1In the days when the hill villages had kept goats and sheep for longer than anyone could tell, there was a boy named Rami who hated them.
2He was sixteen. His father had been the best herdsman on the mountain, and in the spring his father had gone after a strayed kid on wet rock, and fallen. So the flock came to Rami: forty-three head of sheep and goats, one dog, a mother who had stopped talking, and two small sisters who had not stopped eating.
3When the snow left the high pastures, he drove the flock up, as his father had every year. There was a fold of piled stone up there, and a hut with half a roof, and nothing else but wind. He would be there alone until the leaves turned.
4He carried fire up with him in a clay pot packed with ash, lit from his mother's hearth. He could have made fire with a drill when he got there. But it was the custom of his village that the herdsman's fire came from home, and that it went back home in autumn, so that the hearth below and the hearth above were one hearth. His father had called it foolishness and had done it every year.
5Rami sat by that fire each night and thought about the sea.
6He had never seen it. But the black stone road ran over the pass above his pasture, and three or four times each summer the carriers came through. They were lean men and women with packs on their backs, walking from the mountain of black stone in the north down to the villages of the plain, and on, it was said, to a water so wide that it had no other side. They carried shells from it. They wore them on cords.
7A sheep, Rami thought, knows forty things, and all of them are grass.
8At midsummer a trader came over the pass with six carriers. His name was Hazo. He was a big man with a copper bead in his ear, the first copper Rami had seen, bright as a drop of the sun. He was short of backs that year. One of his people had gone lame and another had taken a wife in a village and stayed.
9He looked the boy over while his carriers drank at the stream. "You are strong," he said. "And you look at my road the way a man looks at another man's dinner."
10"I have a flock," said Rami.
11"So I see. Here is what I see also. I see a boy who will be on this mountain when he is sixty, talking to goats." Hazo squatted down. "Hear my offer. I go up to the black stone, and I come back by this pass in six days. Come with me then. Drive your animals along; I will sell them for you at the big village on the plain, the lot, for grain and goods, and send a fair part up to your mother. You carry for me. In a year you will have seen the sea. In five you will have a road of your own."
12"All of them?" said Rami. "The ewes as well?"
13"The ewes are what they pay for. Nobody gives much for a he-goat." Hazo stood. "Six days. Have an answer."
14On the third evening after that, as the light was going, someone came down the path from the pass. It was one person, alone, and walking slowly. The dog, whose name was Burr, stood up, and then lay down again.
15It was an old woman. She was small and very upright, with white hair tied back in a cord, and a bundle on her back no bigger than a child's. She had a staff, but she did not lean on it. She stopped at the edge of his firelight, as a guest should.
16"May I share your fire?" she said.
17"There is room," said Rami, for that was the answer. No one in the hills turned a traveller from a fire.
18He gave her milk, warm from the goat, and a piece of the hard cheese. She untied her bundle and brought out figs, dried and pressed flat, and gave him half. They ate without speaking, and the fire ticked, and the flock breathed in the fold behind them.
19He waited for her to say where she had come from and where she was going. Travellers always said. She did not. She looked at the fire, and then at the pot of ash it had come from. She looked for a long time at the fold, where the old ewe with the broken horn stood at the gate with her face to the dark, as she stood every night.
20"That one is old," said the woman.
21"She was old when I was small. She has not dropped a lamb in three springs. My father would never kill her." He shrugged. "The rest go where she goes. I think that is why."
22The old woman nodded as if that were a great deal to have said. Then she turned and looked at him. Her eyes were very clear. They made him feel that he had been asked his name and could not remember it.
23"What have you left open?" she said.
24He did not understand her. He looked at the fold. "The gate? It is shut. I shut it at dusk."
25She smiled, a little, and said nothing more. She lay down on the far side of the fire with her bundle under her head and seemed to sleep at once, as the old can.
26Rami lay awake. It was a strange way to ask a thing. He fell asleep still turning it over.
27When he woke, the sky was grey, and she was gone. The grass was flattened where she had lain. Beside the fire, on a flat stone, she had left three figs. That was all. Burr was sniffing along the path that led down toward the villages, so he supposed she had gone that way, though he never met anyone afterward who had seen her.
28The question stayed. It was like a thorn in wool. All that day, as he sat above the flock, it would not come out.
29He looked at the animals because there was nothing else to look at. And slowly, for the first time, he saw them.
30He knew how his father had done it. Each autumn the flock came down, and his father had walked through it with his hands, feeling backs. This one to eat. This one to keep. The ram lambs, mostly, to eat. The ewe lambs to keep. The strong mothers, never. The old one with the broken horn, never, for she knew every path on the mountain and the snow-signs besides. His father had done that every year of his life. So had his father's father. So had someone before him, and before, back to whoever first caught a wild kid on these rocks and, with a hungry family behind him, did not kill it.
31Every animal on that slope was alive because someone had stood over its mother with a knife and waited. The flock was not forty-three animals. It was a thousand autumns of not eating the ewe.
32And he was going to sell all of it in one day, for a walk to the sea.
33He thought of his sisters. Tali was nine, and she already knew every ewe by its voice. In a few years the flock would have been hers to hold if she wished it, or bride-wealth if she did not. He thought: the trader will send my mother a fair part. Then he thought: grain is eaten in a winter. A ewe gives a lamb every spring until she dies.
34But he thought of the road too, and he was honest about that. The wanting did not go away because he had seen something. He wanted the sea like water. If he stayed, he would be on this mountain at sixty, talking to goats. Hazo was right about that.
35He sat with both things in him, and they would not lie down together, and it grew dark.
36That night the weather broke.
37It came over the pass with no warning, as mountain storms do: wind first, then rain like thrown gravel, then the sky cracking white from end to end. The flock went mad in the fold. Rami ran to the gate to tie it double. Then the lightning showed him three grey shapes on the wall of the fold, and he understood that the storm had not come alone.
38The wolves had been waiting for a night with no moon and a great deal of noise. One was already inside. The sheep broke the far wall with their own weight and poured out into the dark, and the old ewe with the broken horn went at the front of them, and they were gone up the slope toward the crags.
39Rami had a staff and a sling he could not see to use. He snatched a burning branch from the fire, and the rain put it out in his hand. He ran back and dug in the ash pot with his fingers and got a pine knot going from the coal, fat with pitch, which the rain could not kill. Then he went up the mountain after his flock with a torch in one hand, shouting for the dog.
40He found them by the old ewe's bell of bone, which his father had tied on her. She had taken them where she always took them when there was danger: out onto a shelf of rock under an overhang, with a fall on one side and the cliff on the other, and one narrow way in. The whole flock was packed on it, steaming. It was a place where forty sheep could be guarded by one man. She had known that. He had not.
41He stood in the narrow way with the torch. Burr stood beside his knee, with his hackles up and a sound in his chest like stones grinding. The wolves came.
42They came three times before dawn. The first time the fire turned them. The second time one got past his left side and pulled down a yearling at the edge, and it went over the fall with the wolf's teeth in it. The third time the largest came straight at the torch. Burr met it in the air. They went down together in the dark beyond the light, and there was a terrible noise, and then only one of them was making it.
43Rami went forward swinging the torch and screaming. He did not know what he was screaming. The wolves drew off into the rain. They did not come again.
44When there was light enough to see, he found Burr lying across the narrow way, as if he were still holding it. The dog's eyes were open. His tail moved once when the boy knelt down. Rami sat with the dog's head on his knees until it was heavy. Burr had been his father's dog before he was his.
45He had lost three sheep and the dog. The old ewe came and stood by him and chewed, and looked out at the morning, as if nights like that were only to be expected.
46He buried Burr under stones at the mouth of the ledge. Then he sat and looked at the flock he had stood in front of all night. He had not thought once of the sea, in the dark. He had not thought at all. His feet had known what the flock was before his head did.
47He thought of the old woman's question. "Not enough," he said aloud. "But I can see how."
48Hazo came down from the pass on the sixth day with his carriers bent under black stone. He found the boy mending the fold wall with hands wrapped in rags. He looked at the hands, and the new grave, and the tufts of grey fur still caught on the stones, and he was not a stupid man.
49"Well," he said. "Do you come to the sea?"
50"Not this year," said Rami. "And the flock is not for sale. Not the ewes. Not ever the ewes."
51Hazo shrugged. "Then talk to your goats."
52"Wait. I have two he-goats, fat. Take them for one of your knives. They will feed your people to the plain." Rami stood up. "And hear my offer. My sister is nine. In three summers she will be twelve, and she will hold this flock better than I ever have. She has a cousin who will come up with her. That autumn I will stand at this pass with a pack. If you want a back then, I will carry for you. I will go to the sea, and I will come home, too, and bring my mother shells."
53The trader laughed until his copper bead shook. "Three summers! Boy, I might be dead in three summers."
54"Then I will carry for whoever has your road," said Rami. "It was there before you. It will be there."
55Hazo stopped laughing and looked at him in a different way. Then he took a knife of black stone from his belt, hafted in horn, sharper than anything in Rami's village, and gave it to him for the two he-goats. He said, "Three summers. If I am alive." And he went on down.
56Rami brought the flock home in autumn. He carried the ash pot down the mountain with a coal alive in it, and tipped the coal into his mother's hearth, as was the custom. That was the first evening she spoke. She said, "You have your father's way of shutting a gate." It was not much. He kept it.
57Three summers after, a girl of twelve sat by the fold on the high pasture with a young dog at her knee and forty-nine animals behind her. She watched her brother go up the path to the pass with a pack on his back, until he was too small to see.
58He looked for the old woman on every road he ever walked, to tell her his answer. He had it ready: The fold, and the road. Both. He never met her. But the answer stayed ready in him all his life. It changed with the years, and grew longer, and he found that he did not mind that it was never finished.