A shepherd's dream (I)

A short story by Grazia Deledda, a Sardinian writer who lived between the eighteen and nineteen-hundred. I have decided to post it in a few pieces (it is not that short to translate), here you are part I.



It is Christmas night, but it is so fresh and clear it seems to be in Fall. The moon shines on the lonely plain. A stream widens and narrows and winds around among the black wild grass, and disappears glimmering at the horizon, where it seems that it ends in a sea of blue smokes, in a far away emptiness.
The night has just begun. The shepherd looks at the grazing flock. The sheep are yellow and black under the moonlight, and quite sleepy while they go around the plain sadly looking for cold grass below the bushes and along the low walls covered in mosses; their bells swing and play a strange music, a lullaby, that comes and goes and rings and quivers crisply as the flock wanders around; and the silence of the plain is both broken and made stronger by this strange music.

The shepherd looks; and wild dreams pass in front of his eyes. He came down from his harsh mountain home place, where the cold pastures, fragrant with thyme and myrtle in Spring, are now covered with snow marked by the tracks of swift hares and sweet-eyed mouflons.
The shepherd left the high pastures at the first Fall winds, and came down to the plain with his flock, his dogs, his sack - that is a long mantle made of coarse wool fabric that he throws on top of his head and ties under his chin - with his horse, his cork tools, his spoons made with a sheep nail, and with his stock of barley bread which shall last for the whole winter.

He is a nomad, but has a large family that stays in the village high up in the mountains.
While his eyes looks at the grazing sheep, his mind goes to the simple house where his loved ones spend the harsh winter; there, behind the shiny moon mist the silvery peaks of the mountains rise, and, below the white dells where mouflons live, the lights of the small village shine. The shepherd's house is built in stone and wood, and in the wide kitchen the old stone fireplace smokes, and on the log fire a large black pot boils. The shepherd's house is rich; there is wood, lard, potatoes, beans. The shepherd's women worked all year in the vegetable gardens, watering the furrows, they picked chestnut and walnuts in the woods, and shelled the violet-and-black beans.

The house is rich, and the eldest daughter, fat and red in her tight wool costume, is engaged to a man that in turn reaps much barley and much wheat. But the "major", that is, the family head, lost in the loneliness of the plain, dreams about the day in which he will be so rich as to have a serf who will look after the flock.
Ah!, then he won't anymore have to lose his sleep to guard his sheep. It will be the serf's business, and woe to him if just one sheep will be lost.
He, the shepherd, will be really rich then, will just sit next to the fire with his elderberry stick, looking now and then inside the pot, chatting with his women and spitting on the ashes. His beard will be white and long; he will be fat and red. His son in law will visit him, and they will challenge each other to an impromptu poetry contest, sipping wine and spirits.
Ah!, that will be really a happy life! But how much more time will he need to turn that dream into reality, how many times will he need to spend his Christmas far away from his family, in the bleak nights of the plain!
Isn't there any way to shorten the harsh path? Well, yes, there's a way; he knows it, he thought about it the whole day. In the nearby pasture there is another shepherd that wants to start a wheat trade, thus he has sold most of his flock, and in a few days he will sell the rest and go away. He is now down there, beyond the stream, and sleeps inside his hut, resting with his head on a stone under which there is a leather pouch with the money he got from the sheep's sale.
Our shepherd thinks that it would be easy to go there and get the pouch.

... (continues)