Perfectly Ordinary People
Nick Alexander
Prologue.
Tall Tale #1: Living With Wolves.
Did I ever tell you the story about the man who replaced his guard dogs with wolves?
He was a rustic young farmer with a huge moustache – we’ll call him Moustache to make things easier – living out in a remote village called La Vieille-Loye at the western edge of Alsace, right in the middle of a forest. He’d been struggling for years with the local wolves that continually visited, killing his sheep anytime they fancied a snack.
Some nights, in summer, he could lose ten or even twenty sheep in a single night, and that made him incredibly sad, because not only were his sheep his livelihood, but he loved them, giving them names and treating them like pets. The wolves didn’t always seem to kill because they were genuinely hungry, either. He knew this because sometimes they would kill twenty sheep and only eat three of them. So it seemed to him that they were killing just for fun.
When Moustache spoke to the other farmers, they advised him to get some Pyrenean Mountain Dogs – in French they call them patou. These are huge dogs with shaggy white fur, and what the farmers do is to raise them with the sheep from the moment they’re born. That way these dogs end up thinking they are sheep as well and, because they think the sheep they live with are their mothers and brothers and sisters, they’ll do anything they can to protect them, even laying down their own lives.
So that’s what this farmer did. He bought three baby patou dogs and he raised them to think they were sheep. And for years afterwards he didn’t lose a single animal, because the patou would scare off any marauding wolves.
But one day, when he was in his thirties, he went down to his field and found that a massacre had taken place overnight. Not only had the wolves killed ten of his sheep, but they’d killed all three guard dogs as well. Why had they killed them? Well, the dogs believed they were sheep, and so I think the wolves just thought the same thing.
Now Moustache loved those dogs even more than he loved his sheep, so this made him very, very angry.
He thought about replacing them but worried that any new dogs would also be killed by the wolves.
After a few days thinking about the problem, he came up with what he thought was a better idea. Instead of dogs, he would raise wolves to think they were sheep. The only problem was getting hold of wolf cubs, but he asked around until someone told him about a wolf breeder in the South of France.
That was a very long way from where Moustache lived, but he decided to go and get them anyway. It took him two days and about ten trains to get there, and two days and ten different trains to get back.
But finally home with the three baby wolves he’d bought – they were still tiny and fluffy and cute – he put them in with the sheep. And he was in luck, because one of the sheep, who’d just given birth, fed the wolves, letting them suckle alongside her lambs.
When these wolves grew up, his plan worked perfectly, because the wolves were convinced that they too were sheep. And whenever any wolves tried to attack his flock, the wolf-sheep would defend the real sheep and chase the wild wolves away.
This worked well for years, but then one day, at the beginning of the Second World War, the Germans invaded Alsace, and everywhere they went they robbed and killed and plundered.
Eventually some very bad soldiers happened upon the remote village where our farmer lived. Luckily he was out at the market that day, because otherwise the soldiers would no doubt have killed him. Instead they started killing the sheep, initially because they thought they might want to eat them, but then because, just like the wolves, they decided that killing was fun.
When the wolf-sheep heard all the commotion they came bounding over the hill, and when they saw what was happening to their brethren – because wolves are very intelligent, you know – they ran so fast across the fields that the Germans didn’t even have time to shoot them. They leapt at them and with single bites ripped out their throats, killing them as easily as sheep.
By the time the farmer got home, everything was calm again. There were three dead sheep lying at one end of the field but he was surprised to see that they hadn’t been killed by wolves but had been shot. His wolf-sheep looked fatter than usual, and rather sad, as if they were maybe grieving the deaths of the three sheep, one of which was the ewe that had suckled them when they were cubs.
But it was only at the end of summer when he happened to cross the field in exactly the right spot that he was able to work out what had happened during his absence at the market that day. Because he found something strange in that field: three German soldiers’ helmets, and three German rifles.
But that’s all he ever found. There were no arms, no legs, no swastikas, no uniforms, no boots . . . Turns out that his trusty wolf-sheep had not only killed those German soldiers, but they’d eaten every last crumb!
Ruth. Part One.
My grandfather Chris told us a lot of rather gruesome stories that my parents didn’t entirely approve of, and he always began them with the phrase, ‘Did I ever tell you about . . . ?’
There weren’t that many different tales, so I can only remember about ten of them, but when we were little and we saw him, he would sit us down and tell us a story without fail. We never tired of hearing them, either – especially the scary ones. In fact it would be true to say that the repetition made our excitement, our anticipation, even greater. Our eyes would widen at the first mention of the wolves and our mouths would drop as we awaited to learn the fates – awful fates we already knew – of those evil German soldiers.