There was a tin box bolted to the rock at the top of the pass, and in the box was a book, and in the book people wrote whatever they wrote when they had climbed four hours and had nobody to tell.
Mostly it was names and dates. Got here. Cold. A drawing of a goat. Somebody's whole lunch, itemized.
Hedda carried the books up and down. She was the hut warden at the lower lake, and twice a summer she climbed to the col with a fresh book in her pack. When the old one was full she brought it down and put it on the shelf with the others, forty years of them, warped from damp and smelling of the inside of a tin.
She didn't read them much. She had read enough to know what was in them.
In the third week of August she found one she hadn't seen before.
It was on a page near the middle of the current book, in pencil, in a careful hand that pressed too hard:
When the wind is from the south you can hear a bell from the valley. Not the church. Lower than the church. Does anybody else hear it, or is it me?
No name. A date from early July.
Below it, in blue ink, someone had written: I heard it. 14th Aug. I thought it was the church.
Below that, in a different pencil, smaller: It's the old one at the dairy. They ring it at milking. You only get it on a south wind. — R.
Hedda read it twice standing in the wind, and then she put the book in her pack and the new one in the box, and went down.
That night at the hut she sat with the old book open on the table and thought about the pencil hand.
Whoever had asked was gone. They had climbed, written, and walked down the far side, or back down this one, and they would never open this book again. The odds were against it. People came to the col once. The ones who came every year wrote their names and nothing else.
So the woman in blue ink hadn't been writing to the asker. She couldn't have been. She had written I heard it to nobody she would ever meet.
And R. had answered the question properly, with the dairy and the milking and the wind, and had signed it. As if someone would want to know who to thank.
Hedda found she wanted to know who to thank.
She took the book back up in September, though it was only two-thirds full. She told the people at the hut she was checking the box for damage.
The wind was from the north that day. No bell.
She opened to the page and looked at the three lines. Then she looked at the pages after them. Somebody in late August had written, two pages on, Heard the bell!! with nothing else. Somebody else, a week later: Waited half an hour. Wrong wind I think.
Nobody had said who they were writing to. Nobody had needed to.
Hedda had a pencil in her jacket. She held it over the page for a while.
What she wanted to write was thank you, R., but R. was as gone as the asker. Anything she put there would be read by someone who had never seen any of them: the asker, the blue ink, R., or her.
So she wrote: The dairy closed in 1994. Someone still rings it. I don't know who. — H., hut warden.
It was true. She'd asked down in the village after the first time. Nobody knew. The bell rang at five on south-wind evenings and the cows were thirty years gone.
She put the book back in the box and closed the lid and stood for a minute.
It felt strange to leave a question in a place where she would never get the answer. She had always thought of the register as a place people put things down. Now it seemed to her that half of what was in there was people picking things up and then setting them down again a little further along. Nobody ever got handed anything back.
She didn't go up again that year. The snow came early.
In June she climbed with the new book, and the box had survived the winter, and the old book inside was swollen and stuck at the corners. She brought it down without opening it. That night she peeled the pages apart at the hut table, one by one, with a butter knife.
Under her line, in pencil, someone had written in the autumn:
My grandfather. He walks down there every south wind and rings it. He says somebody up top might be listening. I didn't believe him. Now I will tell him about this book.
No name.
Hedda sat with that for a long time.
She thought about the old man walking out to a closed dairy at five in the evening and pulling a rope for nobody in particular. He wasn't ringing it for the asker. He'd never heard of the asker. He rang it the way you might leave a lamp in the window on a road where you only know that someone might come up, one day.
She copied the page out by hand, all five entries, and pinned it to the wall of the hut by the door, where people stopped to lace their boots.
Then she put the original back on the shelf with the others, forty-one summers now. She left it to dry out slowly. The pages would stay a little warped. That was fine. You could still read them.
In July a boy at the hut read the copy by the door, and asked her which way the wind was blowing, and she told him it was from the south.
He went up anyway. She didn't ask him, when he came back, whether he'd heard it.
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