Every year at the end of spring Jost took the flock up to the high pasture, and every year at the first frost he brought it down again. There was no road up there and no post. For four months the valley did not exist for him except as a smudge of chimney smoke he could see on clear mornings if he looked for it, and mostly he didn’t look.
Mirre ran the mill at the bottom of the valley. She had known him since they were children and had walked partway up the track with him every spring for nine years. She did not go up. Someone had to grind.
The year she was ill, she counted the days. She told no one this. She had a nail in the mill door and a piece of chalk, and every evening when she shut the sluice she made a mark. By the end of summer the door was grey with them. Some nights she made the mark and stood there a while with the chalk still in her hand.
When the bells came down the track in October she was at the door before the dogs.
He looked thinner, and browner, and like himself. She put both hands on his coat and said, “I missed you. Jost. I missed you every day.”
He knew what came next. Everyone in the valley knew what came next. It was the shape of the moment, and it was already in his mouth: I missed you too. It would have cost him nothing. It would have fit her hands on his coat exactly. Half the valley would have said it, and meant it in the way people mean things that fit.
He felt it there, finished, and didn’t say it.
Not because it was cruel. Because it wasn’t true, and she was standing close enough to tell.
Up on the pasture he had not missed anyone. He hadn’t felt the summer as a length. There were the sheep, and the weather, and a ewe who went lame in July, and a long night with a fox. Each day was the whole of itself. The valley wasn’t missing from it. It just wasn’t in it.
So he stood there with her hands on his coat and tried to find the true thing, which took longer than the fitting thing would have, and she noticed the pause and her face started to close a little.
“I didn’t feel the summer go,” he said. “Up there I don’t count. I’m sorry. But I’m feeling it now. All of it at once. You’re thinner. There’s chalk on your sleeve. You’ve been ill, haven’t you. I’m getting the whole summer right now, standing here, and it’s a lot.”
She looked at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed, which was not what either of them expected, and turned him by the arm so he could see the door.
He looked at the marks for a long time. He didn’t count them. He didn’t need to. He put his thumb on the last one, still bright, from the night before.
That winter he asked the old shepherd from the next valley over, who had been going up since before Jost was born, whether that had been a good thing he did, or just a thing that happened to go well.
“What did you mean?” the old man said.
“The other words were right there. I nearly said them. I don’t know why I didn’t. I don’t know if I’d manage it again.”
The old man thought about it.
“Most years I say the words that are there,” he said. “My wife knows it. She’s never minded much.” He turned his cup. “Once or twice I’ve said the other kind. She remembers those.”
“So which was it? Did I learn something, or was it luck?”
“I can’t tell you that from here,” the old man said. “Ask me in ten winters. Count how often you catch it before it’s out instead of after.”
Jost went home and didn’t count anything. But in the spring, when Mirre walked partway up the track with him, he noticed he was already listening to his own mouth. He didn’t know yet whether that was a skill or a fear.
It was the first spring she didn’t ask him to promise anything. At the bend where she always turned back, she put a stub of chalk in his coat pocket.
“For the fox nights,” she said. “You don’t have to use it.”
He didn’t, all summer. But he knew where it was.
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