The story “The Shepherd” completes the series of stories about the villages of Torbeevo and Vysotskoye, known to readers from the collection “Wonders”, the story “White Wolf”, and the fairy tales “Rusalka” and “The Carver”. The last book of this series tells about the fate of Neil - an orphan, a village shepherd, endowed with amazing abilities from birth. How will he use these abilities - for the benefit of people or for the harm? Great is his strength, great is his thirst to gain power and wealth for himself, to rise above the rest. At the same time, Neil is a living person, one cannot help but sympathize with his fate. Rejected by his fellow villagers, betrayed by his beloved, Neil flees his native place and begins to wander with an artel of wandering carpenters. It seems that fate has finally smiled on him, and the past is forever forgotten - but then a whitish ghost appears in front of him, a terrible companion from the very past that Neil is trying to forget.