Sometimes lack of context can make you interpret a phrase completely differently from how it was meant. A prime example of this is when a word can be singular or plural but spelled the same, like fish, or deer. This specific construct might explain the anomaly of farmer Pluckman, who, for about an hour now, was keeping himself occupied by being drunk and enraged about his sheep. More specifically, the source of his anger was that no one else at the pub understood exactly what he meant when he said that he had woken up that morning to find his sheep scattered across his field.

The other pub goers thought that he was simply getting worked up about a more or less ordinary inconvenience, everyone had seen their herds of sheep break out and wreak havoc on their farms, this was an infuriating thing, but common enough that no experienced farmer would be so afflicted by it. This was of course because they were thinking, as most anyone would, about a herd of sheep; but if you knew anything about farmer Pluckman, which, obviously, none of the pub goers did, you would know that he only had one sheep.

This simple bit of context quite dramatically changes the phrase "I woke up to find my sheep scattered across the field"