Page 66 of She, Wolf, Him.

The Beast is hunting her.

I bar the door and sleep out the daylight, since my work now starts at dusk, and for the first time since the bells went wrong, nothing follows me down.

35

HELPING

AGNÈS

The maid Agnès, pious and dutiful, gave herself to the hunt as to a penance, walking the hills with the men, never tiring, never afraid.

— FOLK SONG FRAGMENT, MARGERIDE, DATE UNCERTAIN

The house runs out of work before the light does. I've scoured a pot that didn't want scouring, and taken down and re-hung my mother's dried herbs for no reason a sane woman could give. My hands have kept me decent through every grief this village ever handed me. This one is a different size. There's no fold in me big enough to take it, and it won't go down swallowed. The only answer I have for a hurt like that is what a herder does with a beast taken by the gripes. Keep it moving. Let it lie down, and it has you.

Yesterday the line went out without me, because I couldn't make myself go the first morning. Today, when the bell brings the men up to the square for the day's line, I put on both shawls and go up with them.

Frost sits thick on the stones, the second hard morning of it running. The church lays its shadow blue across the square, and the cold inside that shadow has an edge the sun won't blunt before noon. Anselme keeps to the steps, above the mud, the register held to his chest, taking names one at a time in the voice he uses for setting down burials. The men come up singly and in pairs. Iron-shod staves, billhooks, a mattock over one shoulder. Their breath stands white over the gathering, making the square steam.

I take my place at the foot of the steps. "I'll walk," I say. I made a vow over her candles. This is the keeping of it.

The talk near me thins without stopping. The men look at me, then find work for their eyes elsewhere. Pascal doesn't look at me at all, which is its own kind of looking. I've watched that look ripen all autumn. Pity in it, and under the pity the unease of men who've marked whose lane the dying keeps choosing. Nobody tells me no, though nobody quite says my name, either.

"I can walk as far as any of you," I say. "Farther, if it's wanted. I know the gullies below the groves better than your dogs do."

"She knows the land." Old Vidal, grey to the eyebrows and built like his own fold wall, says it to the steps, not to me, as testimony is given. "Her father grazed it man and boy."

Anselme looks at me the length of one breath. Then he wets his pencil and writes. Whatever he thinks of a woman on the line, the register keeps it for him. "The lower slopes," he says. "With Vidal and the young Berthou. Stay within calling. When the horn goes, you come in."

I don't thank him. The habit rises, the little worn coin of it ready in my mouth, and for once I let it lie. Nothing has been handed to me here. The work is owed, and nobody in this square owes the dead more than I do.

The priest would have preached a Sunday against it, a woman carrying iron out among the men. The priest is still unburied under his own church, and no one has stood up to do his minding for him.

No one says the hunter's name, not Anselme with his roster and not the men testing their stave-points against the frost. I don't say it either. I don't ask where he is, or why the one man in this parish who reads ground for his bread isn't wanted on it. There's no asking that wouldn't cost him or me or both, and I've nothing left over for costs. I take my place in the line.

The cold scrapes going in, every breath of it. Good. Let it scrape. I've sins to be sorry for that no one living has the office to absolve, and the cold will have to serve.

By midday we're strung across the lower slopes, the chestnut groves falling away on our left into fog, Vidal a field's width to one side of me, the Berthou lad the other. The boy carried his stave two-handed from the first wall on, ready to kill the bracken itself, and for the first hour he talked. "My father wouldn't lend the dog," he told me. "As if the dog'd be any use. I'd sooner have the stave. If it shows itself, I'll—" He doesn't know what he'll do. Neither do I, and mine is the steadier stave. "What'll you do, then," he asked me, "if it comes out at us."

"Shout," I said, "and hold my ground, and let the horn do the rest."

"Shout," he repeated, like it's poor fare. "Shout and stand there."

The woods have since taken the talk off him the way they take the light. He hasn't said a word since the fog shut the village bell away behind us.

No birds move in the groves. "Where've the birds got to, then," a man says, off to my left, making weather-talk of it. Nobody answers. The answer is why we're carrying iron.

I walk my stretch slow, hunting for bracken bent against its lie, and for the soft ground at the spring-heads where anything of weight must print if it drinks. I've no schooling in sign, not as the hunter has it, but this ground is as familiar as my own garden rows, and the Beast's work is work I've learned better than any man on this line. They buried what it leaves. I washed it.

That's the sum of why half of them wanted me out here and the other half wanted me home behind a barred door.

The ground itself has gone strange without moving. We cross above the drover's hollow, where the salt road cuts below, and the men give it a wider berth than the walking asks. We pass under the Crouzet byre wall, limed so white since the autumn's work there that it hurts to look at, the whitewash laid on thick over what stood against it once. We skirt the old pen where wolves opened a ewe in the early autumn, the one killing this year that was no more than it looked. Every one of these places had a plain name at midsummer. They carry other names now, the kind nobody says aloud, and I know each one to its smallest particular.

Margot walked these slopes with me every chestnut harvest since we were small enough to ride the sacks down. She never in her life crossed ground quietly. You heard her come. Sticks going under her clogs, her skirt catching on every third briar, and under it that no-tune of hers, humming whenever her hands or her feet were busy. The hum stopped when a trouble sat on her, and that was how you knew, without her saying, that a trouble had come. All this wood sounds like her trouble now. I keep catching myself listening into the fog for her, not meaning to, the tongue going back and back to the gap where the tooth was. Frost ticks off the branches when the sun leans through. Nothing else answers.

I'd hoped to carry proof down off this hill. A print the men could set their iron against, or so much as a tuft of wool on a thorn. For her, I mean. The churchyard ground over her is two days raw, too new for grass, and this morning I couldn't stand at it longer than a breath. Denis was there before me, with his back to the lane so nobody would see his face, doing his own standing. I left him the ground. The words I owed her got no chance, so I came up here to say it with my feet, which is a poor tongue for an apology, but it's the one sorrow has left me. Slope after slope, spring-head after spring-head, there's nothing. Once, away east, the horn speaks twice, and it's only the line turning on itself. By the time the light goes long we've beaten every gully between the groves and the pasture wall, and the day has given us not so much as a bent fern that couldn't be laid to sheep.

By the last gully I'm going on grief alone, and it drives better than will ever did.