C4 antho - Chamber Four

~196~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
“Ran over Sonny.”
“Anything salvageable?”
“Can’t find him.”
“Quit plowing and go gather up what woolies you can
find.”
“How come you shot those sheep?” Billy asked.
“What sheep?”
“Those sheep up there I radioed about.” Billy waited long
for a response.
“My goddamn eyes. Who’d I kill?”
“Not sure, but three.”
“Shit. All right. Just get the dead.”
Billy drove the Versatile a quarter-mile across the field
and parked on the timberline where he last saw the dogs. He
loaded the three sheep that James Carl had killed, pulling
them on top of the plow. He found some old, rusty barbed
wire rolled up and looped over a fence post and used it to tie
them to the frame. He had expected to find one or two more
dead, or at least some evidence that a couple had been killed
by the dogs, but instead, he found seven strung out along a
short path on Wewoka Creek, which was the east border of
the property. He couldn’t believe the waste. Two went unaccounted
for. He assumed they had been killed and carried
off, but the fact the dogs had killed seven and let them lay
was odd. And then there was Sonny, plowed under somewhere
on the lower half of the 320. Billy drove the tractor
and sheep to the shearing barn. James Carl looked over the
dead.
“Ten? Damn. Just three were mine? I shot eight times.”
“Just the three.”
“The Ewe I Hate and One Eye ran with this group.”