop. We hung at the entrance, watching the rust-blighted warning sign swing from one screw in the breeze. Our scouting missions revealed nothing: by the end of the first bend, the darkness was absolute, the length of the tunnel unfathomable. To forge ahead was to risk being met by an oncoming train; to turn away from the tracks was to lose our way. Pan seemed untroubled by the impasse, and bided the time uprooting the muddy clumps of spinifex that sprouted by the tracks.

The air grew moist as the twilight descended, and we turned back to the nearest leeway for the night. We pitched the tent and set out a meagre supper of silverbeet with chili jam. The sound of a goods train echoed in the valley, chugging its way towards the tunnel. We called for Pan to join us in the safety of the leeway, but the sheep did not respond. The spinifex patch was deserted. The train lumbered on; there was nothing we could do. We ran back to the leeway and watched the carriages rattle past on ancient sleepers, hoping that the end came swiftly.

*

We had no idea how long we were inside. The torch batteries were losing their charge, but we had light enough to put one foot in front of the other. We were determined to find Pan, no matter what. We clung to the tunnel walls, as if that would protect us, drawing in the remnants of coal smoke, which lingered in our lungs, resonating like the fragments of a song we’d never liked, but took comfort in nonetheless.

*

We heard the bellbirds before we saw the light. We followed the tracks to the mouth of the tunnel and emerged into cloudless dawn. The night had passed without tiredness, without hunger, without the rumbling threat of the train we feared would greet us in the void. Only now did we stop, to allow our eyes to adjust to the morning sun.

Pan was waiting for us there. Vines heavy with purple flowers arched above our heads. Bluebells grew wild in the green grass beneath our feet. Beyond the vines, we saw a field bordered by towering fig trees. The pleasant trickle of a mountain stream, flowing over rocks rubbed smooth by the water, broke the stillness of the plateau. A small dog—a Jack Russell, we thought—dug around the twisted roots of a nearby tree. The dog grunted at Pan, then ran off past the vines, into the field.

Pan let out a bleat, louder than any we’d heard before. We twitched our noses, and the sheep knew then that we understood, and broke off from the group. We could see the sun rising over the pasture, the heat misting from the grass. If we squinted, we could almost make out the cows and horses, dogs and cats, chickens and sheep mingling by the stream, refreshing themselves in the clear, mild water. We stood at the threshold, delaying the turn back to the tunnel. We had delivered Pan to Arcadia, to the bucolic domain of the sheep’s lord and namesake, where the animals danced all night with the nymphs and the dryads, and feasted until the break of day.


This story was a runner-up for the 2024 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize, judged by Samanta Schweblin, Alejandro Zambra, Ottessa Moshfegh and Megan McDowell. KYD is a proud publishing partner. Submissions are open for the 2025 prize until 13 April 2025.