1In a country of green mountains and heavy rain there was a town on a bend of a river. The low street of the town ran along the bank, behind a wall of earth that the people had built to keep the water out. Three hundred people lived on the low street. One of them was a girl named Tala, who was twelve.
2Her father worked on ships, far away, and came home one month in the year. When she was nine he had brought her a strange present. It was a clear tube with lines on it, to catch the rain and measure it. He drove a long bamboo into the river mud below the house and painted it in red and white bands, each band a hand high.
3"The river is not a mystery," he told her. "It is only water, and water keeps rules. It runs downhill. It takes time to arrive. What falls up there in the mountains must pass by here, and it cannot pass any faster than it can. Write down what you see every day. In time you will know its rules."
4Then he went back to sea. Tala wrote down what she saw. She was the kind of child who would.
5Every morning and every evening she read the tube and the bamboo, and wrote both numbers in a notebook with the date. Her aunt lived a day's walk up the valley, in the high village where the rain came first. Her aunt had a tube too, and sent its number each evening by telephone. Tala filled one notebook, and then a second.
6After two rainy seasons she began to see a pattern in the numbers. When heavy rain fell on her aunt's village, the bamboo by her own house did nothing for a while. Then, about six hours later, it rose. And how high it rose could be worked out from how much had fallen. She drew it on squared paper. The points did not scatter. They lay along a line.
7In her third season the rule spoke, and she listened. One evening her aunt's number was larger than any in the notebooks. Tala laid it on her line, and the line said the river would come over the earth wall before morning.
8She was eleven then, and afraid, but she told her mother, and her mother told the neighbours. Half the low street believed it. They carried their pigs and their bedding up the hill in the rain and sat all night in the school.
9The river rose. It came to within a hand of the top of the wall. Then it went down.
10In the morning the people walked back with their wet bedding, and they were not kind. A pig had been lost in the dark. For a year after that the children called her River Girl, and when the sky clouded, grown men would call across the street, "River Girl! Shall we run?"
11She did not throw the notebooks away. She did something harder. She went back into them to find out why she had been wrong.
12It took her two months. The answer was in the days before. That time, the great rain had fallen after three dry weeks. The ground in the mountains had been thirsty and had drunk a share of the rain before any reached the river. Her line knew how much fell. It did not know how wet the ground already was.
13So she added a third number, the rain of the ten days before. With the new rule she worked back through every flood in her notebooks, and it fitted all of them, even the one she had got wrong. She showed it to her teacher, Mr. Reyes, a careful man who did not praise easily. He checked every line. "It is better than the first," he said, "because it has a mistake inside it that has been mended."
14Now hear what came in her fourth season.
15It was the week of the town's feast, the day of its founding. It had rained for nine days. The mountains were as full as a soaked cloth. On the evening of the feast the rain stopped. The clouds tore open and there was a red sunset. The whole town came out into the square, where there were lanterns and a stage and roasted pork.
16At six o'clock Tala's telephone sounded. It was her aunt. A storm has sat down on us and will not move. I have emptied the tube twice. I have never seen this. And she gave a number.
17Tala went cold. She ran home along the low street to her squared paper. She laid the aunt's number on it, and the ten days' rain beside it. The line did not stop a hand below the top of the wall this time. It went over the wall and over the doors of the houses. It reached the eaves.
18Six hours. It was now twenty past six. The water would be at the town a little after midnight, when the feast was ended and the low street lay asleep behind its wall.
19She went outside and looked at the bamboo. The river was brown and quiet. The sky was clear and red. Everything a person could see with their eyes said that the danger was over. The only thing that said otherwise was a line on a piece of paper, drawn by a girl who had been wrong before.
20She thought of the pig, and of River Girl, shall we run? If she was wrong a second time, they would never let her forget it as long as she lived in that town.
21Then she thought: the water does not know I was wrong last year. It does not know it is a feast day, or that I am twelve. It is already coming down the valley. It will arrive when it arrives, whether I speak or not.
22She took both notebooks and the squared paper, and she ran to the square.
23She went first to the mayor, who stood by the stage in a white shirt, shaking hands. An election was coming, and the year before he had raised the earth wall by the height of a man's knee. He had said in many speeches that the low street was now safe for a hundred years.
24He listened to about half of what she said. Then he smiled, as one smiles at a child, and looked over her head. "The rain has stopped, little one. Look at the sky. And the wall is higher now. Go and eat something."
25Her face burned. She nearly went home then. She went instead to Mr. Reyes, who was sitting with his wife at a long table, and she put the notebooks down among the plates.
26"I need you to check it," she said. "Please. Not believe it. Check it."
27He looked at her face, and put on his spectacles. He worked through it on a paper napkin by lantern light, while the band played and his pork went cold. He tried it her way, and then another way of his own. Then he took off his spectacles.
28"I get a little less than you," he said. "I get the water at the windows and not the eaves. It does not matter. Either one is over the wall." He stood up. "Come with me."
29He walked her to the stage. He spoke to the men with the drums, and they stopped. In the quiet he took the speaking horn and said, "This girl has something to tell you. I have checked her figures myself, and I can find no fault in them. Listen to her." And he put the horn into her hand.
30Tala stood in front of the whole town. Her knees were shaking so that she could see her skirt move.
31"You know me," she said. Her voice came out small, and then the horn made it large. "I am the one who was wrong last year. You carried your things up the hill for nothing, and a pig was lost. I am sorry for the pig."
32Some people laughed. It was not all unkind.
33"I found out why I was wrong. The ground was dry then and it drank the rain. Tonight the ground is full. It has rained nine days. Three hours ago a storm began over the high village, and it is a bigger one than any I have written down. My aunt measured it. The water is in the valley now. It takes six hours. It will be here after midnight, and it will come over the wall."
34"The wall was raised!" someone shouted.
35"By this much," said Tala, and held her hand at her knee. "The water will be higher than that. I may be wrong. I am telling you so myself. Here are my books, three years of them, every day. Anyone who can reckon may come up and look. If you find the mistake, show it to me and I will thank you, and we can all go back to the feast." She took a breath. "If I am wrong, you may laugh at me every day for the rest of my life. I will not mind. But if I am right and you stay in your beds, there will be no one left on the low street to laugh."
36Then an old man got up from a bench at the back. This was Berto, who had fished that river for sixty years. He had laughed at her as loudly as anyone the year before.
37"I cannot reckon," he said. "But I will tell you what I saw this evening and thought nothing of. The river has gone thick and yellow, and it smells of the mountain. There are green branches coming down with the leaves on. That is not this morning's rain. That is something breaking, up top." He looked at the mayor. "The river does not know you raised the wall. It does not vote. I am going to move my boat."
38That turned them. The low street began to move. They did not all go. Some said they would sleep with one eye open, and some stayed because the mayor stayed. But most went. They carried the old on doors and drove the pigs up the hill by lantern light. Mr. Reyes opened the school, and by eleven there were two hundred and sixty people on its floor.
39Tala and her mother carried up the bedding and the rice and her father's letters. Then she stood at the school wall and watched the river. It lay flat in the moonlight, and still it had not risen. Midnight came, and half past. A man said, quite loudly, "Well, River Girl?"
40She felt sick. She thought: I have done it again. She held her notebooks against her chest.
41At ten minutes to one, a sound came down the valley. It was not loud at first. It was like a great many people a long way off, all breathing out.
42The river did not rise as it did in other floods. It came as a step, a brown shelf of water the height of a child, and trees turned over in it. It filled the bed in the time it takes to count a hundred. For a little while the earth wall held it. Then the water came over the top in one long smooth sheet from end to end. The low street went under, lamp by lamp, until there was only moonlight on moving water and the roofs standing in it.
43Then there was shouting, out in the dark. Nineteen people had stayed, and they were on their roofs now, calling. Berto had moved his boat to the high end of the town, and it was the only one still afloat. He and two fishermen went out with a lantern on a pole, among the floating trees, and took people off the roof tiles one family at a time. On the ninth journey they took off the mayor, in his white shirt.
44By first light they had counted. Nineteen had stayed, and nineteen had been brought in. Every pig that had not been driven up the hill was drowned. And nobody had died, in a street of three hundred where the water stood at the windows.
45At the windows. Tala heard somebody say it. She thought, Mr. Reyes was nearer than I was. I must find out why. And she thought, One o'clock, not midnight. I was fifty minutes wrong. She was already writing it in the notebook.
46Her own house had stood at the lowest part of the street. When the water went down, one wall and the cooking stone were left. The rain tube was gone, and her bed, and her father's chair.
47But the bamboo was still there. It leaned a little. There was a line of yellow mud across it, far above the highest band her father had painted. She stood in the wreck of her house and measured how far above with a knotted string. Then she wrote that down too. It was the highest number in the book.
48The mayor made a speech that week. He said it had been a flood such as no one could have foreseen. Mr. Reyes was standing in the crowd. He did not shout. He only lifted a napkin above his head with a sum on it in pencil, and kept it there, until everyone had turned to look, and the mayor stopped speaking.
49No one called her River Girl after that, or if they did, it meant something else. In the dry season eight children came to her and asked to be shown how it was done. She showed them last year's mistake first, before anything else.
50By the next rains there was a painted bamboo at every bridge up the valley. The numbers came down each evening to a board on the wall of the school, where anyone could read them and reckon for themselves. Her father came home and stood in front of that board a long time with his cap in his hand.
51"I gave you a tube and a stick," he said.
52"You gave me the rule," said Tala. "You said water takes time to arrive. Everything else was in that."
53Now hear of a man whose whole work was to weigh one thing against another, and what he found when he put his own house on the scale.