Sheepstealer was a wild dragon of an ugly mud-brown color, hatched on Dragonstone while Jaehaerys I was still young and never claimed, so that with each unridden year he grew stranger to men and harder to master. He lairs in the caverns at the back of the Dragonmont and hunted between Driftmark and the Wendwater, and the smallfolk named him for his taste in mutton; he would eat a sheepdog now and then but never harmed a shepherd. By the Dance of the Dragons he was well over fifty years old and one of three wild dragons on the island.
At the Sowing of 129 AC he killed more would-be riders than Vermithor, Seasmoke, and Silverwing together, tearing the arm from Silver Denys and burning Alyn of Hull, until a bastard girl called Nettles tamed him by leaving a fresh-killed sheep for him every morning until he suffered her on his back. She rode him in the Battle in the Gullet and at the taking of King's Landing, then hunted Vhagar along the Trident with Prince Daemon from Maidenpool. When Queen Rhaenyra named Nettles a traitor the girl fed him the castle's largest black ram and flew off over the Bay of Crabs. He was later seen at Crackclaw Point and in the Mountains of the Moon, where in 134 AC a royal column found him and a ragged Nettles in a cave and lost sixteen men; the pair flew deeper into the mountains and were never seen again, though the Burned Men's rites are said to remember a fire-witch and her dragon.