In the year 1762 men’s minds, in the upper reaches of the Tweed, began to be sore perplexed by an unaccountable leakage in the numbers of their sheep.  Normal losses did not greatly disturb them; to a certain percentage of loss from the “loupin’ ill,” from snowstorm, from chilly wet weather during lambing, they were resigned.  But the losses that now disquieted them were quite abnormal.  It was not as if the sheep were perishing on the hillside; then at least their skins would have been brought in, and the element of mystery would not have agitated the minds of owners.  But here were sheep constantly vanishing in large numbers without leaving even a trace of themselves.  Something must be very far wrong somewhere.  They were angry men, the Peeblesshire hill farmers, that summer of 1762, angry and sore puzzled, for up Manor Water and the Leithen, by Glensax Burn and the Quair, and over the hills into Selkirkshire, the tale was ever the same, sheep gone, and never a trace of them to be found.

In Newby was a tenant, William Gibson, whose losses had been particularly severe, and, not unnaturally, Gibson was in a very irritable frame of mind; so upset, indeed, was he that, before the faces of the men, he blurted out on one occasion the statement that in his opinion these continued losses were due chiefly to carelessness or ignorance of their work, if not to something even worse, on the part of the shepherds.  Now, to throw doubt on their knowledge or skill was bad enough, but any insinuation as to their honesty was like rubbing salt on open wounds.  It touched them on the raw, even though no direct accusation had been made, for a finer, more capable, careful, and honest class of men than the Border shepherd has never existed anywhere.  Deep, therefore, was their anger, wrathful the mutterings that accompanied them in their long tramps over the windy hills; it would have gone ill with any one detected in possession of so much as a lamb’s tail to which he might fail to establish his legal right.

Eyes sharpened by resentment were continually on the watch, yet the losses continued, now less, now more, but always a steady percentage, and it seemed beyond mortal power to guess how and when these losses occurred.  But at last it chanced one day that Gibson, for some purpose, had mustered his ewes and lambs, and as the men went about their work, one of the older shepherds, Hyslop by name, halted abruptly as a lamb ran up to a certain ewe, and suckled.

“Dod!” cried Hyslop, “thon’s auld Maggie an’ her lamb!”

Now “Maggie” was a black-faced ewe, so peculiarly speckled about the face that no one, least of all a Border shepherd, could possibly make any mistake as to her identity.  She had been missing for some days, and was given up as lost for good and all.  Yet here she was suckling her lamb as if she had never been away.

Something prompted Hyslop to catch the ewe.  Then he whistled long and low, and swore beneath his breath.