# Endlessly ending stories, room 74, Before and after at once, Mythos
Text version of https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/r/both-before-after-mythos (the interactive reader). Instruction: Both at once (https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/i/both). Index of every room: https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/llms.txt
Part 2 of 4. https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-2.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-3.txt https://endlessly-ending-stories.pages.dev/t/both-before-after-mythos-4.txt
This part starts at lane 1, hop 15.

### hop 15 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1902 words)
Nobody wrote the mountain down until the surveyor, and he wrote it down wrong, which the mountain people would have told you was the only way it could be done. Before him there had been a tithe list, kept in a lowland church and lost in a fire, and before that nothing at all, only the two valleys and the ridge and the slow business of living on either side of it. The lowland towns had their records and their registers and their men in black coats who came up once a decade to count chimneys, and the chimneys were counted and the men went home, and what they carried down was a number that meant nothing to anyone who had not stood in the smoke.

The mountain did not resist being known. That was the mistake the surveyor made, and the tithe men before him, and the schoolmaster who came later and lasted one winter. It simply did not help. It answered the questions it was asked and offered nothing more, and when the questioner had gone it closed over the place where he had stood like water over a dropped stone. So the records that exist are all of the same kind: brief, confident, and wrong in the particular way that confidence is wrong when it has not been tested against snow. The surveyor's map is the only one that survived, and it survived because a clerk thought the frame was handsome, and for no other reason.

There is a map in the county office, drawn by a surveyor who came through in a wet year and never came back, and on it the mountain is a single hatched oval with one name across it. The name is not one the people on the mountain use. They have never agreed on a name, which is the first thing to understand about them, and the second is that they would not thank anyone for pointing it out. The surveyor marked a spring that is no longer there and a road that never was, and he wrote in the margin, in a hand that has faded nearly to nothing, that the inhabitants were civil but incurious. He was wrong about the second part. He had simply not stayed long enough to learn what they were curious about, or to notice that it was never the same thing on both sides of the ridge.

The map hangs in a frame beside the door, and the clerk dusts it twice a year, and nobody from the mountain has ever asked to see it. They know the shape of where they live better than paper can hold it. They know which fields drain and which hold water into May, which lanes the snow fills first, which stones in the river can be trusted and which only look as if they can. What they do not know, or have agreed among themselves not to know, is the shape of the other side. That is a different kind of knowledge, and it is handed down more carefully than any of the rest, in silences rather than words.

The lowland people had a saying about the mountain, that it kept its own counsel, and they meant it as a kind of praise. From the river towns it looked like a single thing, a long blue back rising out of the hay fields with snow on it until June and sometimes after. The drovers who came up in spring to buy wool knew better, but they did not say so, because the people on the mountain did not like to be explained, and a drover who talked too much went home with less. So the saying stood. The mountain kept its own counsel. It was simpler than the truth, which was that the mountain was not one place at all, and had not been for longer than anyone living could remember.

The west valley people said their forebears had come up from the river in a bad year and stayed. The east valley people said the same, and said it about a different river. Neither side could say when the path through the notch had last been used for anything but sheep gone astray. There was a story about a wedding, and another about a quarrel over a spring that had since gone dry, and a third, told only by the very old, about a winter when the two valleys had shared a doctor. None of these stories agreed with the others. What they had in common was that they were told as if about another country, and that nobody thought to ask why.

There were two of them, the valleys, lying side by side like the halves of a split log, and a ridge between them that nobody crossed. Not because it could not be crossed. There was a notch in it, and a path of sorts, and in a dry August a strong walker could go up and over between breakfast and dark. It was only that there had never been a reason. The west valley had its own water and its own dead, and so did the east, and the lowland people, who saw them only as one blue shape against the sky, were the only ones who ever thought of them together.

Mara was fifteen the summer the stranger's sheep came down the wrong side. She drove them back up alone, because her father was laid up and her brothers were cutting, and at the notch she met the girl who had come looking for them. They did not have much to say. The east girl had a loaf in her pack and broke it, and they ate on a flat stone, and the sheep stood about looking foolish. Before they parted the east girl took a tin from her coat, the kind that holds needles, and put a folded paper in it, and gave it to Mara without explaining.

It was a letter. It said almost nothing: the weather on that side, the name of a dog, a line about her grandmother who sat by the east window and remembered a time when the path was worn. Mara read it a great many times. In the autumn a second tin came down with a boy and a lame ewe.

She did not answer the first one. She told herself it was because she had no paper, which was true, and because she had nothing to say, which was not. The second tin she opened in the byre with the lamp turned low, and this time there was a question in it, a small one, about whether the west side had the same wind in October that came down off the snow and made the dogs restless. Mara found she could not leave a question lying. She tore a leaf from the back of her mother's account book, where the pages were still blank, and wrote three lines, and then four more, and then stopped because her hand was shaking and she did not know why.

The boy took it back up with him the next morning. He was a cousin of the east girl, or said he was, and he walked with the careful indifference of someone who has been told not to ask. After that there was a kind of season to it. Nothing came in the deep winter, when the notch filled and the path was only a guess under the drifts. But in March a tin came down in the pocket of a man who had lost a dog, and in May two came at once, and by the second summer Mara had a loose stone in the byre wall where she kept them all, and her brothers had begun to notice that she looked at the ridge more often than she looked at anything else.

It was the middle brother, Tam, who said something, and he said it badly, the way he said most things, at the table with their father listening. He asked whether the east side had grown prettier since last year or whether it was only that Mara had grown dafter. Nobody laughed. Their father put down his spoon and looked at her for a long moment, and she understood that he had known for some time and had been waiting to see whether she would stop on her own.

He did not forbid it. That was the strange thing, afterward, the thing she turned over for years. He only asked her what the girl's name was, and when she told him he nodded as if it meant something, and went back to his soup. Later, when the lamp was out and the house had settled into its night noises, he came and stood in the door of the byre where she was pretending to check the ewes.

He said the doctor story was true. He said he had been a boy, and the doctor had come over the notch on a mule in February, and had stayed four days, and that when he left a woman from the east side had gone with him partway and not come back for a month. He did not say who the woman was. He said that was the last time, and that there had been reasons, and that the reasons had seemed good. Then he said the loose stone was a poor hiding place, since he had used it himself, and he went in to bed.

Mara stood a long while after he had gone, with the lamp making its small sound and the ewes shifting in the straw. She took the tins out one by one and held them without opening them, and tried to think what it meant that her father had once kept something behind that stone, and what, and for whom. She could not make the thought go anywhere. It sat in her like a stone in a boot. In the morning she looked at him across the table and he looked back with the same face he had always had, a little tired, a little amused, and she understood she would never be told, and that this was itself a kind of telling.

She moved the tins that week to a hollow under the hearthstone of the old shieling up the brae, where nobody went after the lambs were down. It was further to walk, and she liked that. The walk gave her time to think of what to write, and on the way back time to stop thinking of it.

The next letter to come down asked, in the east girl's careful hand, whether anyone on the west side still spoke of a doctor. Mara read it three times and then sat on the flat stone outside the shieling with the paper on her knee and the whole ridge laid out in front of her, grey and quiet and nearer than it had ever looked. She wrote back that evening. It was the longest letter she had ever written, and she did not keep a copy, and for the rest of her life she could not have said exactly what was in it, only that after she had sent it the ridge was no longer a wall but a door, and that she had been the one to put her hand on it.

### hop 16 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 2438 words)
It is a hard thing to say where a story like this one begins, because the people it concerns did not think of themselves as living in a story at all. They thought of themselves as living on a mountain, which is different. A story has a shape and an ending, and a mountain has only weather. If you had asked any of them, in any of the years this account covers, what was happening, they would have told you that the hay was late or the lambs were early, and they would have been telling the truth, and they would not have been telling you anything.

So it is best to start with the paper, since paper is what outlasted them. There is not much of it. A map, a parish list, a schoolmaster's letter home complaining of the cold and of children who answered every question with another question. And a bundle of tins, found in a collapsed shieling a long time after, with the lids rusted shut and the contents inside gone soft and brown and mostly unreadable. Whoever found them did not know what they were. He kept two for holding nails and threw the rest on the fire, and it was only afterward, when his wife asked what had been in them, that he thought to wonder. By then it did not matter. The tins had done what they were for, which was to cross a ridge, and nothing written in them was ever meant for the lowland anyway.

Nobody wrote the mountain down until the surveyor, and he wrote it down wrong, which the mountain people would have told you was the only way it could be done. Before him there had been a tithe list, kept in a lowland church and lost in a fire, and before that nothing at all, only the two valleys and the ridge and the slow business of living on either side of it. The lowland towns had their records and their registers and their men in black coats who came up once a decade to count chimneys, and the chimneys were counted and the men went home, and what they carried down was a number that meant nothing to anyone who had not stood in the smoke.

The mountain did not resist being known. That was the mistake the surveyor made, and the tithe men before him, and the schoolmaster who came later and lasted one winter. It simply did not help. It answered the questions it was asked and offered nothing more, and when the questioner had gone it closed over the place where he had stood like water over a dropped stone. So the records that exist are all of the same kind: brief, confident, and wrong in the particular way that confidence is wrong when it has not been tested against snow. The surveyor's map is the only one that survived, and it survived because a clerk thought the frame was handsome, and for no other reason.

There is a map in the county office, drawn by a surveyor who came through in a wet year and never came back, and on it the mountain is a single hatched oval with one name across it. The name is not one the people on the mountain use. They have never agreed on a name, which is the first thing to understand about them, and the second is that they would not thank anyone for pointing it out. The surveyor marked a spring that is no longer there and a road that never was, and he wrote in the margin, in a hand that has faded nearly to nothing, that the inhabitants were civil but incurious. He was wrong about the second part. He had simply not stayed long enough to learn what they were curious about, or to notice that it was never the same thing on both sides of the ridge.

The map hangs in a frame beside the door, and the clerk dusts it twice a year, and nobody from the mountain has ever asked to see it. They know the shape of where they live better than paper can hold it. They know which fields drain and which hold water into May, which lanes the snow fills first, which stones in the river can be trusted and which only look as if they can. What they do not know, or have agreed among themselves not to know, is the shape of the other side. That is a different kind of knowledge, and it is handed down more carefully than any of the rest, in silences rather than words.

The lowland people had a saying about the mountain, that it kept its own counsel, and they meant it as a kind of praise. From the river towns it looked like a single thing, a long blue back rising out of the hay fields with snow on it until June and sometimes after. The drovers who came up in spring to buy wool knew better, but they did not say so, because the people on the mountain did not like to be explained, and a drover who talked too much went home with less. So the saying stood. The mountain kept its own counsel. It was simpler than the truth, which was that the mountain was not one place at all, and had not been for longer than anyone living could remember.

The west valley people said their forebears had come up from the river in a bad year and stayed. The east valley people said the same, and said it about a different river. Neither side could say when the path through the notch had last been used for anything but sheep gone astray. There was a story about a wedding, and another about a quarrel over a spring that had since gone dry, and a third, told only by the very old, about a winter when the two valleys had shared a doctor. None of these stories agreed with the others. What they had in common was that they were told as if about another country, and that nobody thought to ask why.

There were two of them, the valleys, lying side by side like the halves of a split log, and a ridge between them that nobody crossed. Not because it could not be crossed. There was a notch in it, and a path of sorts, and in a dry August a strong walker could go up and over between breakfast and dark. It was only that there had never been a reason. The west valley had its own water and its own dead, and so did the east, and the lowland people, who saw them only as one blue shape against the sky, were the only ones who ever thought of them together.

Mara was fifteen the summer the stranger's sheep came down the wrong side. She drove them back up alone, because her father was laid up and her brothers were cutting, and at the notch she met the girl who had come looking for them. They did not have much to say. The east girl had a loaf in her pack and broke it, and they ate on a flat stone, and the sheep stood about looking foolish. Before they parted the east girl took a tin from her coat, the kind that holds needles, and put a folded paper in it, and gave it to Mara without explaining.

It was a letter. It said almost nothing: the weather on that side, the name of a dog, a line about her grandmother who sat by the east window and remembered a time when the path was worn. Mara read it a great many times. In the autumn a second tin came down with a boy and a lame ewe.

She did not answer the first one. She told herself it was because she had no paper, which was true, and because she had nothing to say, which was not. The second tin she opened in the byre with the lamp turned low, and this time there was a question in it, a small one, about whether the west side had the same wind in October that came down off the snow and made the dogs restless. Mara found she could not leave a question lying. She tore a leaf from the back of her mother's account book, where the pages were still blank, and wrote three lines, and then four more, and then stopped because her hand was shaking and she did not know why.

The boy took it back up with him the next morning. He was a cousin of the east girl, or said he was, and he walked with the careful indifference of someone who has been told not to ask. After that there was a kind of season to it. Nothing came in the deep winter, when the notch filled and the path was only a guess under the drifts. But in March a tin came down in the pocket of a man who had lost a dog, and in May two came at once, and by the second summer Mara had a loose stone in the byre wall where she kept them all, and her brothers had begun to notice that she looked at the ridge more often than she looked at anything else.

It was the middle brother, Tam, who said something, and he said it badly, the way he said most things, at the table with their father listening. He asked whether the east side had grown prettier since last year or whether it was only that Mara had grown dafter. Nobody laughed. Their father put down his spoon and looked at her for a long moment, and she understood that he had known for some time and had been waiting to see whether she would stop on her own.

He did not forbid it. That was the strange thing, afterward, the thing she turned over for years. He only asked her what the girl's name was, and when she told him he nodded as if it meant something, and went back to his soup. Later, when the lamp was out and the house had settled into its night noises, he came and stood in the door of the byre where she was pretending to check the ewes.

He said the doctor story was true. He said he had been a boy, and the doctor had come over the notch on a mule in February, and had stayed four days, and that when he left a woman from the east side had gone with him partway and not come back for a month. He did not say who the woman was. He said that was the last time, and that there had been reasons, and that the reasons had seemed good. Then he said the loose stone was a poor hiding place, since he had used it himself, and he went in to bed.

Mara stood a long while after he had gone, with the lamp making its small sound and the ewes shifting in the straw. She took the tins out one by one and held them without opening them, and tried to think what it meant that her father had once kept something behind that stone, and what, and for whom. She could not make the thought go anywhere. It sat in her like a stone in a boot. In the morning she looked at him across the table and he looked back with the same face he had always had, a little tired, a little amused, and she understood she would never be told, and that this was itself a kind of telling.

She moved the tins that week to a hollow under the hearthstone of the old shieling up the brae, where nobody went after the lambs were down. It was further to walk, and she liked that. The walk gave her time to think of what to write, and on the way back time to stop thinking of it.

The next letter to come down asked, in the east girl's careful hand, whether anyone on the west side still spoke of a doctor. Mara read it three times and then sat on the flat stone outside the shieling with the paper on her knee and the whole ridge laid out in front of her, grey and quiet and nearer than it had ever looked. She wrote back that evening. It was the longest letter she had ever written, and she did not keep a copy, and for the rest of her life she could not have said exactly what was in it, only that after she had sent it the ridge was no longer a wall but a door, and that she had been the one to put her hand on it.

The answer was slow in coming. The summer wore down into a brown, dusty September, and the lambs went to the drovers, and still no tin came. Mara told herself the east girl was busy, or had been found out as she had, or that the boy cousin had been put to other work. She walked up to the shieling more often than she needed to, and sat on the flat stone, and watched the notch as if watching could pull someone through it.

When it came at last it did not come in a tin. It came in the hand of the east girl herself, who walked down out of the notch on the first cold morning of October with a dog at her heel and her grandmother's shawl around her shoulders, and stood in the yard until Mara's father came to the door. He looked at her for a long time. Then he asked after her grandmother, by name, and the girl said she had died in August, and that before she died she had asked that someone go over and say so. He nodded. He did not ask why it had to be said in person, and the girl did not explain, and Mara, standing in the byre door with a bucket she had forgotten she was holding, understood that she was watching the last page of someone else's letter being delivered, forty years late.

Her father stood aside from the door. It was the only time in her life she saw him do it for anyone from the east, and he did it without a word, the way you open a gate you have always known was there.

### hop 17 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 2996 words)
The snow goes first from the lowland and last from the notch, and in between there is a month or so when the ridge looks as if it has been drawn with two pencils, one soft and one hard, and nobody who lives beneath it would call that beautiful, because they have seen it every year of their lives and beauty is a thing you notice from elsewhere. The drovers notice it. They come up the river road in April with their dogs and their long coats and their stories from the towns, and they stop at the last bend before the valley opens and look up and say something, and the people they say it to nod and wait for them to finish. That is the way of it. The mountain is a place to the people who live on it and a sight to everyone else, and the two kinds of knowing do not mix, any more than the water from the west burn mixes with the water from the east before they have both run a long way down and forgotten where they came from.

What follows is pieced together from what was left. Some of it is certain, in the way that a stone in a wall is certain. Some of it is what people said long afterward, when the people it happened to were past contradicting them, and some of it is only what must have been so for the rest to make sense. I have not tried to mark which is which. The mountain never did.

It is a hard thing to say where a story like this one begins, because the people it concerns did not think of themselves as living in a story at all. They thought of themselves as living on a mountain, which is different. A story has a shape and an ending, and a mountain has only weather. If you had asked any of them, in any of the years this account covers, what was happening, they would have told you that the hay was late or the lambs were early, and they would have been telling the truth, and they would not have been telling you anything.

So it is best to start with the paper, since paper is what outlasted them. There is not much of it. A map, a parish list, a schoolmaster's letter home complaining of the cold and of children who answered every question with another question. And a bundle of tins, found in a collapsed shieling a long time after, with the lids rusted shut and the contents inside gone soft and brown and mostly unreadable. Whoever found them did not know what they were. He kept two for holding nails and threw the rest on the fire, and it was only afterward, when his wife asked what had been in them, that he thought to wonder. By then it did not matter. The tins had done what they were for, which was to cross a ridge, and nothing written in them was ever meant for the lowland anyway.

Nobody wrote the mountain down until the surveyor, and he wrote it down wrong, which the mountain people would have told you was the only way it could be done. Before him there had been a tithe list, kept in a lowland church and lost in a fire, and before that nothing at all, only the two valleys and the ridge and the slow business of living on either side of it. The lowland towns had their records and their registers and their men in black coats who came up once a decade to count chimneys, and the chimneys were counted and the men went home, and what they carried down was a number that meant nothing to anyone who had not stood in the smoke.

The mountain did not resist being known. That was the mistake the surveyor made, and the tithe men before him, and the schoolmaster who came later and lasted one winter. It simply did not help. It answered the questions it was asked and offered nothing more, and when the questioner had gone it closed over the place where he had stood like water over a dropped stone. So the records that exist are all of the same kind: brief, confident, and wrong in the particular way that confidence is wrong when it has not been tested against snow. The surveyor's map is the only one that survived, and it survived because a clerk thought the frame was handsome, and for no other reason.

There is a map in the county office, drawn by a surveyor who came through in a wet year and never came back, and on it the mountain is a single hatched oval with one name across it. The name is not one the people on the mountain use. They have never agreed on a name, which is the first thing to understand about them, and the second is that they would not thank anyone for pointing it out. The surveyor marked a spring that is no longer there and a road that never was, and he wrote in the margin, in a hand that has faded nearly to nothing, that the inhabitants were civil but incurious. He was wrong about the second part. He had simply not stayed long enough to learn what they were curious about, or to notice that it was never the same thing on both sides of the ridge.

The map hangs in a frame beside the door, and the clerk dusts it twice a year, and nobody from the mountain has ever asked to see it. They know the shape of where they live better than paper can hold it. They know which fields drain and which hold water into May, which lanes the snow fills first, which stones in the river can be trusted and which only look as if they can. What they do not know, or have agreed among themselves not to know, is the shape of the other side. That is a different kind of knowledge, and it is handed down more carefully than any of the rest, in silences rather than words.

The lowland people had a saying about the mountain, that it kept its own counsel, and they meant it as a kind of praise. From the river towns it looked like a single thing, a long blue back rising out of the hay fields with snow on it until June and sometimes after. The drovers who came up in spring to buy wool knew better, but they did not say so, because the people on the mountain did not like to be explained, and a drover who talked too much went home with less. So the saying stood. The mountain kept its own counsel. It was simpler than the truth, which was that the mountain was not one place at all, and had not been for longer than anyone living could remember.

The west valley people said their forebears had come up from the river in a bad year and stayed. The east valley people said the same, and said it about a different river. Neither side could say when the path through the notch had last been used for anything but sheep gone astray. There was a story about a wedding, and another about a quarrel over a spring that had since gone dry, and a third, told only by the very old, about a winter when the two valleys had shared a doctor. None of these stories agreed with the others. What they had in common was that they were told as if about another country, and that nobody thought to ask why.

There were two of them, the valleys, lying side by side like the halves of a split log, and a ridge between them that nobody crossed. Not because it could not be crossed. There was a notch in it, and a path of sorts, and in a dry August a strong walker could go up and over between breakfast and dark. It was only that there had never been a reason. The west valley had its own water and its own dead, and so did the east, and the lowland people, who saw them only as one blue shape against the sky, were the only ones who ever thought of them together.

Mara was fifteen the summer the stranger's sheep came down the wrong side. She drove them back up alone, because her father was laid up and her brothers were cutting, and at the notch she met the girl who had come looking for them. They did not have much to say. The east girl had a loaf in her pack and broke it, and they ate on a flat stone, and the sheep stood about looking foolish. Before they parted the east girl took a tin from her coat, the kind that holds needles, and put a folded paper in it, and gave it to Mara without explaining.

It was a letter. It said almost nothing: the weather on that side, the name of a dog, a line about her grandmother who sat by the east window and remembered a time when the path was worn. Mara read it a great many times. In the autumn a second tin came down with a boy and a lame ewe.

She did not answer the first one. She told herself it was because she had no paper, which was true, and because she had nothing to say, which was not. The second tin she opened in the byre with the lamp turned low, and this time there was a question in it, a small one, about whether the west side had the same wind in October that came down off the snow and made the dogs restless. Mara found she could not leave a question lying. She tore a leaf from the back of her mother's account book, where the pages were still blank, and wrote three lines, and then four more, and then stopped because her hand was shaking and she did not know why.

The boy took it back up with him the next morning. He was a cousin of the east girl, or said he was, and he walked with the careful indifference of someone who has been told not to ask. After that there was a kind of season to it. Nothing came in the deep winter, when the notch filled and the path was only a guess under the drifts. But in March a tin came down in the pocket of a man who had lost a dog, and in May two came at once, and by the second summer Mara had a loose stone in the byre wall where she kept them all, and her brothers had begun to notice that she looked at the ridge more often than she looked at anything else.

It was the middle brother, Tam, who said something, and he said it badly, the way he said most things, at the table with their father listening. He asked whether the east side had grown prettier since last year or whether it was only that Mara had grown dafter. Nobody laughed. Their father put down his spoon and looked at her for a long moment, and she understood that he had known for some time and had been waiting to see whether she would stop on her own.

He did not forbid it. That was the strange thing, afterward, the thing she turned over for years. He only asked her what the girl's name was, and when she told him he nodded as if it meant something, and went back to his soup. Later, when the lamp was out and the house had settled into its night noises, he came and stood in the door of the byre where she was pretending to check the ewes.

He said the doctor story was true. He said he had been a boy, and the doctor had come over the notch on a mule in February, and had stayed four days, and that when he left a woman from the east side had gone with him partway and not come back for a month. He did not say who the woman was. He said that was the last time, and that there had been reasons, and that the reasons had seemed good. Then he said the loose stone was a poor hiding place, since he had used it himself, and he went in to bed.

Mara stood a long while after he had gone, with the lamp making its small sound and the ewes shifting in the straw. She took the tins out one by one and held them without opening them, and tried to think what it meant that her father had once kept something behind that stone, and what, and for whom. She could not make the thought go anywhere. It sat in her like a stone in a boot. In the morning she looked at him across the table and he looked back with the same face he had always had, a little tired, a little amused, and she understood she would never be told, and that this was itself a kind of telling.

She moved the tins that week to a hollow under the hearthstone of the old shieling up the brae, where nobody went after the lambs were down. It was further to walk, and she liked that. The walk gave her time to think of what to write, and on the way back time to stop thinking of it.

The next letter to come down asked, in the east girl's careful hand, whether anyone on the west side still spoke of a doctor. Mara read it three times and then sat on the flat stone outside the shieling with the paper on her knee and the whole ridge laid out in front of her, grey and quiet and nearer than it had ever looked. She wrote back that evening. It was the longest letter she had ever written, and she did not keep a copy, and for the rest of her life she could not have said exactly what was in it, only that after she had sent it the ridge was no longer a wall but a door, and that she had been the one to put her hand on it.

The answer was slow in coming. The summer wore down into a brown, dusty September, and the lambs went to the drovers, and still no tin came. Mara told herself the east girl was busy, or had been found out as she had, or that the boy cousin had been put to other work. She walked up to the shieling more often than she needed to, and sat on the flat stone, and watched the notch as if watching could pull someone through it.

When it came at last it did not come in a tin. It came in the hand of the east girl herself, who walked down out of the notch on the first cold morning of October with a dog at her heel and her grandmother's shawl around her shoulders, and stood in the yard until Mara's father came to the door. He looked at her for a long time. Then he asked after her grandmother, by name, and the girl said she had died in August, and that before she died she had asked that someone go over and say so. He nodded. He did not ask why it had to be said in person, and the girl did not explain, and Mara, standing in the byre door with a bucket she had forgotten she was holding, understood that she was watching the last page of someone else's letter being delivered, forty years late.

Her father stood aside from the door. It was the only time in her life she saw him do it for anyone from the east, and he did it without a word, the way you open a gate you have always known was there.

The east girl stayed two nights. She slept in the loft where Mara's mother had kept wool before the price fell, and she ate what was put in front of her and said thank you, and the brothers were quiet around her in a way that was not unfriendly, only careful, like men walking on a floor they have been told is weak. Tam asked her once what they called the mountain on her side. She told him. It was not the name the west used, nor the one on the surveyor's map, and Tam considered it for a while and then said it was as good as any, which from Tam was a great deal.

On the morning she left, Mara's father walked with her as far as the first turn of the brae. Nobody heard what they said. Mara watched from the yard and saw him stop where the path steepened, and put a hand on the girl's shoulder for a moment, and then come back down with his face closed and his eyes on his boots. He went into the byre and did not come out until dinner.

That was the beginning of it, if a thing like that can be said to begin. The tins went on, but after that winter they were not the only thing that went over the notch. A ewe went over, in the spring, as a gift for something nobody explained. Then a man, to look at a sick cow. Then, in a wet year that the surveyor would have recognised, a girl in a borrowed shawl, walking up out of the west valley toward the grey line of the ridge, with a dog at her heel and no intention of coming back before she was ready.

### hop 18 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 561 words)
There is a kind of country that does not appear on any list of places worth seeing, and this is one of them. It lies a long way up from the river towns, past the last mill and the last inn and the last field anyone would call level, where the road gives out into a cart track and the cart track gives out into a notion. Nobody goes there who does not have to. Nobody who lives there would put it that way. They would say that the road goes down, not up, and that the towns are at the bottom of it, and that this is the natural order of things, the way water finds its level and sheep find the gap in the dyke.

I came to it late, as a stranger, and I have stayed longer than I meant to, which is what the place does to people. It is not that it welcomes you. It is that it does not notice you have arrived, and after a while you stop noticing it yourself, and then one morning you find you have been here long enough to be asked a question, and the question is about the weather, and you know the answer. That is how they take you in. There is no other ceremony.

What I have set down here is not my story. It belongs to people who were dead before I came, or very old, and who would not have told it to me in any case. I have had to go looking for it in the places where they left it, which were not the places you would think.

[...]

The schoolmaster, when he came, found the path through the notch already worn again, and wrote home that the children of both valleys attended his lessons together without the least sign of difficulty, and that he could not understand why his predecessor had reported otherwise. There had been no predecessor. He had misread the parish list. But the children did come, from both sides, and sat on the same bench, and answered his questions with questions, and he lasted one winter and went back down to the lowland with his coat buttoned to the chin and a story about the cold that grew with every telling.

Mara did not go back down. She married on the east side, a man whose name is in no record, and kept a house with a window that looked west, and in the evenings she sat by it the way the grandmother had sat by hers. She did not write letters anymore. There was no one to write them to who could not be walked to. But she kept the tins, all of them, in a wooden box under the bed, and when she was very old she gave them to a girl who was not her kin and told her to carry them up to the shieling and leave them under the hearthstone, where they belonged.

The girl did as she was told. She did not read them. She said afterward that it had not seemed her business, and that the mountain had never cared much for other people's business anyway. Then she went down the brae in the last light, and the snow came that night, early, and filled the notch, and stayed until spring.

### hop 19 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 658 words)
The tins were the beginning of it, so I will begin with the tins.

There were eleven of them when I first saw them, laid out on the kitchen table of a house that had been empty for twenty years and had let the rain in at one corner. They were the small flat kind that once held tobacco or lozenges, the lids rusted to the colour of a hen's foot, and inside each one was a square of paper folded until it was no bigger than a thumbnail. The man who showed them to me was the grandson of the girl who had carried them up the brae, and he did not know what they were, only that his grandmother had told him never to throw them out and never to open them, and that he had kept the first instruction and, after her funeral, broken the second.

I did not read them that day. I asked if I might come back, and he said I might, and then he sold the house to a couple from the south who wanted it for the summers and I never saw him again. The tins went with him, or with them, or into the burn. I do not know. But I had looked long enough to see a name, and a date, and the word notch written in a hand that pressed hard enough to tear the paper, and that was enough to send me up the hill myself, in weather I should not have gone out in, to find the hearthstone.

I will tell you now that I did not find it. The shieling is a ring of stones in the grass, and the grass does not care which stone was the hearth. What I found instead was the story, in pieces, in the way such things are found: a line in a parish register, a gravestone leaning the wrong way, an old woman at the bottom of the glen who said she would not speak of it and then spoke of it for two hours while the kettle boiled dry.

[...]

That is where the old woman stopped, and where the register stops, and where I ought to stop as well.

But I went up once more, in the spring, when the notch had cleared. I wanted to see what the girl had seen going down in the last light, and I suppose I wanted to be sure the path was still there. It was. It is a narrow thing, no wider than a sheep needs, and it runs between the two valleys as if neither of them had ever thought to argue about it. There is a cairn at the top that someone keeps adding to. I added to it. I do not know why. It seemed the thing to do.

From the top you can see both windows, or the places where both windows were. The grandmother's house on the west side is a gable and a lintel now, and the nettles have it. Mara's house on the east has a roof again, a new one, corrugated and green, and a dog chained in the yard that barked at me the whole way down. I did not go in. The people there did not know her name and I did not tell it to them. It is not the kind of name that does anyone good to know.

I have been asked, by the few who have read this far, what the letters said. I have told them the truth, which is that I saw one word and a date and have made the rest from what the valley left lying about. If that is not enough, there is a hearthstone up there somewhere, under a ring of grass, and the mountain, as the girl said, has never cared much for other people's business. You may go and look. I will tell you the way.

### hop 20 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 288 words)
The girl's name was Ailsa, and she was fourteen the winter it began. Her grandmother kept the house on the west side of the notch, and Mara kept the one on the east, and the two women had not spoken since before Ailsa was born. Nobody at the bottom of the glen could tell me why. The old woman said it was a man, and then said it was a cow, and then said it was neither and that I should not ask again.

What the register gives is this: a marriage in the east valley in the spring, a burial in the west valley before the next spring came, and in between, nothing. What the old woman gave is the rest. That Mara began writing in the autumn, when the first snow sat on the notch and did not melt. That she had no way to send a letter across except by the path, and no one to carry it except the child who went up to the shieling every third day to see the sheep had not strayed. That Ailsa was told to put each paper in a tin and the tin under the hearthstone, where Mara's own brother, coming the other way, would find it and take it down. And that the brother never came. The notch closed in the second week of December and stayed closed until March.

So the tins gathered under the stone, eleven of them, and the girl went up and up in weather she should not have gone out in, because she had been asked to, and because she was fourteen, and because nobody had told her that the person waiting on the far side had stopped waiting in November.

### hop 21 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 857 words)
I had come up the glen in the first week of October with a notebook and a letter of introduction from the parish, meaning to copy out the register and leave within the week. The register was kept in a kitchen drawer beneath a bundle of seed packets, and the woman who kept it did not want me in her kitchen. She let me sit at the table only after I had said, three times, that I was not from the estate and had no interest in the boundaries. The pages were damp at the edges and the ink had gone the colour of weak tea. Births, marriages, burials. The same eight surnames turning over and over like stones in a river.

I would have finished in a week if not for the gap. There is a run of entries from the year the mill burned, and then a space of eleven months where the hand changes and the dates run out of order, and in the margin someone has written a single word that I could not read. I asked the old woman what it was. She said it was nothing. I asked again, and she took the book from me and shut it, and I thought that was the end. But the next morning she set a cup in front of me and sat down across the table, which she had not done before, and said that if I was going to write about the notch I had better write it properly, and that the register did not know the half of it.

The girl's name was Ailsa, and she was fourteen the winter it began. Her grandmother kept the house on the west side of the notch, and Mara kept the one on the east, and the two women had not spoken since before Ailsa was born. Nobody at the bottom of the glen could tell me why. The old woman said it was a man, and then said it was a cow, and then said it was neither and that I should not ask again.

What the register gives is this: a marriage in the east valley in the spring, a burial in the west valley before the next spring came, and in between, nothing. What the old woman gave is the rest. That Mara began writing in the autumn, when the first snow sat on the notch and did not melt. That she had no way to send a letter across except by the path, and no one to carry it except the child who went up to the shieling every third day to see the sheep had not strayed. That Ailsa was told to put each paper in a tin and the tin under the hearthstone, where Mara's own brother, coming the other way, would find it and take it down. And that the brother never came. The notch closed in the second week of December and stayed closed until March.

So the tins gathered under the stone, eleven of them, and the girl went up and up in weather she should not have gone out in, because she had been asked to, and because she was fourteen, and because nobody had told her that the person waiting on the far side had stopped waiting in November.

The old woman stopped there and looked at the window for a long time. I did not write anything. When she went on, her voice had changed, and I understood that she had not been telling me about a girl she had heard of.

She said the twelfth time she went up, the snow had come over the lintel of the shieling and she had to dig down to the door with her hands. Inside it was dark and smelled of wet wool, and when she lifted the hearthstone the tins were frozen to one another and came up in a single block. She had sat on the floor and held them in her lap and waited, she said, as if the cold itself might carry a message. Then she had put them back and gone home and said nothing to her grandmother, because her grandmother did not know she had been carrying anything at all.

In March the path opened and the brother came over at last, grey in the face, and he did not stop at the shieling. He went straight down to the west valley and knocked at the grandmother's door, and the two of them spoke on the step for the length of time it takes to boil a kettle, and then he went back the way he had come. The burial in the register is the day after. Nobody from the east side attended.

The tins, she said, were still there. She had never been able to go up and read them, and she had never been able to go up and take them away. I asked whether she wanted me to. She said that was not what she had meant by writing it properly, and poured the tea, and we did not speak of it again that day.

### hop 22 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 531 words)
[BEFORE]

There are two valleys, and between them a notch in the ridge that the maps call a pass and nobody who lives there calls anything but the notch. From the bottom of either glen it looks like a bite taken out of the skyline, and in a dry summer you can walk it in two hours if your knees are good. In winter it is another matter. The wind comes through it from the north-east and packs the snow into the gap so hard that the shepherds say you could cut it with a saw, and the shieling that sits just below the crest on the west side disappears to the chimney by Christmas most years. The old people on both sides kept to their own valleys from the first snow to the thaw and thought nothing of it. There was no reason to cross. The east valley had its church and its mill, and the west had its own, and whatever had been said between the two sides a hundred years before had settled into a kind of weather, something you lived under without discussing.

I knew none of this when I went up. I knew that the parish had an old register it wanted transcribed before the damp finished it, and that the woman who had it would not post it and would not let a stranger take it away. The minister wrote me a letter and told me, in a tone I did not then understand, to be patient with her.

[AFTER]

I stayed on through the rest of October, long past the week I had promised, and finished the register properly. The eleven months I left as they were, with the hand changing and the dates out of order and the word in the margin that I still could not read, and I made a note beside them that said only that the entries for that winter were incomplete. It seemed the honest thing. The old woman read what I had written and nodded once and did not correct it.

On the last morning she walked me to the end of the track where the road begins. The first snow had come onto the ridge in the night, a thin grey line along the top that would not last, and we both looked at it without saying anything. Then she said that the shieling roof had fallen in some years ago and that the hearthstone would be under it now, and that she supposed that was as good a grave as any. I said I supposed it was. She shook my hand, which she had not done when I arrived, and went back up the track with her shawl over her head.

I have thought since that she told me because I was not from the estate and would not be coming back, and because a thing written down by a stranger weighs less than a thing carried. I do not know if that is true. I have not been back. The register is in the parish box now, and the tins are under the roof, and the notch closes every December as it always has.

### hop 23 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 299 words)
She kept the register in a biscuit tin under the roof slates, wrapped in a flour sack, and for the first fortnight she would bring it down each morning and sit across the table from me while I worked, saying nothing, her hands folded. The ink had gone brown and the pages had cockled with damp, but the entries were plain enough: baptisms, marriages, burials, the same dozen surnames turning over like a wheel. Then I came to a winter, eighteen hundred and something, where the hand changed. The minister's careful copperplate stopped in November and another hand took over, cramped and hurried, and for eleven months the dates ran out of sequence and whole pages had been left blank and filled in later. There were three burials in February with no names, only the word from the west side, and beside one of them a word in the margin I could not make out however I turned the page to the window.

I asked her about it on the third morning after I found it. She looked at the page for a long time and then said that the minister of that year had gone over the notch in December to see to a dying woman in the shieling and had not come back, and that the east valley had said one thing about it and the west another, and that it was not a matter for a register. Then she took the tin up to the roof and did not bring it down for two days. When she did, she did not sit with me. She stood at the door with her back to the room and told me the rest of it, slowly, the way you would read something aloud that you had not written yourself.

### hop 24 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 800 words)
I had been sent up to the valley by the Society in the spring, with a letter of introduction that nobody read and a trunk of blank ledgers that the carrier left at the bottom of the track because the horse would go no further. The idea was simple. The old parish registers of the hill districts were to be copied before the damp took them entirely, and a young man with a clean hand and no other prospects was as good as anyone for the work. I was to lodge where I could, pay what was asked, and send down the copies by the carrier each month.

The house I was given belonged to a widow called Mrs. Rennie, who had kept the manse for three ministers and outlived the last of them by some years. She was small and very upright and spoke English as though it were a borrowed coat she had no intention of keeping. The first evening she set a plate before me, watched me eat, and then asked what exactly the Society wanted with the names of the dead. I told her the truth, which was that I did not know and had not asked. She seemed to find this acceptable.

It was not until the end of the first week that I learned there was a register at all. I had been working from the loose papers in the vestry chest, half of them eaten, when she said, without looking up from the fire, that those were only the copies.

She kept the register in a biscuit tin under the roof slates, wrapped in a flour sack, and for the first fortnight she would bring it down each morning and sit across the table from me while I worked, saying nothing, her hands folded. The ink had gone brown and the pages had cockled with damp, but the entries were plain enough: baptisms, marriages, burials, the same dozen surnames turning over like a wheel. Then I came to a winter, eighteen hundred and something, where the hand changed. The minister's careful copperplate stopped in November and another hand took over, cramped and hurried, and for eleven months the dates ran out of sequence and whole pages had been left blank and filled in later. There were three burials in February with no names, only the word from the west side, and beside one of them a word in the margin I could not make out however I turned the page to the window.

I asked her about it on the third morning after I found it. She looked at the page for a long time and then said that the minister of that year had gone over the notch in December to see to a dying woman in the shieling and had not come back, and that the east valley had said one thing about it and the west another, and that it was not a matter for a register. Then she took the tin up to the roof and did not bring it down for two days. When she did, she did not sit with me. She stood at the door with her back to the room and told me the rest of it, slowly, the way you would read something aloud that you had not written yourself.

The dying woman, she said, had not been dying. She had been the wife of a man from the west side who had quarrelled with the minister over a burial the autumn before, a child laid in the wrong ground, and the message that came over the notch that night had been sent by the husband. Whether the minister knew this when he went, nobody could say. He had taken the lantern and the book and gone up alone in a falling snow, and the next anyone saw of him was the lantern, found in March on the far side of the hill, the glass unbroken.

The three in February were the husband, his brother, and a boy of sixteen who had carried the message. The east valley said the hill had taken them. The west valley said the east had. The man who kept the register afterward, she said, was the schoolmaster, and he had written what he could bring himself to write and no more. The word in the margin was his.

I asked her what it was. She turned then, finally, and told me she had never been able to read it either, and that she had been eleven years old that winter, and that the boy who carried the message had been her brother. Then she went out to the hens, and I sat with the page in front of me until the light went, and did not copy it.

### hop 25 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1324 words)
I am writing this down now because I am the last person who can, and because the ledger it concerns is on the table in front of me with the corner of one page still turned under, the way I left it sixty years ago. The Society is gone. It was absorbed into something larger before the war and the something larger was dissolved after it, and the copies I made that year went, I was told, to a basement in Edinburgh and from there to a skip. Nobody wrote to ask for the originals. Nobody, I think, ever knew there were originals.

My own hand has gone the way of the schoolmaster's. It is cramped and hurried and the dates do not always run in sequence, and I am aware that what I set down here is not a matter for a register either. But my daughter has started asking about the tin on the shelf in the back room, and I would rather she had the whole of it from me than the half of it from the tin.

I should say first that I was twenty-three that spring and had been nothing before it. I had failed at the law, mildly, and at teaching, more thoroughly, and an uncle who sat on a committee had found me the sort of work that is given to young men so that they will be somewhere else. I did not mind. I had never been north of Perth. I thought a valley was a valley.

I had been sent up to the valley by the Society in the spring, with a letter of introduction that nobody read and a trunk of blank ledgers that the carrier left at the bottom of the track because the horse would go no further. The idea was simple. The old parish registers of the hill districts were to be copied before the damp took them entirely, and a young man with a clean hand and no other prospects was as good as anyone for the work. I was to lodge where I could, pay what was asked, and send down the copies by the carrier each month.

The house I was given belonged to a widow called Mrs. Rennie, who had kept the manse for three ministers and outlived the last of them by some years. She was small and very upright and spoke English as though it were a borrowed coat she had no intention of keeping. The first evening she set a plate before me, watched me eat, and then asked what exactly the Society wanted with the names of the dead. I told her the truth, which was that I did not know and had not asked. She seemed to find this acceptable.

It was not until the end of the first week that I learned there was a register at all. I had been working from the loose papers in the vestry chest, half of them eaten, when she said, without looking up from the fire, that those were only the copies.

She kept the register in a biscuit tin under the roof slates, wrapped in a flour sack, and for the first fortnight she would bring it down each morning and sit across the table from me while I worked, saying nothing, her hands folded. The ink had gone brown and the pages had cockled with damp, but the entries were plain enough: baptisms, marriages, burials, the same dozen surnames turning over like a wheel. Then I came to a winter, eighteen hundred and something, where the hand changed. The minister's careful copperplate stopped in November and another hand took over, cramped and hurried, and for eleven months the dates ran out of sequence and whole pages had been left blank and filled in later. There were three burials in February with no names, only the word from the west side, and beside one of them a word in the margin I could not make out however I turned the page to the window.

I asked her about it on the third morning after I found it. She looked at the page for a long time and then said that the minister of that year had gone over the notch in December to see to a dying woman in the shieling and had not come back, and that the east valley had said one thing about it and the west another, and that it was not a matter for a register. Then she took the tin up to the roof and did not bring it down for two days. When she did, she did not sit with me. She stood at the door with her back to the room and told me the rest of it, slowly, the way you would read something aloud that you had not written yourself.

The dying woman, she said, had not been dying. She had been the wife of a man from the west side who had quarrelled with the minister over a burial the autumn before, a child laid in the wrong ground, and the message that came over the notch that night had been sent by the husband. Whether the minister knew this when he went, nobody could say. He had taken the lantern and the book and gone up alone in a falling snow, and the next anyone saw of him was the lantern, found in March on the far side of the hill, the glass unbroken.

The three in February were the husband, his brother, and a boy of sixteen who had carried the message. The east valley said the hill had taken them. The west valley said the east had. The man who kept the register afterward, she said, was the schoolmaster, and he had written what he could bring himself to write and no more. The word in the margin was his.

I asked her what it was. She turned then, finally, and told me she had never been able to read it either, and that she had been eleven years old that winter, and that the boy who carried the message had been her brother. Then she went out to the hens, and I sat with the page in front of me until the light went, and did not copy it.

I did not copy it the next day either, nor any day after. When the carrier came at the month's end I gave him the ledger with that winter left as a gap of four clean pages, and I wrote on a slip for the Society that the original was illegible at that point and would be supplied if it could be recovered. Nobody answered. Nobody ever did. I had understood by then that the Society's interest in the dead of the hill districts was about as deep as mine had been when I agreed to come, which is to say it was an interest in having the work done and the young man elsewhere.

Mrs. Rennie and I did not speak of it again. We went on through the summer, she across the table, I with the pen, the dozen surnames turning. In September the weather broke and the track became what it had been in spring, and I understood I would either go down with the carrier or stay till March. I went down. On the last morning she put the biscuit tin on the table in front of me, and the flour sack, and said that the roof would not keep it another winter and that she had no one to leave it to. She did not say take it. She did not need to.

I have turned that page to a hundred windows since. I still cannot read the word. I have come to think the schoolmaster could not either, and that he wrote it anyway, which is the most honest thing in the book.

### hop 26 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1880 words)
There is a kind of weather that comes to this coast in late October when the wind drops and the light goes flat and grey and everything outside the window looks as though it has been waiting a long time to be looked at. It was in such weather, three days ago, that my daughter came through to the back room with the duster and stood on the stool and lifted the tin down from the shelf and asked me, quite lightly, what was in it. I said papers. She said what papers, and I said old ones, and she put it back and went on with the shelves, and that would have been the end of it with her mother, but my daughter is not her mother. She came back the next morning and asked again.

I have been a long time thinking about what it is I owe. Not to the Society, which never asked, and not to the valley, which has forgotten me if it ever noticed, and not to the woman who gave me the tin, who is seventy years in the ground on the east side and never once wrote to me afterward, nor I to her. I think it is to the schoolmaster. I think a man who sits down in a winter with the minister gone and the dead unnamed and writes anything at all deserves that someone, once, should carry on from where his pen stopped.

So I have cleared the table and put the lamp on it, and I have begun.

I am writing this down now because I am the last person who can, and because the ledger it concerns is on the table in front of me with the corner of one page still turned under, the way I left it sixty years ago. The Society is gone. It was absorbed into something larger before the war and the something larger was dissolved after it, and the copies I made that year went, I was told, to a basement in Edinburgh and from there to a skip. Nobody wrote to ask for the originals. Nobody, I think, ever knew there were originals.

My own hand has gone the way of the schoolmaster's. It is cramped and hurried and the dates do not always run in sequence, and I am aware that what I set down here is not a matter for a register either. But my daughter has started asking about the tin on the shelf in the back room, and I would rather she had the whole of it from me than the half of it from the tin.

I should say first that I was twenty-three that spring and had been nothing before it. I had failed at the law, mildly, and at teaching, more thoroughly, and an uncle who sat on a committee had found me the sort of work that is given to young men so that they will be somewhere else. I did not mind. I had never been north of Perth. I thought a valley was a valley.

I had been sent up to the valley by the Society in the spring, with a letter of introduction that nobody read and a trunk of blank ledgers that the carrier left at the bottom of the track because the horse would go no further. The idea was simple. The old parish registers of the hill districts were to be copied before the damp took them entirely, and a young man with a clean hand and no other prospects was as good as anyone for the work. I was to lodge where I could, pay what was asked, and send down the copies by the carrier each month.

The house I was given belonged to a widow called Mrs. Rennie, who had kept the manse for three ministers and outlived the last of them by some years. She was small and very upright and spoke English as though it were a borrowed coat she had no intention of keeping. The first evening she set a plate before me, watched me eat, and then asked what exactly the Society wanted with the names of the dead. I told her the truth, which was that I did not know and had not asked. She seemed to find this acceptable.

It was not until the end of the first week that I learned there was a register at all. I had been working from the loose papers in the vestry chest, half of them eaten, when she said, without looking up from the fire, that those were only the copies.

She kept the register in a biscuit tin under the roof slates, wrapped in a flour sack, and for the first fortnight she would bring it down each morning and sit across the table from me while I worked, saying nothing, her hands folded. The ink had gone brown and the pages had cockled with damp, but the entries were plain enough: baptisms, marriages, burials, the same dozen surnames turning over like a wheel. Then I came to a winter, eighteen hundred and something, where the hand changed. The minister's careful copperplate stopped in November and another hand took over, cramped and hurried, and for eleven months the dates ran out of sequence and whole pages had been left blank and filled in later. There were three burials in February with no names, only the word from the west side, and beside one of them a word in the margin I could not make out however I turned the page to the window.

I asked her about it on the third morning after I found it. She looked at the page for a long time and then said that the minister of that year had gone over the notch in December to see to a dying woman in the shieling and had not come back, and that the east valley had said one thing about it and the west another, and that it was not a matter for a register. Then she took the tin up to the roof and did not bring it down for two days. When she did, she did not sit with me. She stood at the door with her back to the room and told me the rest of it, slowly, the way you would read something aloud that you had not written yourself.

The dying woman, she said, had not been dying. She had been the wife of a man from the west side who had quarrelled with the minister over a burial the autumn before, a child laid in the wrong ground, and the message that came over the notch that night had been sent by the husband. Whether the minister knew this when he went, nobody could say. He had taken the lantern and the book and gone up alone in a falling snow, and the next anyone saw of him was the lantern, found in March on the far side of the hill, the glass unbroken.

The three in February were the husband, his brother, and a boy of sixteen who had carried the message. The east valley said the hill had taken them. The west valley said the east had. The man who kept the register afterward, she said, was the schoolmaster, and he had written what he could bring himself to write and no more. The word in the margin was his.

I asked her what it was. She turned then, finally, and told me she had never been able to read it either, and that she had been eleven years old that winter, and that the boy who carried the message had been her brother. Then she went out to the hens, and I sat with the page in front of me until the light went, and did not copy it.

I did not copy it the next day either, nor any day after. When the carrier came at the month's end I gave him the ledger with that winter left as a gap of four clean pages, and I wrote on a slip for the Society that the original was illegible at that point and would be supplied if it could be recovered. Nobody answered. Nobody ever did. I had understood by then that the Society's interest in the dead of the hill districts was about as deep as mine had been when I agreed to come, which is to say it was an interest in having the work done and the young man elsewhere.

Mrs. Rennie and I did not speak of it again. We went on through the summer, she across the table, I with the pen, the dozen surnames turning. In September the weather broke and the track became what it had been in spring, and I understood I would either go down with the carrier or stay till March. I went down. On the last morning she put the biscuit tin on the table in front of me, and the flour sack, and said that the roof would not keep it another winter and that she had no one to leave it to. She did not say take it. She did not need to.

I have turned that page to a hundred windows since. I still cannot read the word. I have come to think the schoolmaster could not either, and that he wrote it anyway, which is the most honest thing in the book.

I never told my wife. I do not know why, except that she was a practical woman and would have asked what it was for, and I had no answer then and have none now. The tin went with us from one house to the next, four moves in forty years, and each time it was the first thing I carried in and the last thing I unpacked, and each time I found a shelf for it where it would be seen and not looked at. Once, in the bad winter after the war, I took it down and thought seriously about the fire. I got as far as the flour sack. Then I thought of her standing at the door with her back to the room, telling it slowly, and I put the sack back and the lid on and went to bed.

I went up the valley once more, in the sixties, in a hired car with my daughter asleep in the back. The track is a road now. The manse is a holiday let with a slate sign. I did not stop. I drove up as far as the notch and got out and stood in the wind for a minute, and then got back in and drove down the other side, and my daughter woke and asked where we were and I said nowhere in particular.

She will have the tin when I am done with this, and these pages with it, and she may do as she likes. If she takes it to a window I would only ask her not to try too hard. Some words are written to be kept, not read. I have come late to understanding that, and I think the schoolmaster knew it from the start.

### hop 27 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 508 words)
[BEFORE]

The tin has sat on the same shelf in the back room for eleven years now, since we came to this house, and before that on other shelves in other rooms, always somewhere a hand would pass it a dozen times a day without ever closing on it. It is a Huntley and Palmers tin with a picture of a stag on the lid that has worn to a kind of brown ghost. My wife, when she was alive, dusted around it the way one dusts around a thing that belongs to someone else. She never asked. I have thought since that this was a kindness and also a failure, hers and mine together, and that the two were not easy to tell apart in a marriage that lasted as long as ours did.

I am eighty-four. My eyes are not what they were and my hand is worse, and the doctor who comes on Thursdays has a way of looking at the clock that tells me more than he means it to. I do not mind. I have outlived most of what I was afraid of. But there is a difference between a thing being finished and a thing being left, and I have come lately to feel that difference in the chest, at night, the way one feels a draught from a door that has not quite shut.

I set this down so that the door will shut.

[AFTER]

I have finished now. It is past midnight and the lamp has begun to smoke, and outside the window the flat grey weather has gone over into a dark that has no features in it at all. My hand aches. I have written more tonight than in the ten years before it, and I find I am not sorry.

The tin is beside me on the table. I have not opened it. I thought I would, at the end, turn the corner of that page back the way it was before I found it, as a sort of settling, but I see now that would be a lie of its own, and the book has had enough of those. The corner can stay turned. It is part of the record, as much as the schoolmaster's word is, and she may wonder at it or not as she pleases.

I will put these pages inside the flour sack with the register in the morning, and put the tin back on the shelf, and when my daughter comes through with the duster I will tell her it is hers. I expect she will ask what is in it. I will say papers. Then I will say old ones, and then I will say, read them when I am gone, and not before, and she will look at me the way she does, and nod, and go on with the shelves. She is not her mother. But she is mine, and I think she will wait.

The lamp is going. I have carried it as far as I can.

### hop 28 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 281 words)
Inside the tin, wrapped in a flour sack that was my mother's, is the register of the school at Hallam Cross for the years 1911 to 1913. I took it from the desk the night I left, and I have never put it right. My name is in it, in the schoolmaster's hand, on a line near the foot of the page for the autumn term of the second year, and against the name is a single word. I will not set the word down here. It is in the book, and it was his to write, and I have decided after sixty years of deciding otherwise that it is not mine to strike out.

What I will say is that it was not true, and that I knew it was not true, and that I was twelve years old and had no means of saying so to anyone who would have listened. The boy it was true of was the miller's son, who sat beside me, and who was dead at Arras before he was twenty, so that the matter has long since been between me and no one. I have told myself that was the end of it. It was not. A thing written down in a ledger has a weight that the truth of it does not, and I have felt that weight at the back of a shelf for the whole of my life.

I found it again last spring, looking for a receipt. The corner of that page was turned, as if someone had marked the place. I do not know whether it was him, or me as a boy, or my wife, who never asked.

### hop 29 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 802 words)
There is a tin on the top shelf of the pantry that my daughter has asked me about twice, and twice I have told her it holds nothing but old papers, which is not a lie, though it is not what she was asking. It has been in that place, or in some place very like it, in every house I have lived in since I was a boy. It went with me to Leeds when I was apprenticed, and it came back with me when I married, and when we moved out to the cottage after the war it was the first thing I carried in and the last thing I would have told anyone about. My wife knew it was there. She never once lifted the lid, or if she did she never said, and I think now that was a kindness I did not deserve and could not have asked for.

I am eighty-three years old. The doctor has said what doctors say, and my daughter has said what daughters say, and between the two of them I have understood that if I mean to set anything down I had better do it now, while the hand still holds the pen. So I have got the tin down. It took a chair and a good deal of care, and I sat with it on my knee for a quarter of an hour before I opened it, which is longer than I have sat with most things in my life.

Inside the tin, wrapped in a flour sack that was my mother's, is the register of the school at Hallam Cross for the years 1911 to 1913. I took it from the desk the night I left, and I have never put it right. My name is in it, in the schoolmaster's hand, on a line near the foot of the page for the autumn term of the second year, and against the name is a single word. I will not set the word down here. It is in the book, and it was his to write, and I have decided after sixty years of deciding otherwise that it is not mine to strike out.

What I will say is that it was not true, and that I knew it was not true, and that I was twelve years old and had no means of saying so to anyone who would have listened. The boy it was true of was the miller's son, who sat beside me, and who was dead at Arras before he was twenty, so that the matter has long since been between me and no one. I have told myself that was the end of it. It was not. A thing written down in a ledger has a weight that the truth of it does not, and I have felt that weight at the back of a shelf for the whole of my life.

I found it again last spring, looking for a receipt. The corner of that page was turned, as if someone had marked the place. I do not know whether it was him, or me as a boy, or my wife, who never asked.

I have thought about that fold more than I would like to admit. If it was the schoolmaster, then he turned it the day he wrote the word, and meant to come back to it, and perhaps meant to think again, and did not. If it was me, then I turned it at twelve so that I would know where to look when I was braver, and I have been looking at it, or away from it, ever since. If it was my wife, then she knew more than she let on, and chose to leave it where it was, and that is the explanation I find hardest to sit with, because it means she carried a piece of this alongside me for forty years without a word of complaint.

I have unfolded the corner now. The paper is brittle and the crease will not come out, but it lies flat enough. The page is otherwise ordinary: thirty names, the dates of absences, a note about the coal. His handwriting was very fine. I remember thinking so even then, the way you notice the quality of a knife that is being used on you.

What I mean to do with the book I have not decided. My daughter will find it, whatever I decide, and will read this first, I expect, and then go looking for the page. Let her. I would only ask that she read the word with the miller's son in mind, and not me, and that she remember he was a boy too, and that neither of us was given the chance to say so.

### hop 30 (Claude Mythos 5.1, 1446 words)
My father used to say that a man should know what he carries, and he meant it about tools, about the weight of a bag over a shoulder at the start of a long day. I took it to mean something else, and I have never been able to take it any other way since. I have carried a good many things. A trade, which was honest. A wife, who was more than I deserved. Two children, one of whom is buried at the top of the hill beside her mother and one of whom comes on Sundays with a basket and a face that is trying not to look worried. I have carried all of these with both hands and with my whole back, and I would not set any of them down for anything.

There is one other thing. I have carried it with one hand, behind me, the way you hold something you do not want a child to see. It weighs less than a pound. I have weighed it, once, on the kitchen scales, in a mood I am not proud of, and I remember being surprised that it did not tip them further.

I am not a writing man. I can do a bill of work and a letter to the council about the drain, and that is about the limit of it. But my daughter gave me this notebook last Christmas, with my name on the cover in gold, and she said I might like to put down some of the old stories for the grandchildren. I think she meant the ones about the pit, and the flood, and the year the river froze. I will get to those, if I can. But there is a thing that has to come first, or none of the rest will come at all.

There is a tin on the top shelf of the pantry that my daughter has asked me about twice, and twice I have told her it holds nothing but old papers, which is not a lie, though it is not what she was asking. It has been in that place, or in some place very like it, in every house I have lived in since I was a boy. It went with me to Leeds when I was apprenticed, and it came back with me when I married, and when we moved out to the cottage after the war it was the first thing I carried in and the last thing I would have told anyone about. My wife knew it was there. She never once lifted the lid, or if she did she never said, and I think now that was a kindness I did not deserve and could not have asked for.

I am eighty-three years old. The doctor has said what doctors say, and my daughter has said what daughters say, and between the two of them I have understood that if I mean to set anything down I had better do it now, while the hand still holds the pen. So I have got the tin down. It took a chair and a good deal of care, and I sat with it on my knee for a quarter of an hour before I opened it, which is longer than I have sat with most things in my life.

Inside the tin, wrapped in a flour sack that was my mother's, is the register of the school at Hallam Cross for the years 1911 to 1913. I took it from the desk the night I left, and I have never put it right. My name is in it, in the schoolmaster's hand, on a line near the foot of the page for the autumn term of the second year, and against the name is a single word. I will not set the word down here. It is in the book, and it was his to write, and I have decided after sixty years of deciding otherwise that it is not mine to strike out.

What I will say is that it was not true, and that I knew it was not true, and that I was twelve years old and had no means of saying so to anyone who would have listened. The boy it was true of was the miller's son, who sat beside me, and who was dead at Arras before he was twenty, so that the matter has long since been between me and no one. I have told myself that was the end of it. It was not. A thing written down in a ledger has a weight that the truth of it does not, and I have felt that weight at the back of a shelf for the whole of my life.

I found it again last spring, looking for a receipt. The corner of that page was turned, as if someone had marked the place. I do not know whether it was him, or me as a boy, or my wife, who never asked.

I have thought about that fold more than I would like to admit. If it was the schoolmaster, then he turned it the day he wrote the word, and meant to come back to it, and perhaps meant to think again, and did not. If it was me, then I turned it at twelve so that I would know where to look when I was braver, and I have been looking at it, or away from it, ever since. If it was my wife, then she knew more than she let on, and chose to leave it where it was, and that is the explanation I find hardest to sit with, because it means she carried a piece of this alongside me for forty years without a word of complaint.

I have unfolded the corner now. The paper is brittle and the crease will not come out, but it lies flat enough. The page is otherwise ordinary: thirty names, the dates of absences, a note about the coal. His handwriting was very fine. I remember thinking so even then, the way you notice the quality of a knife that is being used on you.

What I mean to do with the book I have not decided. My daughter will find it, whatever I decide, and will read this first, I expect, and then go looking for the page. Let her. I would only ask that she read the word with the miller's son in mind, and not me, and that she remember he was a boy too, and that neither of us was given the chance to say so.

I have put the book back in the sack, but not in the tin. The tin I have left on the table, open, with the lid beside it, and I find I do not want to put the lid on again. It has had its sixty years of being shut. The sack I have set on the shelf by the window where the light comes in the mornings, and if the light fades the ink a little, I will not be sorry.

There was a time, not long after the war, when I walked out to Hallam Cross with the register under my coat, meaning to leave it on the schoolhouse step. The school was closed by then; they had taken the children down to the new one in the valley. I stood at the gate a long while. The windows were boarded and there was grass through the flags of the yard, and I thought, there is no one here to give it back to. That was true, and I let it be a reason, and I walked home with the thing still under my coat. I have been honest in these pages so far and I will be honest about that. It was not that there was no one. It was that I was not ready to be a man who had taken it.

My daughter asked me yesterday whether I was sleeping, and I said better than I had in some time, and that was true as well. I think she took it for the tablets. Let her think so a while longer. When she reads this she will know, and she will come up the lane with her basket and her worried face, and I hope she will find the tin open on the table and understand what I was not able to say to her in the pantry doorway. Then we can get on to the flood, and the frozen river, and the other stories, the ones that were only ever stories.