1In the hills above the valley of the white stones, in a later age, there lived a people who gathered the wild grain. It grew on the slopes among the oaks, thin and scattered, and it ripened in early summer. When it was ripe the people cut it with blades of flint set in bone, and beat it, and carried it down in baskets to their winter place, where they had round huts sunk in the ground beside a spring.
2The grain did not wait for them. That was the trouble with it. When an ear was ripe it broke apart and threw its seed on the ground, and what was on the ground was for the ants. The people had perhaps ten days. In a good year they filled their baskets. In a bad year they did not.
3There was a woman of that people named Nali. When she was a girl a rock had rolled on her leg, and the bone had mended crooked. She could not range with the gatherers or run with the hunt. So she stayed at the winter place with the old ones and the babies. She kept the fire, which was a low thing to do in those days, for any fool could wake a fire from two sticks by then. But her people did not let their hearth die. They said it had come from far off and long ago, from hand to hand, and that it was bad luck to be the hand that dropped it.
4A woman who stays in one place sees what the walkers do not. Nali saw this. Behind the huts was the flat rock where the grain was beaten every summer. Some always spilled. And every spring, around that rock, the grain grew thicker than it grew anywhere on the hills.
5She watched it for three springs. In the fourth she said to her mother, "The grain comes from the grain."
6"Everything comes from somewhere," said her mother, whose name was Ushi, and who was cracking acorns and did not look up.
7"No. Listen. It is not the ground by the rock that makes it. It is what we spill there. Each grain is a small closed hand, and there is a whole plant shut inside it."
8"Then you have been eating a great many plants," said Ushi.
9That autumn Nali took a basket of grain from the store and limped down to the wet ground below the spring. She scratched the earth with a digging stick and laid the grain in it and covered it. People stood and watched her bury food. Her man, Toru, was a kind man and a good hunter, and he was ashamed. He said, "If you are not hungry, give it to someone who is."
10Nothing came up. Not one blade. Nali dug in the spring and found the grains where she had left them, black and soft. She sat a whole day beside the place. Then she understood. The store grain had been parched on hot stones, as all store grain was, so that it would keep and not sprout in the basket. It had been through the fire. Whatever had been shut inside each small hand, the fire had taken out.
11So the next summer she went up the hill herself, on her bad leg, behind the gatherers. She took the ears as they stood, and kept them from the parching stones, and hid them in a skin bag in the roof of her hut. In autumn she put them in the ground. They came up green in the winter rain, and she wept to see it. Then the gazelle came down one night and ate every shoot to the earth.
12The third year she cut thorn bush and dragged it, branch by branch, into a ring around her patch. It took her a moon. Her hands were torn to the wrists. The grain came up, and the thorn kept the gazelle off, and she sat among it through the spring throwing stones at birds. Toru brought her food there. He had stopped being ashamed. He had not begun to understand, but he had seen her hands.
13That summer she cut her own grain, standing thick as hair, all in one place, twenty steps from her door. A child could have gathered it. Now mark this, for it mattered more than she knew. Some of her ears had already broken and thrown their seed, and those she could not gather. The ones she cut were the ones that had held on. So the seed she kept was the seed of the grain that waits. She did not choose it. Her blade chose it.
14She had one skin bag full when she was done. It was as much as a person can hold in two arms. She did not let anyone eat a grain of it. "It is not grain," she said. "It is next year's field. I will plant all of it, and from that I will have ten bags, and then we will eat."
15Her daughter Imi was five then, and had her mother's way of looking long at things. "Is it asleep in there?" she asked, with her ear against the bag.
16"Yes," said Nali.
17"When will it wake up?"
18"When I put it in the ground and the rain comes. Not before. If it is eaten, it never wakes."
19That was the winter of the long snow.
20The acorns had failed in autumn. The hunters walked for days and came back with a hare, or with nothing. Snow fell before the baskets were full and it did not stop. By midwinter the store pits were empty and the people were boiling hides. There were forty of them in the round huts by the spring, and they grew quiet. Hungry people do not shout. They sit and look at their hands.
21Then someone remembered the bag in Nali's roof.
22It was the headwoman who came, a tall woman named Barra, with four others behind her. She was not cruel. She had buried a grandchild that week. She stood in Nali's door with snow on her shoulders and said, "You have grain."
23"I have seed," said Nali.
24"There are forty mouths here and one of them is your own child's. Do not play with words."
25"If you eat it," said Nali, "you will have two days. I have measured it. Two days, for forty, and thin days. Then you will be as hungry as you are now, and the field will be gone, and next winter we will sit here again and look at our hands. If I plant it, there will be ten bags. The year after, a hundred."
26"The year after," said Barra, "is a story. My grandson was not a story." She looked up at the roof. "Take it down."
27Nali did not take it down. She stood under the place, on her crooked leg, with her digging stick held across her, and she was not a large woman. They could have gone through her. Perhaps they would have. But Toru came and stood beside her. He did not believe in the ten bags. He believed in his wife. Barra looked at the two of them, and she was too tired for blood.
28"Then your hut eats nothing from the common pot," she said. "Not while that hangs there. Chew your story." And they went away.
29That night Nali took the bag out through the snow and buried it under the flat rock where the grain was beaten. She told no one where. Not Toru. She did not trust his kindness, and she was right not to.
30Now came the worst of it, and I will tell it plainly. For eleven days that hut ate what Toru could find, and it was nearly nothing. Bark, boiled. A frozen bird. Ushi, the old mother, stopped taking her share. She said she was not hungry. She said it each night, and pushed her bowl across to Imi, and Nali let her, because Imi's arms had grown as thin as reeds, and the child had stopped asking when the grain would wake up.
31On the ninth night Imi could not stand. Toru took Nali by the shoulders. He was weeping. "Where is it? Tell me where it is. I will take one handful. One. She is dying in front of you, and you sit on a bag of food like a stone on a well."
32Nali said, "One handful will not save her. And I know you. After the one there will be another."
33"Then what will save her?"
34"I do not know," said Nali. That was the truth. She went out and sat in the snow by the flat rock in the dark, above the bag, and she put her hands flat on the stone. I will not tell you she was sure. She was not sure. She thought: I am killing my child for a thing I have seen once. She got up to dig. She sat down again. She did that three times before morning. The seed stayed in the ground.
35On the tenth day Ushi did not wake. She had made herself small in her furs and gone in the night without a sound. She had given eleven days of her food to the child. It is not known whether the grain in the bag would have saved her. Two days of it, among forty? Nali thought not. But she did not know, and she carried that not-knowing the rest of her life, like the crooked leg.
36On the twelfth day the wind turned to the south. On the thirteenth a hunter found deer yarded in the deep snow of a hollow, too weak to run, and the people ate. Imi lived. She was small all her life, from that winter. But she lived.
37When the ground softened, Nali dug up the bag. The seed was dry and whole. She planted every grain in the wet earth below the spring, inside the thorn. Nobody helped her and nobody stopped her. Barra watched from her doorway with her arms folded.
38All that spring Nali lived in the field. She slept in it. She drove off the birds by day and the wild pigs by night with a burning branch from her hearth, and when she could not stay awake, Imi sat up with a pile of stones and woke her. The grain came up. It stood. It turned from green to the colour of a lion.
39At midsummer she cut it. There were eleven bags. It was the most grain that had ever been in one place in those hills, and it had grown where a lame woman could reach it from her door.
40She took none of it to her own hut. She carried the first bag to the middle of the winter place and set it down. Then the second. People came out and stood. When the tenth bag was down she kept the eleventh under her arm.
41"Those are to eat," she said. "This is not. This one is asleep."
42Barra came across the open ground. She put her hand into one of the bags, to the wrist, and let the grain run through her fingers. She did it a second time. She was thinking of a grandson and an old woman, and of two thin days, and of this.
43"If we had eaten it," she said at last.
44"Then we would have had two days," said Nali. "And I would have my mother's thanks, and no field."
45"I do not know if I can forgive you the winter," said Barra.
46"I do not know if I can either," said Nali.
47But Barra bent and lifted a bag onto her own shoulder. In the autumn it was Barra who cut the thorn for a second field, with her own hands, and set her daughters to carrying it.
48After that, in those hills, there were two kinds of grain. There was the grain you ate, and there was the grain that slept. The second was kept in its own basket, high up and dry, away from the parching stones, and a child who put a hand in it was told the story of the long snow. In a few lifetimes the people forgot that grain had ever grown thin and scattered on the slopes, or that it had ever thrown itself on the ground before the hand could come.
49Imi kept the seed basket after her mother. She was a small woman who looked long at things. When she was old, a girl asked her what the hardest part of farming was, thinking she would say the thorn, or the birds, or the cutting.
50"The hardest part is in winter," said Imi. "It is to sit hungry in a house with a basket of grain, and to know what it is."