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Show 33, he was responsible for defending the sheep from predators. When he began to herd Smokey Jack's sheep, at Twenty Hill Hollow, his own sympathies were clear: The sheep of my flock are unhappy creatures, dirty and wretched, miserably misshapen and misbegotten and I am hardly sorry to see them eaten by those superior beings, the wolves. But given the nature of his duties, several weeks later Muir could only say that he wished he had not seen a coyote approaching the flock. His journal does not indicate that he shot the coyote, but certainly that would have been his responsibility as a sheep man's employee. The issue returned that same summer when he was tending Patrick Delaney's sheep near North Dome on the headwaters of Yosemite Creek. This time the predator was a bear, the first one that Muir had ever seen at home. The Sierran Canyons, Muir knew, were the homes of bears, where they reigned as kings until Man happened along. And though he wrote in his journal that he would like to know his "hairy brothers" better, he also returned to camp for a rifle to shoot this one. "Fearing he might attack the flock I reluctantly went," he penciled into his journal, although the final draft indicates he would only have shot the bear "if necessary." Fortunately, Muir never had to shoot that bear, or any other. But he knew that he might have to if he continued his work as a shepherd. Two years later, on finding a dead Yosemite bear, he could only write an elegy: |