Part I

Silver Mtawi slumped over the tiller of his little wooden sailing boat.

Through half-closed eyes, the speckles of sunlight on the wave tops reminded him of lions sleeping on the river banks back home.

The boat lolled around in the waves. In his uneasy sleep, he heard a lion bleating in the distance.

As Silver dreamed of bleating lions, the wind picked up. The sails fluttered and filled, and the bleating of the lions grew closer.

Sensing a change in the boat's motion, Silver struggled for consciousness, pulling himself upright against the wooden tiller.

He rubbed his eyes clear to look into the distance to where the noise was coming from.

A distance away, bobbing around in the ocean was something that he could not explain.

He squinted ahead as he pulled the tiller gently towards him and adjusted the sails.

A few minutes of concentration later, he pulled alongside a sheep clinging to a piece of drift wood.

It is true. Somewhere a hundred miles or so off the coast of East Africa, there was a sheep clinging to a piece of drift wood.

Damp. Bedraggled. Not in the peak of fitness. But nonetheless, a sheep.

The sheep and the African fisherman looked at each other blankly.

Then, at the same time that Silver Mtawi realised that he could take the sheep home to his village, the sheep realised that it might be better-off onboard Silver’s boat.

For a few moments both Silver Mtawi and the sheep shared the same vision of their own salvation.

In short order the sheep was hustled awkwardly out of the sea and into the boat where it stood, bleating, in the bow.

For Silver, the long trip at sea had come to an excellent, if unexpected, conclusion.

No longer would he drift the ocean current trailing a fishing line as he had been doing for the past eight unsuccessful days.

Now he could head for home.

With the biggest smile that he had worn for many years, Silver Mtawi tightened his sails and pointed his boat toward that bit of the horizon beyond which lay his village.

He sailed the rest of the day, through the long evening and into the deep night.

Under the light of the moon, Silver adjusted his sails to account for a shift in the wind.

From under his boat there was a sharp bump and a second later a flurry of water off to one side.

Silver’s smile faded as he felt another bump on the boat’s hull, then another.

In no time, the sea was heaving with fins and bumps and splashes and the flashes of white in the water.

Silver’s boat was suddenly surrounded by sharks. Not the tidy little black-tip sharks that you could catch and sell at the market, but the crazy ones with the round white fins.

Silver eyed the sheep in the bow suspiciously. His boat would not survive a sustained attack by the white-tip sharks, so he would have to act fast.

He lashed the tiller with a piece of rope so that the boat continued to steer towards home. Then he found another length of rope with which he bound his sharp, steel knife to an oar.

He stood in the moonlight with his oar-spear raised, ready to defend himself, his vessel and his sheep.

He struck at the sharks as they thrashed wildly in the water. He stabbed the knife blade at their dark, hard heads, lunging and shoving as the shark’s thrashed and bumped and splashed.

Then, without warning, Silver lost his balance and fell overboard into the jaws of the sharks and was instantly torn to pieces and eaten.

In the bow of the little wooden sailing boat, the sheep, bleating.

With the tiller lashed in position, the boat sailed on into the night toward Silver’s village.

Part II

The next evening, Silver’s little wooden boat came to the last mile of its journey. It had found it’s way to Silver’s village.

For some years now the weather in this village had been changing away from the regular cycles that had sustained the village for hundreds of generations.

A drought had been on this region for many months.

In order to ensure that the village did not waste-away from hunger, Silver and all the older fishermen had put to sea with the conviction not to return without a big catch.

A week later the fishermen had returned, practically empty handed. All except Silver.

The village had pined for Silver’s return. On sighting his boat closing on the shore, the villagers had danced on the beach.

His little wooden boat bumped against the sand and in no time the villagers had surrounded it, captured the confused, bleating sheep and begun to speculate about Silver’s fate.

As the night fell, a consensus emerged that Silver would not return home and that the sheep was a gift from whom-ever had done away with their favourite son.

The villagers wept as they slaughtered, butchered, cooked and devoured the sheep. In the morning they were able to face their sorrow and the ongoing drought with a full belly.

Part III

A few weeks after a single, lone sheep had filled the bellies of the hungry African village affected by a long and unexplained drought, a ship called the MV Cormo Express pulled alongside a wharf in Australia.

The ship’s Captain descended the gang plank into a sea of journalists and photographers.

He was saved only by the arrival of the Australian Trade Minister who had pulled from his pocket a carefully crafted speech.

He explained Australia’s interests and the protocols that dictated the expression of free-trade in a globalized economy.

He said that the decision to slaughter 50,000 healthy sheep in the middle of the ocean and throw their carcasses overboard was the only available option given the extreme circumstances.

He also said that these actions were fully consistent with Australia’s commitment to resolve the issue in a humanitarian manner.

At the same time as the Trade Minister finished his speech and began to field questions from the press, an African man settled himself against a palm tree on a distant beach.

He stared out to sea and remembered the day that the drought had drifted from the minds of the village and they had feasted on a sheep gifted from the sea.

As the African man stared into the distance, the villager wondered if there were any more sheep beyond the horizon.

And he wondered what price the village would have to pay should another sheep unexpectedly come their way.

copyright Guy LANE 2004