But of all the islands and of all parts of them, the Peak, shining over clouds and visible from far seas, is the king and chief. I left its fiery summit with a certain reluctance. It attracted me strangely. It represented, feebly enough, I daresay, the greatest of all elemental forces. Yet its faint fires and its smoke and sulphur fumes had all the power of a mighty symbol. By such means, by such a formula, had the very world itself been made. Though snow lay upon its slopes and ice bound ancient blocks of lava together, it might at any hour awake again and renew the terrors which once must have floated over the seas in a gust of flame.
With the introduction of fences, which are now coming in with tremendous rapidity, sheep-herding as an art is inevitably doomed. When I knew north-west Texas a few years ago there was not a fence between the Rio Grande and the north of the Panhandle, but now barbed or plain wire is the rule, and in the pastures it is, of course, not so necessary to look after the sheep by day and night. In Australia I have not seen those under my charge for a week or more at a time. While there was water in the paddock I never even troubled to hunt them up in the hundred square miles of grey-green plain with its rare clumps of dwarf box. If dingoes were reported to be about I kept my eyes open, of course, but they were very rare in the Lachlan back blocks, and I was never able to earn the five shillings reward for the tail of this yellow marauder. But in Texas there are more wild animals--the coyote, the bear, the "panther" or puma--and it is impossible to leave the sheep entirely to their own devices, even in pastures which prevent them wandering. Nevertheless, looking after them on fenced land is very different from being with them daily and hourly, sleeping with them at night, following and directing them by day, being all the time wary lest some should be divided from the main flock by accident, or lest the whole body should spy another sheep-owner's band and rush tumultuously into it.
But the new and unaccustomed shepherd on the prairie is apt to give himself much unnecessary trouble. It takes some time to learn that a flock of sheep is like a loosely-knit organism which will not separate or divide if it can help it. It might be compared with a low kind of jelly-fish, or even to a sea-anemone, for under favourable conditions of sun and sky it spreads out to feed, leaving between each of its members what is practically a constant distance. For when the weather changes they come closer together, and any alarm puts them into a compact mass. I have heard a gun fired unexpectedly, and then seen some 2000 sheep, spreading loosely over an irregular circle, about half a mile in diameter, rush for a common centre with an infallible instinct. And then they gradually spread out again like that same sea-anemone putting forth its filaments after being touched.