There was a ewe in Teodor's flock everyone called Crooked, because she limped.
She had split her front hoof on a rock the spring she was two, and it had healed wrong, and she had limped ever since. Not badly. She kept up. She grazed the high meadow with the rest and came down for the evening count and stood a little lopsided at the gate, and Teodor would say there's Crooked the way you'd say there's the church tower. A fixture. A fact of the hillside.
The year the boy Matei came up to help with the lambing, he asked about the limp on his first evening.
"Old hoof," Teodor said. "Split it years back. She's fine."
Matei nodded. He was new, and the answer was complete, and a complete answer is a comfortable place to stop.
In the third week the ewe began lying down more.
Teodor saw it. "She's getting on," he said. "The old hoof aches in the wet." And that was true too. It had rained four days running, and the ground was soft, and an old split hoof does ache in the wet. He gave her the dry corner of the fold and thought no more about it.
Matei gave her the dry corner too. He also, for no reason he could have named, sat with her a while after the count. Not to look for anything. He liked her. She leaned on him when he sat, and he let her.
On the fifth night she flinched when he put his hand on her shoulder.
He took his hand away. Put it back, lighter. She flinched again, and turned her head and looked at him, and he had been on the hill long enough by then to know that sheep don't look at you like that unless they mean it.
He parted the wool. Underneath, high on the shoulder where the wool was thickest, there was a swelling the size of a hen's egg, hot, and in the middle of it two small marks close together. A dog, or a fox, some night in the rain when nobody was counting carefully.
He went and got Teodor.
The old man came with the lantern and knelt and looked, and was quiet for a while. Then he said, "Well."
He lanced it there in the fold, and cleaned it, and the ewe stood for it better than either of them expected. Afterward, washing his hands in the trough, Teodor said:
"I'd have found it."
Matei didn't say anything.
"In a week, maybe. When she stopped eating." He shook the water off. "The hoof was true, you know. It does ache in the wet."
"I know," Matei said.
"That's the trouble with it," Teodor said. "If it had been a lie I'd have caught it."
What Matei carried down the mountain at the end of the season was not don't trust the old explanation. The old explanation was right. The hoof was split. It did ache. A man who threw out every true thing he knew each time an animal lay down would never get the flock counted.
What he carried was smaller and harder to keep. A known cause is a lid. It fits so well over the pot that you stop lifting it. And the better it fits — the more years it has been true, the more it explains — the less you lift it, until the day there are two things in the pot and the lid still fits.
He found the swelling because he wasn't looking. He was only sitting with her, with his hand where it happened to fall.
Teodor kept Crooked another six years. She limped the whole time. Every so often, at the evening count, he would stop at the gate and put his hand on her, slow, shoulder to flank, the way you'd check a wall you've walked past a thousand times.
There's Crooked, he'd say. And then he'd look anyway.
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