The Mountain Shepherd
The Mountain Shepherd A Story Told by Marcos, Forty-Five Years Later Part 1 : The Family My name is Marcos. I grew up in a small house, in the countryside. We didn't have much. We had goats, that was all. And those goats were our life. If we lost them, we lost everything. We lived with my father, my stepmother, and my little brother Juanillo. We called my stepmother "the old woman." She wasn't kind to us. She shouted a lot. She hit us sometimes. She didn't love us, me and Juanillo. We knew it. We had always known it. My father said nothing. He never defended us. I think he was afraid of her. Or maybe he was too tired to fight. We were poor. We owed money to the landlord, a rich man named Don Honesto. We kept his goats, we lived in his house, we used his horse. We didn't belong to him, but almost. Me and Juanillo spent our days in the mountains with the goats. We knew them all by name. There was Lucero, Lunara, Minero, and many others. We lo...