The Jester's Sheep Bell

A Whetstone on Grove Street

At six o'clock on a July morning, before the heat came down off the foothills and flattened everything, Grove Street in Boise belonged to the sprinklers and the sparrows and one small old woman on a bench.

Arthur Pendelton had walked over from the circus lot by the river because he could not sleep past four, and because the festival chairman had told him to look at the block before the crowds did. "Then you'll know where to hide."

So he walked it. One short block of downtown between two busy streets, closed to cars with planters at each end, and lined on both sides with old brick and newer brick and murals. A tall narrow house of red brick with green shutters, the oldest brick house in the city, a plaque said, which had for half a century been a boardinghouse for Basque sheepherders coming in from the hills. A long building with an arched door and, behind it, he would learn, a hundred-year-old handball court with one great wall. A social club with its doors shut and a smell of last night's frying drifting out of a vent. A mural running the length of one wall: green hills, a stone farmhouse with a red roof, a coast with fishing boats, men in red berets dancing, a flock of sheep walking off the painted edge toward a painted Idaho sagebrush, as if the whole of a country had decided to move west and had got as far as this wall.

The air smelled of wet pavement and cut grass and, faintly, from the foothills, of sage. It was going to be a hundred degrees by four o'clock, and everyone in Boise had told him so, with pride.

The old woman on the bench was sharpening a pair of shears.

They were not scissors. They were a pair of long, blunt-nosed iron blades joined at the back by a bow of springy steel, the kind of shears made for taking the fleece off a sheep by hand, and she had them open across her knees, and a gray whetstone in her right hand, and she was drawing the stone along the edge of one blade in long, even, patient strokes, and spitting on it, now and then, with great accuracy.

She was tiny, brown and wrinkled as a walnut, in a black cardigan in spite of the heat, with white hair cut short and a red beret pulled down over one ear. A cane with a carved handle leaned against the bench beside her, and beside that a canvas bag. She did not look up.

"You are the clown," she said, in English.

Arthur was in his cardigan and his plain gray trousers, as he always was out of costume. He stopped.

"I'm the man who carries the chairs."

"Gorka said they were sending a clown. Gorka said he is very tall and walks like a heron." She drew the stone along the blade. "You walk like a heron. Sit down. You are blocking my light."

He sat down at the other end of the bench. She went on sharpening.

Then, without any warning at all, she began to sing.

It was quiet, a plain, firm, unornamented voice, an old woman's voice cracked through like a teacup, and it went to a tune that rose and settled and rose again, and the words came out of her quick and certain, in a language Arthur did not know at all, one line after another, eight lines, with a little lift at the end of every second one where the sound of the word matched the sound of the word before it. He did not understand a syllable. He understood perfectly that it was about him. She did not stop sharpening the whole time, and at the end she spat on the stone, and sniffed, and looked at him for the first time.

Her eyes were black and very bright.

"Well?" she said.

"It was beautiful," said Arthur. "I suspect it was also rude."

The old woman made a small sound that might, in a less dignified person, have been a laugh.

* * *

A bicycle came down the block, fast, and braked hard at the bench with a squeal. The girl on it was perhaps seventeen, long-legged and dark-browed, in running shorts and a faded green T-shirt with a sheep on it, a paper cup of coffee in her free hand and an expression of deep and practiced exasperation.

"Amama," she said. "It is six in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

"You told Aita you'd wait for him to drive you. You walked. With your hip. Down the hill. In the dark."

"It was not dark. There were stars." The old woman held out her hand for the coffee without looking, and the girl put it into her hand, and she drank. "Too much milk."

"You always say too much milk."

"Because you always put too much milk." She jerked her chin toward Arthur. "This is the clown."

The girl looked at Arthur properly for the first time, up and then a long way further up. "You're the clown?"

"So I'm told."

"I'm Maite. Arrieta. This is my grandmother. Begoña Arrieta. Everybody calls her Bego." Maite took her phone out of her back pocket and looked at it, and showed it to her grandmother, and then, after a moment's thought, to Arthur. It was the family's calendar, crowded with small colored entries, and on today's date someone had typed, in capital letters: AMAMA, CLOWN, 6 A.M., GROVE ST. DO NOT LET HER WALK. "That was Aita," said Maite. "My dad. He put it in last night. She read it. That's why she walked."

"A calendar is not a fence," said Bego Arrieta.

Arthur looked at the shears across her knees. "May I ask what you said? In the song?"

Maite drank some of the coffee herself, out of her grandmother's cup, and was swatted. "She said," Maite began, and stopped, and looked at her grandmother, and seemed to edit. "She said you're too tall to be a sheep and too old to be a clown, and the committee spent all the money from the raffle on you, and she'll make the best of it because she's made the best of worse." She paused. "That's the polite version."

"What's the other version?"

"There's a donkey in the other version."

"There is always a donkey," said Bego, satisfied. "It rhymes with a great many things."

* * *

The Hrynchuk Family One-Ring Circus had come to Boise because of a letter, and the letter had come because of a retirement, and Lesia Hrynchuk had told Arthur the whole story twice on the long drive down from Montana with the expression of a woman who suspected she was being managed by the universe.

For more than fifty years, the summer festival on the Basque Block had closed its Friday night with a comic act. It was always the same act, more or less. A lost sheep wandered through the festival, through the crowds and the food lines and the dancers, and a herder chased it with his long stick, and the sheep hid, and the herder found it, and everybody laughed and went home. A retired ironworker named Pello had played the sheep since 1997 in a fleece costume of his own making, with great success and increasing difficulty, and in March, at the age of seventy-seven, he had moved to Arizona to be near his daughter and announced that he had played his last lamb.

Gorka Aldape, the festival chairman, a round anxious man with a mustache, had written to every circus he could find in North America. Only one had written back. Then a polite foundation nobody had ever heard of had offered to cover the summer's fuel, in honor, it said, of small shows reaching small festivals.

"That's four, Dido," Lesia had said. "Four years. Somebody."

"The Prime Minister," Taras had said comfortably, "has relatives in Idaho."

Arthur had looked out the window at the Montana grass and said nothing at all.

* * *

"Fifty-six years of sheep," said Bego Arrieta now, on the bench, "and every one of them I wrote."

"You wrote the act?"

"Since 1971. Before Pello there was Patxi, and before Patxi there was a dentist from Nampa who was very bad. I write it. Every year. The committee changes, the chairman changes, the sheep changes. The writer stays." She put down the whetstone and reached into the canvas bag beside her and brought out something heavy wrapped in a dish towel, and unwrapped it on her lap.

It was a bell.

A big one, the size of a large man's fist, long and narrow and flared at the mouth, made of iron that had been dipped in brass long ago and had worn down to dark metal at the edges and stayed gold in the hollows. It hung from a broad collar of thick old leather, cracked and oiled and cracked again, fastened with a wooden peg, and on the collar someone had burned, in small careful letters, T.U. 1924.

She lifted it by the collar and shook it once.

The sound went down Grove Street like a dropped tray. There was nothing pretty about it: a big, hollow, flat, clanking bong, with a rattle inside it, and every sparrow on the block went up at once, and a man hosing the sidewalk outside the club turned around with his mouth open.

"My father's," said Bego. "Tomas Urkiaga. He came from Ispaster, in Bizkaia, in 1920, when he was seventeen, and he walked behind sheep in the mountains of this state for fourteen years. This was on the old wether who led his band. The bellwether. Where the bell goes, the sheep go. You put the bell on the one with sense. In a band of two thousand sheep there are maybe twenty with sense." She held it out to him. "This year the sheep wears this."

Arthur took it. It was heavier than it looked, and warm from her lap.

"Madam," he said, "a lost sheep who is trying to hide, wearing this, would not be able to hide anywhere."

"Yes," said Bego Arrieta. "That is the joke. Pello never understood that. Thirty years he hid too well."

* * *

Maite walked her grandmother up the hill at seven, pushing the bicycle, Bego on her other arm with the cane, both of them arguing in a mixture of English and the other language so quick that Arthur, watching them go, could not tell where one stopped and the other started. He noticed that Maite never answered in the other language. He noticed, too, that she laughed at two of her grandmother's remarks before she had translated them, or rather instead of translating them, and then looked over her shoulder to see whether he had noticed, and turned away when she saw that he had.

He walked back to the lot along the river with the bell wrapped in its dish towel under his arm. The cottonwoods along the water were full of light. People were already running on the path in the heat, and cyclists, and a man fishing, and the circus tent stood red and white on its patch of trampled grass with Taras out in front of it on the seven-foot unicycle in his undershirt, riding slow circles in the dew and looking at the sky.

In the Sardine Can, which stood at the edge of the lot under a cottonwood with its leaking east window propped open for the air, Arthur put the bell on the shelf beside the dented enamel mug. Then he took out the old pastille tin from his pocket and opened it and looked, as he did most mornings, at what was inside: two of his grandmother Nell's last buttons, a dozen small paper sparrows with spoon-shaped tails, and a buff pasteboard ticket that said ADMIT ONE and nothing else.

He had carried it since December. He had not yet found the rest of the sentence. On the twenty-fourth of that month he had knocked, in his cardigan, on a door in a yellow-brick two-flat in Chicago, and the extra chair had been there at the table, as promised, and a very old man in a shell-banded hat had looked up from his soup and said, "Money man. You're late." It had been one of the better evenings of his life. He had still not known what to write on the ticket.

He shut the tin and settled the tiny earpiece into place.

"Reginald."

"Arthur. It is two in the afternoon in Edinburgh and raining sideways. How is the desert?"

"It isn't a desert. There's a river. There are a great many trees. There is also a woman of eighty-four who sharpens sheep shears on a public bench at dawn and sings at people."

"Sings what?"

"Verses. In Basque, I think. Eight lines. Rhymed. Made up on the spot. She made one up about me in the time it took to sharpen one blade."

There was a pause from Scotland, and the faint sound of a page being turned.

"Then she is a bertsolari," said Sterling. "An improvising poet. It is a very old art in the Basque country and a very serious one. They sing to set tunes and set meters, and they are given a subject on the spot and must answer in rhyme within moments. They hold championships. Thousands of people fill arenas to hear them." Another page. "It is generally done in pairs, I believe. One sings, and the other answers."

Arthur looked at the bell on the shelf.

"Nobody answered her," he said.

Thirty Men at One Table

The Arrietas lived on the Bench, the long shelf of land that rises above the river on the south side of Boise, in a brick bungalow from the 1940s with a deep porch and a grape arbor so old and so heavy that it had to be propped up in three places with lengths of steel pipe. Behind the house was a garden in raised beds: tomatoes, beans on strings, and two long rows of small red peppers that Bego said were the only peppers in Idaho worth the water. And in the side yard, under a box elder, parked on four rubber tires with its tongue resting on a cinder block, stood a sheep wagon.

Arthur stopped on the sidewalk to look at it.

It was the old kind, the kind that had carried a herder's whole life across the mountains for a hundred years: a wooden box on wheels with a rounded canvas top over iron hoops, like a covered wagon that had been folded small. A stovepipe came up through the canvas. There was a little Dutch door at the front with a step below it, and a window with a red-checked curtain, and a horseshoe nailed above the door, points up. The canvas was new and white, the wood had been sanded and oiled, and somebody had painted the wheels green.

"My grandfather's," said Maite, coming down the porch steps to meet him. "Well. His boss's. He lived in it fourteen summers. When the outfit sold up in the sixties the boss gave it to him, and he towed it home behind a truck and parked it there and never moved it again. Amama uses it for her office." She looked at the wagon with an expression Arthur could not read. "She writes the sheep in there. She says she can't think in a house."

* * *

Dinner was in the backyard under the arbor, at a long table made of two picnic tables pushed together and covered with a white cloth, with the grapes hanging over it in hard green bunches and the light going gold and then pink over the roofs of the Bench.

Xabi Arrieta did the grilling. He was a big, slow, sunburned man of fifty-eight with his mother's black eyes and a gray mustache, in a pressed short-sleeved shirt that was already giving up, and he stood over a half-barrel grill in the corner of the yard turning chorizos and thick pink slices of marinated pork loin with a long fork and the concentration of a man defusing something. He shook Arthur's hand once, hard, and said, "Glad you came. Don't let her give you the wine from the jug," and went back to the grill.

His wife, Amra, laughed at that. She was a slim, quick, dark-haired woman of fifty with reading glasses pushed up on her head and a pen behind her ear, which, Arthur would learn, was where her pen always was. She had come to Boise in 1997, she told him, at nineteen, from a town in the north of Bosnia, with her mother and a suitcase and nothing else, and had been met at the airport by a volunteer with a sign and by Xabi's sister, who had been working that year at the refugee office.

"Itziar brought me home for dinner the first week," said Amra. "Because I looked hungry. Bego looked at me and said, in English, in front of everybody, this one is too thin and she will marry a Basque. I didn't speak much English. I understood that." She set a platter on the table. "It took eleven years. She told everybody she was right the whole time."

"I was right the whole time," said Bego, from the head of the table.

The platter held burek: a great coiled round of thin flaky pastry, brown and glistening, filled with spiced beef, cut into wedges. Beside it, a bowl of white beans cooked soft with peppers and onions and pieces of the chorizo. A dish of croquetas, small and golden, that Bego had made that morning and that nobody else was allowed to have made. A salad of tomatoes from the beds, so ripe they had split, with nothing on them but oil and salt. Bread. And, on the end of the table nearest Bego, a gallon jug of red wine with a handle, which Xabi moved, as he sat down, to the end of the table furthest from his mother.

Bego looked at the jug, and then at her son, and moved the croquetas out of his reach.

* * *

They ate for a long time, the way people eat outside on a summer night when nobody has to be anywhere. Arthur listened. That was what he was best at, and he had discovered long ago that it was also the thing people gave him most readily, since a tall mild man who carries chairs and laughs at the right moment is not regarded by anybody as a threat.

He learned that the outfit was the Arrieta Sheep Company, since 1972, a single band of about two thousand ewes. That the sheep wintered on the desert south of Mountain Home, lambed in the spring near Glenns Ferry, and went up in June into the high country above the South Fork of the Boise River, on a grazing permit Bego's husband had bought from an old outfit going out of business. That they had one herder, a man from Peru, the best the company had ever had.

"Edwin," said Xabi. "Third summer. He could run the whole thing without me. Some days I think he does."

He said this cheerfully, but Arthur noticed that he had stopped eating while he said it, and that Amra, across the table, had looked at him over her glasses for a moment and then down at her plate.

He learned that Bego's husband, Joxe, had come over in 1957, at nineteen, from a town called Markina, on a three-year contract to herd sheep, under a special law that let the sheepmen of the West bring young herders straight from the Basque country because nobody born in America would do the work. That he had met Bego at a dance at the Basque club in 1961, when she was seventeen, and married her in 1963, and died in 2015, in the hospital, complaining about the coffee.

"He asked me to dance," said Bego, "because I was the only girl at the dance who could answer him."

"Answer him?"

"He sang at me. Across the room. A bertso. About my shoes." She buttered a piece of bread with great care. "So I answered. About his ears. Everybody laughed at him. He came across the room and said, again. I said, about what. He said, anything. We did it for forty minutes. The band stopped playing to listen." She put the bread down. "Then he said, will you dance. I said, I don't dance with herders, they smell of sheep. He said, I have had a bath. I said, when. He said, Tuesday."

Maite was laughing into her napkin.

"So you married him," said Arthur.

"Not then. Then I went home." She picked up her bread again. "Then I married him. He was the only man in Idaho who could keep up with me. Nearly."

* * *

"She grew up in the boardinghouse," Maite told Arthur later, while Xabi and Amra carried the plates in and Bego sat back with her eyes half shut and her hands folded on her stomach, listening, Arthur suspected, to every word. "The brick one on the block, with the shutters? Not that one. Another one. It's gone now. Her parents ran it. Every winter, when the sheep came down to the desert, the herders came into town, the ones with no family, and lived there till spring. Thirty men. Every night at one long table."

"That's right," said Bego, without opening her eyes. "Thirty men. One table. Two soups. My mother cooked. My father carved the meat and kept the peace. I carried the bowls." She opened her eyes. "And they sang."

"Bertsos?"

"Every night. After the soup. Somebody would start. A man from Lekeitio sings about a man from Ea, that his feet smell. The man from Ea answers that at least his feet can count to ten, not like Lekeitio. And then another. And another. Thirty men from thirty villages who had spent all summer alone on a mountain talking to dogs. They had a great deal saved up." She held up her hand and began, very slowly, to tap the fingers against her thumb, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, one, two, three, four, five, six. "I learned to count this way. The lines. Seven, and six, and seven, and six. Before I learned my times tables. My mother said, the girl counts on her fingers like a peasant. My father said, she is counting the right things."

"When did you first answer one?" said Arthur.

Bego looked at him for a long moment.

"Nine years old," she said. "Winter of 1953. There was a man from Gernika, a big man, with a voice like a cow in a well. He sang a bertso about me. That I was a little mouse who carried bowls and could not lift a bucket. Everybody laughed. So I put down the soup and I answered him." She smiled, slightly. "I said that the little mouse had seen him try to lift the bucket of his own wine that afternoon and he had failed. Thirty men stood up from the table and shouted. The man from Gernika stood up and bowed to me." She folded her hands again. "My mother made me wash the dishes alone for a week for answering a grown man. My father gave me a quarter. Secretly. He said, never stop."

"And you didn't," said Arthur.

Something passed across the old woman's face, and was gone.

"The men stopped," she said. "Not me. The men got old, and went back to the old country, or bought ranches, or died. The boardinghouses closed. The young ones never learned. There are six people in Boise now who can make a bertso, and four of them are in the cemetery." She looked at Maite. "And one of them won't."

Maite looked down at the table.

"I don't speak it well enough, Amama."

"You understand every word."

"Understanding's different."

"Yes," said Bego. "It's easier." And then she said something quick and sharp in the other language, and Maite went red, and did not translate it, and got up and went into the house.

* * *

Amra came out with coffee and a laptop, and sat down beside Arthur with the screen turned toward him, partly, he thought, to change the subject, and partly because she wanted to show somebody.

"The ledger," she said. "From the boardinghouse. Bego's mother kept it from 1936 to 1968. Every boarder, every room, every week. I've been photographing it page by page and typing it in, a little every winter, for the whole family. I'm a bookkeeper. I like a ledger." She scrolled. Each page appeared as a photograph of brown-edged paper in a looping, upright, faded hand, and beside it Amra's neat transcription. Names. Villages. Rooms. Dates in and dates out. Dollars and cents. Here and there, a note.

"Look," said Amra. "Room 4. Patxi Zabala, from Ea. Arrived November 1949. Left April 1952. Three winters." She pointed. "Owes two dollars and forty cents. And in the margin, in 1958, in different ink, look: Paid. Sent from California. With interest and a photograph of his wife." She laughed. "Every page is like this. Every page is a novel."

Bego, at the head of the table, had begun to doze. Then she opened her eyes, said "He also owed for a broken chair," and closed them again.

* * *

It was nearly dark when Xabi walked Arthur out to the gate. The sheep wagon stood white under the box elder, and somebody, Bego presumably, had left a light on inside it, so that the canvas glowed like a paper lantern.

Arthur stopped at the gate.

"Your mother said something at dinner about a tree," he said. "When she was talking about her father. She started to tell me, and you said, Ama, not the tree."

Xabi sighed, a long sigh, from the bottom of a large chest.

"There's a photograph," he said. "Nineteen thirty-one. My grandfather in the mountains, standing next to an aspen tree. There's a carving on the tree. A woman in a hat. He told my mother he carved it in 1927, up in the high country, and that it was her mother. Before he ever met her. Before she ever came over. He said he carved a wife in a tree and five years later she walked into the boardinghouse wearing the same hat." Xabi rubbed his face. "My mother's been asking me to find that tree for forty years. Forty years. She says it's above the forks of a creek, a day's walk from the river road. There are ten thousand aspens up there. There are fifty creeks with forks. Half the old trees are dead. And I have two thousand sheep and one herder and a bank."

He opened the gate for Arthur.

"Every summer she asks," he said. "Every summer I say next year." He looked back at the glowing wagon. "She's eighty-four. I keep thinking I've got more next years than I have."

He said good night, and went back up the walk, and Arthur went down the hill toward the river in the warm dark, with the smell of the grill still on his cardigan, past porches where people sat in the heat with the lights off, talking quietly, and lawn sprinklers ticking, and somewhere a dog, and somewhere a radio playing a ball game, and above the city, very faintly, the long low line of the foothills against a sky that never quite got dark.

Hordago

The game was mus, and it was played every afternoon at three o'clock at the back of the Basque club on Grove Street, at a square table under a ceiling fan that turned so slowly it seemed to be thinking about something else, and Arthur was told about it the way you are told about a family illness.

"You don't have to play," said Maite, at the door. "Nobody has to play. But if Amama asks, you play. And if you play, you lose. And if you lose, you lose politely. And whatever you do, don't look at Txomin's face."

"Why not?"

"Because he's talking with it," said Maite. "And it's not to you."

* * *

The club was cool and dim after the white blaze of the street, a long room with a wooden bar down one side and photographs on every wall: dance troupes from every decade, frozen in mid-leap; a sheep camp in snow; handball players with taped hands posed in front of the same high pale wall. Behind the bar a woman was cutting chorizo into coins. At the back, at the square table under the fan, sat Bego Arrieta in her red beret, and across from her a very old man who appeared to be made almost entirely of eyebrows.

"Txomin," said Bego. "Ninety. My enemy. Fifty years he cheats me."

Txomin looked up at Arthur, and his eyebrows moved, one up and one down, and then both down, and he looked back at his cards.

"He says hello," said Bego. "He also says you are too tall to be lucky. Sit. You are my partner. Taras is his."

Arthur had not known Taras was coming. Taras had not, as far as Arthur could tell, known either. But there he was, coming in from the street in his good brown jacket with his cap in his hand, blinking in the dimness, having been fetched from the lot by Maite on the grounds that the old people needed a fourth and he was the oldest available.

"Cards," said Taras, seeing the table. He brightened. "I am very good at cards."

"Not this one," said Maite. "Nobody's good at this one the first time. Sit there."

* * *

Mus, Arthur discovered over the next hour, is played by two pairs of partners with a deck of forty cards of a Spanish kind, with coins and cups and clubs and swords, and it is a game of betting on four things in turn: the highest hand, the lowest hand, the pairs and the points. That was the easy part. The hard part was that you were allowed, and indeed expected, to tell your partner what you held. Not in words. With your face.

"There are signals," said Maite, standing behind Arthur's chair. "You bite your lip, that's one thing. You put your tongue in your cheek, that's another. You close one eye. You shrug one shoulder. Everybody at the table can see. That's the point. The other side sees it too, and they have to decide if you're lying."

"Are you allowed to lie?"

"Lying with your face," said Bego, "is the whole game. Lying with your mouth is for politicians."

Arthur tried to keep his face as still as he kept it in the cloakroom when somebody guessed too near the truth about him. It turned out he was quite good at this, and also that it did not matter, because he did not know what any of his cards were worth.

Taras was a disaster.

Taras had a twitch. It was in his left eyelid, and it had been there, he told the table cheerfully, since 1971, when a horse had kicked a bucket of water at him in Swift Current, and it came on whenever he concentrated. It came on now. Every few seconds his left eye winked, broadly, slowly, unmistakably, at nobody.

The first time it happened, old Txomin went very still. The second time, his eyebrows went up into his hairline. By the fifth, he had put his cards face down on the table and was staring at his partner with an expression of profound and growing respect.

"What is he telling you?" Bego demanded of Txomin, in English.

Txomin moved one eyebrow.

"He says," Bego translated, with narrowed eyes, "that your Ukrainian is the best mus player he has seen in sixty years. That he signals so often nobody can tell which signal is true." She turned on Taras. "You have played before."

"Never," said Taras, and winked.

* * *

They played for two hours. The fan turned. The woman behind the bar brought small glasses of red wine and a plate of chorizo coins and slices of hard bread and did not charge anybody. Old men came in from the street and stood behind Txomin with their arms folded, and then a younger man in a work shirt who said he was only stopping in for a minute and stayed for an hour. Every time Taras winked, one of them groaned.

Bego played as she did everything: fast, fierce and talking. She kept up a stream of remarks in two languages at once, at her cards, at her partner, at Txomin, at the ceiling fan, at the Ukrainian. Arthur understood perhaps a third of it. He understood enough to know he was being blamed for almost everything.

And then, late in the second hour, with the score close and the room crowded, Bego looked at her cards for a long time, and looked at Txomin, and looked at Taras, and put her small brown hand flat on the table, and said, in a voice that rang:

"Hordago!"

The watching men drew in their breath together.

"It means everything," Maite whispered to Arthur. "All in. The whole game on this one bet. You say it, the other side either takes it or runs. If they take it, cards up. Winner takes the game."

Txomin looked at his cards. His face did nothing at all. He looked at Taras.

Taras, who had no idea what had just happened, smiled kindly at Bego, and said, in a reasonable imitation of her accent, "Hordago."

The room exploded.

"He took it!" said the man in the work shirt. "The Ukrainian took it!"

"He doesn't know what it means," said Arthur.

"Doesn't matter," said three people at once. "He said it."

Cards up.

Bego had three kings. Taras had, on careful examination by every man in the room, nothing at all of any value, except that Txomin, his partner, had held the one hand at the table that beat three kings, and had been sitting on it for twenty minutes, waiting for exactly this.

There was a silence. Txomin gathered the cards. His face did nothing. But his eyebrows, very slowly, went up, and stayed up, in what everybody present agreed afterward was the first smile anyone had seen on him since 1998.

* * *

Bego did not say anything for some time. She drank her wine. She looked at Taras over the top of the glass, a long, measuring, unfriendly look, the look of an old general who has been beaten by an amateur through sheer luck and is deciding whether to have him shot.

Then she set down the glass, and she sang at him.

It was quicker than the verse on the bench had been, and harder, and the tune was a different one, a marching kind of tune with a little skip in it. The room went quiet the moment she started. Even the woman behind the bar stopped cutting chorizo. The men behind Txomin's chair nodded along with the meter, one of them tapping it on the back of the chair with a finger, and at the turn of every second line, when the rhyme came down on its word, two of them laughed out loud.

When it was finished there was a smattering of applause from the watchers and a "Tori!" from the man in the work shirt, which Maite said meant, roughly, there, take that.

"What did she say?" Arthur asked.

"That he plays mus like a goat plays the piano," said Maite. "That he won because the goat sat on the right keys. That in her day a man who said hordago with nothing in his hand would be thrown in the river, and in Ukraine they probably make him president." She hesitated. "There was more. About his hat."

Everybody was looking at Taras.

Taras Hrynchuk, who was eighty years old, who had built every unicycle on his show with his own hands, and who had in his long life been insulted by mayors, fire marshals, three provincial health inspectors and one alligator, sat with his cap on his knee and his hands folded on top of it and looked at Bego Arrieta with great seriousness. His left eye was not twitching. He was concentrating so hard that it had stopped.

Then he stood up.

He put his cap on. He set his feet. He put one hand on the back of his chair. He looked at the ceiling fan as if it had been put there to remind him of something.

And he sang back.

It was in Ukrainian, or something older and wilder than the Ukrainian Arthur had heard Vira use at the coffee urn. It was short, just two long lines, sung to a quick bouncing tune that sounded like a dance being stamped out in a wooden room, and it ended on a high shout. And then, before anybody could clap, he sang another two lines to the same tune, and another, and a fourth, each couplet going faster, each landing on its rhyme with a stamp of his boot on the club floor. He had a big rough old voice that had been calling across circus lots for sixty years, and it filled the room to the photographs.

When he finished, he sat down, took his cap off again, and put it back on his knee.

Nobody said anything. Then the man in the work shirt said, "What was that?"

"Kolomyika," said Taras. "From my grandmother. In the mountains, at a wedding, somebody sings two lines to make fun of somebody. Then the other one sings back. All night." He shrugged. "Hutsul people. Very rude. Like Basques."

"What did you say?" said Bego.

Taras looked around the table for a translator. There was none. Vira was at the lot, peeling onions for forty. Then he seemed to remember that he spoke English.

"I said," he said, "that the lady is a fox who shouts at hens. That she thinks she is very clever, and she is. That I came to Idaho for sheep and found a wolf in a red hat. And that in the mountains where my grandmother came from, if a woman sings at a man like that across the table, it means she wants him to answer." He considered. "That one did not rhyme in English. In Ukrainian it is very good."

The room roared.

Bego Arrieta did not laugh. She sat very straight in her chair and looked at Taras for a long time with her black eyes very bright and her mouth pressed tight.

"Goat," she said at last, to her cards.

But Arthur, sitting beside her, saw that her hand on the table was shaking slightly, and that she had to put the other hand over it to make it stop.

* * *

Maite walked out with him into the heat at a quarter to six. The street shimmered. The planters at the end of the block were full of red geraniums wilting like old ladies at a funeral.

"She's never had anybody answer," said Maite. She did not seem to be saying it to Arthur. "Not since Aitite. He died when I was four. I remember them at the table. Every night. Sometimes it was just about the salt." She took her phone out, and opened something, and showed him: a long list, in two columns, with a little play button beside each line. "I started this when I was eight. Amama's words. The ones she uses on people. I recorded her saying each one and wrote down what it means." She scrolled. Astoa, donkey: used for Aita, the mayor, the referee, and every football team Aita watches. Lotsagabea, shameless one: used for me. Txoriburu, bird-head: used for everybody in Nampa. "There's a hundred and forty."

"Are you going to add goat?"

"Goat's already in there," said Maite. "Number three." She put the phone away. "I've never heard her answered. Not by a stranger. Not since him." She looked back at the club door. "She won't sleep tonight."

"Neither will he," said Arthur.

He was right. At two in the morning, by the light of the lot lamp, Arthur looked out of the Sardine Can's propped east window and saw Taras Hrynchuk sitting on the ring curb in his undershirt in the warm dark, all alone, with his cap on his knee, moving his lips.

The Camp Tender

Xabi Arrieta picked him up at half past four on Saturday morning in a white pickup truck with a dented tailgate and a dog box in the bed, and they drove out of Boise in the dark with the windows down and the cab full of the smell of coffee and canvas and, from the back, of the week's groceries for one man.

"Camp tender," said Xabi, when Arthur asked what exactly they were doing. "That's the job. The herder lives up there with the sheep, all summer, alone. Somebody has to bring him what he needs. Once a week, groceries, mail, propane, salt for the sheep, dog food, whatever broke. Move his camp when the sheep need new grass. Bring the news. In the old days it was a man with a string of mules. My father did it twenty years. Now it's me, with a truck, on Saturdays, and Amra yelling at me about the fuel."

"What does he need this week?"

Xabi jerked his chin toward a sheet of brown grocery-bag paper tucked into the sun visor. Arthur pulled it down. It had been torn neatly from a bag and written on in pencil, in capital letters, half English and half Spanish: HARINA 25 LB. PAPAS. CEBOLLA. CAFE. LECHE EN LATA X 12. NARANJAS. AJI IF YOU FIND. BATTERIES AA. DOG FOOD 2. SALT BLOCKS 4. And at the bottom, underlined twice: NEWS.

"He sends it down with me every week," said Xabi. "On a piece of the last bag. I bring it all up in a new bag. He writes the next list on that one." He smiled slightly. "Three summers of grocery bags. Amra wants to frame them."

* * *

They drove east as the sky went green along the rim of the desert, and turned north at Mountain Home onto a two-lane road through sagebrush hills the color of a lion. The air coming in the window smelled so strongly of sage that Arthur could taste it. Then a pass, and a long steel-blue reservoir in a canyon of ponderosa pines, and then a river, the South Fork of the Boise, clear and green over gray rocks, through slopes where a fire had gone through some summers before and left the trunks standing black and the ground between them bright with fireweed.

"Fire," said Xabi. "Every summer now. Bigger every summer. My father never saw fires like these."

At a little town that was mostly a store, a bar and a row of cabins, they turned off onto a gravel road and began to climb in earnest, switchback after switchback, the truck groaning in low gear, the dust boiling up behind them, and the pines gave way to open slopes of grass and wildflowers, and then, on the shoulders of the hills above them, Arthur saw the aspens for the first time.

They stood in groves on the high slopes, in the folds of the hills where the snow lay longest and the water ran underground. White trunks, straight and slim and close together, hundreds of them, thousands, with a pale green crown of leaves that shivered in the morning wind and turned silver on the undersides, so that from a distance each grove seemed to flicker, like a fire made of light.

"Quaking aspen," said Xabi. "Every leaf shakes. Even when there's no wind. My father said they were gossiping about the sheep."

* * *

The camp was at the head of a long green basin, near a spring, at the edge of one of the groves.

There was a sheep wagon, an old one, its canvas gray and patched, its wheels sunk to the hubs in the grass, with a stovepipe smoking. A canvas tent beside it. A rope corral with two horses, a bay and a sorrel, dozing head to tail. A folding table under an awning, with a white enamel basin on it and a towel. A small satellite dish, absurd and modern, bolted to the corner of the wagon roof and pointed at the sky. And everywhere around it, on every side, filling the basin from one edge to the other and pouring up the far slope like spilled cream, sheep.

Two thousand ewes and their lambs, grazing, moving, calling. The noise was extraordinary. It came up the basin in a great continuous wave of bleats in every voice from a deep cough to a high thin cry, with the clank of bells in it, here and there, and under it all, if you listened, the steady sound of two thousand mouths tearing grass.

A man came walking toward them through the sheep.

He was short and broad, with a brown, wide, weather-cut face and black hair under a gray knit cap with flaps over the ears, though the morning was already warm. He wore a canvas jacket, jeans, rubber boots, and over one shoulder a long wooden staff. A black and white border collie trotted at his heel, her eyes going everywhere. Behind him, at a slower pace, ambled something that Arthur at first took for a small white bear.

"Edwin," said Xabi, getting out of the truck. "This is the clown."

"The clown," said Edwin Quispe. He looked Arthur up and down with frank, friendly curiosity and shook his hand. His hand was very hard. "Xabi told me. From the circus. For the sheep act." He smiled. He had a wide smile with one gold tooth in it. "I was the sheep for this one already once. When I was a boy. In my village. In the fiesta, somebody has to be the sheep. Always it is the smallest boy."

"I'm not the smallest boy."

"No," agreed Edwin. "You will be a very big sheep." He turned to the white bear. "Ganso. Ven. Say hello."

The white bear turned out to be a dog. A great Pyrenees, enormous, shaggy, cream-colored, with a broad gentle head and small dark eyes, who belonged, Edwin said, to the sheep, not to him. He lived with them. He slept among them. He had been born in a lambing shed and believed himself to be a sheep with responsibilities, and at night, when the coyotes came, he went out into the dark and explained to them that he was not.

Ganso walked up to Arthur and smelled him thoroughly from the shoes to the belt. Then he leaned his whole weight against Arthur's legs, deliberately, and began to push.

"He's moving you," said Edwin, interested. "He thinks you're lost. He wants you with the others."

Arthur, who weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, was moved four feet toward the flock before Edwin said something sharp in Spanish and Ganso stopped, and sat down, and looked at Arthur with the patient sorrow of a guardian whose charge will not listen.

"He will keep trying," said Edwin. "All day. Don't take it personally."

* * *

They unloaded the groceries into the wagon. Inside it was the size of a large closet and so tidy it made Arthur ashamed of the Sardine Can. Above the bed, on a shelf, a photograph in a plastic frame of a girl of about fourteen in a school uniform, grinning, with a gap between her front teeth. Beside it, a small wooden flute with six holes, and a strip of red and green woven cloth.

"My daughter," said Edwin, touching the frame. "Danae. In Huancayo. In Peru, in the mountains. She is fourteen. She says I smell like sheep even on the video." He pointed upward, at the dish. "The ranch put that this year. I talk to her every night. My wife too. Before this, in the first summer, nothing. You walk to the top of the ridge, you find one bar on the phone, you send one message, you wait three days." He shook his head. "My father, when he was here, he wrote letters. One a month. They took six weeks."

"Your father was here?"

"Here. This mountain." Edwin waved a hand at the whole green basin, the groves, the far blue ridges. "Teófilo Quispe. 1985 to 1991. He herded for Xabi's father. For Joxe. Same sheep, almost. Their great-great-grandmothers." He grinned. "When I wanted to come, my father said, go to the Arrietas. They are good people. Joxe paid on time and once he drove four hours in the snow to bring me a tooth doctor." He touched his gold tooth. "Not this one. This one is from Huancayo."

* * *

At noon Edwin made lunch, and Arthur learned that the sheepherders of the West had been baking bread in the ground for a hundred years.

The bread had gone in at dawn. Edwin showed him the place: a pit dug beside the fire ring, two feet deep, lined with stones, where he had built a fire before sunrise and let it burn down to coals, and then set a heavy black iron pot with a lid, a Dutch oven, full of risen dough, into the coals, and shoveled more coals onto the lid, and then shoveled earth over the whole thing and left it. Now he dug it out with a short shovel, carefully, and lifted the pot out with a hook, and brushed off the ashes, and lifted the lid.

The loaf had risen to fill the pot and domed up under the lid, brown and shining and split across the top in a cross, and the smell that came up out of the pot was so strong and good that Ganso, a hundred yards off among the sheep, lifted his head.

"Basque bread," said Edwin. "The old herders taught the next herders, and the next. Xabi's father taught my father. My father taught me, in Huancayo, before I came, in our yard, so I would not be ashamed." He tipped the loaf out onto a board. "But in my country also we cook in the ground. Pachamanca. Pacha is the earth. Manka is the pot. You make a little oven of stones, very hot, and you put meat and potatoes and beans and corn on the stones, and herbs, and cover with leaves and earth, and wait. On Sundays I do it here. Lamb and potatoes. No proper herbs. I use mint from the creek." He shrugged. "Two countries cooking in the ground. In the middle, Idaho."

They ate the bread hot, torn in pieces, with butter and a salty white cheese and slices of a dry red sausage that Xabi said his mother made in her garage every November, at the folding table under the awning, with the sheep calling all around.

* * *

After lunch Edwin took them into the grove.

It was cool under the aspens, and green-lit, and the ground was thick with grass and wild geraniums and the white leaf-litter of other years. The trunks rose all around them close as the bars of a cage, smooth and pale and powdered white, so that if you put your hand on one it came away dusted.

And they were written on.

Arthur had not been prepared for how many. On almost every trunk at the height of a man's eyes, there were marks: black scars in the white bark, where a knife had cut through long ago and the tree had healed the wound by swelling and darkening around it, so that every letter had spread and blackened and stood out like old ink. Names. Dates. Initials. Village names he half-recognized from the ledger, Lekeitio, Gernika, Ea. A house with smoke coming out of the chimney. A horse. A woman with a great deal of hair and not much else, which Xabi coughed at. A man with a pig's nose and a large belly and the word NAGUSIA cut beside him.

"Boss," said Xabi. "That means boss. There are a lot of those."

Xabi took a picture of it with his phone, and Arthur watched him drop it onto the family's map, onto a pin among a dozen others on this mountain, each a camp, each with a date, the oldest a faded photograph of a wagon in snow marked 1924.

"Every grove up here," said Edwin. "Thousands. A hundred years of men alone. They write their names because nobody is there to say them." He walked a little further, to a younger tree, and put his palm flat beside a small, neat carving: EDWIN Q. HUANCAYO PERU 2026, with a little four-legged animal beside it, long-necked. "Alpaca," he said. "So they know which country."

"Is your father's here?"

Edwin was quiet for a moment.

"Somewhere," he said. "He says, near the creek with two forks, the big trees. Every summer I look. Every Sunday. Many trees are dead now. Aspen lives seventy, eighty years, a hundred if lucky. Then the black comes in the bark, and it falls." He looked up at the shivering crowns. "My father is seventy. He asks me on the video, did you find it. I say not yet. He says, look at the old ones before they fall."

* * *

They drove down in the late afternoon heat with the week's grocery bag on the dashboard, a fresh one, with Edwin's next list already written on it in pencil: HARINA. CAFE. NEWS.

Xabi did not say anything for a long time. The truck bucked down the switchbacks. The dust rolled up behind.

"I'm going to sell," he said, at last, to the windshield.

Arthur waited.

"After this season. The band. The permit. Everything." Xabi's big hands were tight on the wheel. "Wool's worth nothing. It costs me more to shear a ewe than I get for the fleece. Lamb prices go up and down like a yo-yo. The coyotes take fifty a summer, the wolves take more. The fires. The fuel. Amra's been showing me the numbers for three years. I kept saying next year." He laughed, without any pleasure in it. "That's my word. Next year."

"Does your mother know?"

"No." Xabi drove. "My grandfather came here to walk behind sheep. My father came here to walk behind sheep. Since I was two years old there have been sheep on that mountain with an Arrieta paying for them." He looked over at Arthur, quickly, and back at the road. "I'm the one who stops it. And Edwin's the best herder we ever had. And his father herded for my father. And I'm going to stand up in that wagon in October and tell him there's no fourth summer."

He drove the rest of the way down the mountain without speaking.

That night, in the Sardine Can, Arthur found that he had brought the old grocery bag away with him by mistake, the one with last week's list on it. He smoothed it out on the fold-down table and looked at it for a long time. HARINA. PAPAS. NEWS.

Then he took a pair of scissors and cut a clean square from the unwritten side, and put it in the pastille tin with the blank ticket, against the day he would need it.

The Wall That Answers

The fronton was the oldest thing on the block that still did what it had been built to do.

You reached it through a narrow passage behind an arched brick front, past a row of mailboxes, and then, all at once, the ceiling went away: a long, tall hall, open to the rafters, lit by high windows, with a floor of gray concrete marked with painted lines, and at the far end, rising almost to the roof, the wall. One great flat wall of pale plaster, scuffed and pocked and patched a hundred times, with a strip of metal along the bottom that rang when a ball hit it, and a painted line across the top above which no ball was supposed to go. Along one side of the hall ran a low balcony for watchers. It smelled of cool plaster and old dust and, faintly, of the leather of the balls.

"Nineteen fourteen," said Bego, lowering herself into a folding chair that had been set out for her in the exact center of the floor. "Built by a man from Bizkaia for the herders. In the winter they played here. They had nothing to do in town but drink and fight and play, and the ones who played drank less and fought less." She arranged her cane across her knees. "My husband played here. My son played here. Badly. Now the young ones play here. With a racket." She said the word racket the way other people say lice. "Begin."

* * *

The dancers were twelve teenagers in shorts and T-shirts and soft white shoes, and one woman of about forty-five with a whistle, a clipboard, and a voice that could have stopped traffic on the interstate. Her name was Nerea. She had danced with the Boise troupe since she was six, and she now ran it with a firmness Arthur had last seen in a ship's purser, and she looked at him on his arrival, in the full Bippo costume with Tomas Urkiaga's bell hanging around his neck on its leather collar, and said, "Oh, good. Tall."

"Is that good?"

"For being chased," said Nerea. "Everybody can see you. Right. Positions."

The act, as Bego had written it this year, went like this.

On Friday night, at the end of the street dance, when the crowd was thickest, the lost sheep would appear at the far end of the block, bleating. The herders, six of the dancers in white with red sashes and long wooden staffs, would set out to find it. The sheep would hide. Behind the food stalls. Among the dancers. Under the tables at the beer garden. On the steps of the old boardinghouse. Each time, the herders would search in the wrong places, and the crowd would shout where the sheep was, and the herders would pretend not to hear. And each time, just as the sheep was safe, it would move, and the bell would ring, and the herders would turn, and the chase would begin again. The rest of the troupe would dance a jota in the middle of the street throughout, and the sheep would at one point join them, very badly, and be found.

"And at the end," said Bego, "the herders catch it. And they carry it home on their shoulders. Six of them." She looked at Arthur. "We will need eight."

* * *

The first hour was spent learning how to hide in a fronton, which has nowhere whatever to hide.

Bippo crouched behind the folding chair. The bell clanked. Bippo flattened himself against the great wall, arms spread, like a man on a ledge. The bell clanked. Bippo lay down on the concrete in the exact center of the court and covered his face with his hands, on the theory that if he could not see the herders they could not see him. As he lay down the bell rolled off his chest and struck the floor with a sound like a dropped saucepan, and three of the dancers had to sit down.

"Again," said Bego.

He tried creeping. The bell clanked at every step, a big hollow flat sound that went up into the rafters and came back down twice as loud. He tried walking on tiptoe in the size-twenty-two violet shoes, very slowly, with exaggerated care, lifting each foot as high as his waist. The bell clanked on the lift instead of the fall. He tried holding the bell still with one hand. Then he needed the hand to climb onto the balcony. Then he was hanging from the balcony rail by one hand with his violet shoes kicking, and the bell was ringing like a fire alarm, and Nerea was blowing her whistle, and the dancers were shrieking, and Bego in her chair at the center of the court had her face in her hands and her shoulders shaking.

He came down. He took a gray wool sock out of his waistcoat pocket, where he kept a spare for reasons of his own, and, with great secrecy, turning his back on the whole room, stuffed it into the mouth of the bell.

He took one step. The bell made a soft, muffled, woolly clonk.

He took another, triumphantly, and turned to the audience and bowed.

Bego Arrieta rose from her chair, with her cane. She walked across the court, slowly, her canvas shoes scuffing on the concrete. She reached up, to the bell at his chest. She pulled the sock out, and held it up in two fingers like a dead mouse, and dropped it on the floor.

"A sheep without a bell," she said, "is a lamb chop."

The whole troupe applauded. Arthur bowed again, lower, and the bell swung out on its collar and struck him in the nose, and they applauded harder.

"Keep that," said Bego to Nerea, going back to her chair. "The sock. Every night."

* * *

Maite was one of the herders.

She danced, Arthur saw within five minutes, better than any of the others: lightly, precisely, a little bored, as if her feet had known all this for a long time and had got tired of being told. She was quick with the staff and quicker at finding him, and twice she found him before the script said she should, and had to look away and pretend, and the second time she caught Arthur's eye under the paint and grinned before she could stop herself.

But between runs, when the others sat on the floor drinking water and looking at their phones, she went off to the far corner of the court by the great wall and stood with her back to everybody, and her lips moved.

Arthur noticed. He was good at noticing people in corners. On the family calendar, Maite had shown him, this hour was marked REHEARSAL. AMAMA IN CHARGE. BRING WATER.

* * *

He came back at dusk for the sock.

He did not need the sock. He had six more. But he had left the bell's dish towel on the balcony, and Tomas Urkiaga's bell was not a thing to carry through the streets without its dish towel, and the passage door had been left on the latch for the cleaners. So he went down the passage in his cardigan, past the mailboxes, and stopped at the end, in the shadow, because someone was in the court.

The high windows were going amber. The great wall stood pale and empty in the last light. And in the middle of the court, in her shorts and the green shirt with the sheep on it, stood Maite Arrieta, alone, with her phone in one hand held down by her side, playing something very quietly: a beat, a dry simple thump and click, no tune.

She was talking to the wall.

No. Arthur listened. She was not talking. She was rhyming. Fast. In English. To the beat. Line after line, without a pause, without a stumble, her free hand moving in the air, chopping the rhythm. And she was aiming it at the wall, at the great pale wall the herders had built, and the wall was sending it back, a quarter-second late, faint and hollow, so that every line she threw came back to her like a ball, and she caught it, and threw the next.

He caught pieces. They went by too fast for more.

Something about a grandmother who sharpens her shears at dawn like a pirate on a bench. Something about a dad who says next year, every year, like a song with one note. Something about being Basque and Bosnian and from Boise, three B's, a whole hive, and still the only girl at the dance who can't answer. Something about a sheep with a bell, a clown with a bell, a whole town with a bell around its neck, and everybody hearing it but nobody saying where it rings. It rhymed. It rhymed on the inside of the lines as well as the ends. It was funny and fierce and a little sad, and it did not stop, and it was, as far as Arthur could tell, entirely made up as she went along, out of the air of the court and whatever was in her head.

Then she turned, still rhyming, and saw him in the shadow of the passage, and stopped dead in the middle of a word.

The wall finished the word for her, faintly, and was silent.

* * *

"How long have you been there?" she said.

"Since the pirate on the bench."

She shut off the beat. She stood in the middle of the court with her arms folded and her face red in the amber light.

"Don't tell her."

"Your grandmother?"

"She thinks it's shouting. She heard me once in my room, two years ago, and she said, what is that, is somebody being robbed." Maite pushed her hair off her forehead. "It's not shouting. There's a group of us at school. Thursdays, in the library, after school, the librarian lets us. You battle. Somebody gives you a word, or you go off what the last person said, and you answer. You've got sixteen bars. You can't write it down first. That's the whole point. If you write it first, it's dead."

"Like a bertso."

Maite looked at him sharply.

"It's nothing like a bertso," she said. "A bertso has rules. Meter. Seven and six. Set tunes. Rhymes that have to land in the right place. It's a thousand years old. This is just me and a beat in a library." She stopped. "Okay. It's a little like a bertso."

"You're very good."

"In English." She said it flatly. "I'm good in English. My Basque is baby Basque. I went to the Basque preschool till I was six, the ikastola, and I was fluent, Amama says, I talked like a little old lady from Bizkaia. Then I went to regular school and I stopped. Everybody stops. And now I understand everything and I can't say anything without thinking about it first. And she corrects me. Every word. In the middle of the word. Ixilik, Maite, it's not like that, the vowel is wrong, say it again." She shook her head. "You can't freestyle when somebody's fixing your vowels. You lose the beat. You lose everything."

She went to the wall and put her hand flat on it, the way Edwin had put his hand on the aspen.

"I come here because it answers," she said. "Nobody else does. Not in Basque. Not since Aitite. She's been singing at all of us my whole life and nobody answers her, and I could, I know I could, if I could just get the words to come out without stopping." She took her hand off the wall. "And on Thursday that old man from your circus answered her in Ukrainian. In Ukrainian. And she's been walking around the house for four days humming."

Arthur did not say anything for a moment.

"The wall," he said at last, "has been here since 1914. It has answered every ball that every herder ever hit at it. It has never once corrected a vowel."

Maite laughed, in spite of herself.

He found the dish towel on the balcony rail, and wrapped the bell in it, and went out through the passage into the warm blue evening. The planters at the end of the block had been watered, and the geraniums had got up off the floor.

In the pastille tin, among the buttons and the sparrows, was the square of brown paper he had cut from Edwin's grocery bag. He took it out and wrote on it, against the wall of the old boardinghouse, in his small neat hand, under the streetlamp:

CAMP SUPPLIES. One wall that answers. Already on hand. Since 1914.

And under that, after some thought, he drew a very small bell.

He slipped it under the latch of the passage door, where only a herder coming back for a sock would find it.

The Wagon in the Side Yard

"Shoes off," said Bego Arrieta. "It is a wagon, not a barn."

Arthur took his shoes off on the step. Maite, behind him, had already taken hers off and was standing on the grass in her socks, holding a paper bag of pastries from the bakery on the block, a box of tea and her phone.

Inside, the sheep wagon was cool and dim and smelled of canvas, cedar and very old wood smoke that had soaked into the boards long ago and never left. Bego had kept it as it had been: the high bed across the back with its drawers below, a tiny iron stove, cold now, its pipe going up through the canvas; a bench along one side with a lid; a fold-down table under the window with the red-checked curtain. But the bed was heaped with papers. Folders, loose sheets, school notebooks with marbled covers, all in a slanting black hand. Scripts, Maite whispered. Fifty-seven years of sheep.

On a nail by the door hung the shears, in a leather sheath. On the wall over the table, in a cheap black frame, was a photograph.

"Sit," said Bego, and Arthur folded himself onto the bench, and Maite sat on the step in the open half of the Dutch door with her feet in the grass, and Bego took the one chair, by the table, and put her hand flat on the photograph's glass, the way you might put your hand on the head of a dog to keep it from getting up.

* * *

The photograph was small, black-and-white, a little blurred, as if whoever held the camera had been in a hurry or a wind. A young man stood in a grove of white trees with his hat pushed back. He was thin and dark and grinning, with a mustache he had not quite earned yet, in a vest and a collarless shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he was pointing with his whole arm at the trunk of the aspen beside him. On the trunk, at about the height of his shoulder, black against the white bark, was a carving: a woman, in a long skirt, standing very straight, with a hat on her head so wide and so curly at the brim that it was nearly the size of the rest of her. Beside her, a little house with a pointed roof. Under them, a few lines of letters too small and too blurred to read.

On the bottom margin, in pencil, someone had written: 1931.

"My father," said Bego. "Tomas Urkiaga. Twenty-eight years old. A man from a sheep company had a camera, and came up with the camp tender, and my father made him walk two hours to take this. He carved that tree in 1927." She took her hand off the glass. "And that is my mother."

"Before he met her," said Arthur.

"Before he met her. Before he knew her name. Before she had left Bizkaia." Bego leaned back. "Maite. The tea."

Maite got up and made tea, on a small electric kettle plugged into an extension cord that ran in under the canvas from the house, and found three cups, and the pastries. Bego waited until everyone had a cup. She had, Arthur thought, the timing of a professional. Pello the ironworker had never had a chance.

* * *

"He was lonely," she said. "That is the whole story. Seventeen years old, in 1920, he comes from a village near the sea where everybody knows everybody's grandmother, and a man from a sheep company meets him at the train in Shoshone and gives him a dog and two thousand sheep and points at a mountain. And for fourteen summers he walks behind sheep in the high country and sees another person once a week, when the camp tender comes up with the mules and the flour. Seven years he does this, and he is twenty-four, and nobody has said his name aloud in a month." She drank her tea. "So he writes it on a tree. They all did. All the men. Their names, their villages. Their mothers. Their girls at home. The girls they wanted. The girls they did not have."

"And your father didn't have one."

"No. So he made one." Bego set the cup down. "He told me. When I was small, at the boardinghouse, after the bertsos, when he put me to bed. He said: Begoña, in 1927 I was very tired of talking to sheep, so I carved myself a wife. Very handsome. With a big hat, because the sun is strong up there, and a woman from the sea would want a hat. And I built her a house beside her on the tree, so she would have somewhere to live. And I wrote her a bertso. The first half. And I said to her, on the tree, you will come, and when you come, you will give me the answer."

"And then," said Maite, from the step. She knew the story. She said it softly, as if she could not help it.

"And then," said Bego. "In 1932, in November, he comes down from the mountain for the winter, to the boardinghouse on Grove Street, the old one, the Aguirre house. And there is a new girl working in the kitchen. Just come over. Twenty years old. From a village twenty minutes from his. Paskuala Bengoetxea. She is carrying a pot of beans across the dining room to thirty men, and she is wearing her good hat, because it is her first week and she wants to look like somebody." Bego paused. "A big hat. Very wide. Curly at the edge."

Arthur did not say anything.

"My father put down his spoon," said Bego. "He stood up. He said to her, in front of thirty men, in Euskara: you came. And my mother said: who are you? And he said: I carved you on a tree. And she said: then you are crazy. And all thirty men laughed, and my mother put the beans on the table and went back into the kitchen." She folded her hands. "They were married in 1934. They were married forty-five years. He told that story every winter at that table, every single year, until he died. And every year my mother said it was a lie."

"Was it?"

"I don't know," said Bego simply. "I have only this." She touched the photograph. "And I have never seen the tree."

* * *

There was a silence in the wagon. Outside, a lawnmower started up somewhere on the Bench, and a jay screamed in the box elder, and Maite's phone, face down on the step beside her, buzzed once and was ignored.

"Amama," said Maite. "The bertso. On the tree. You never told me what it says."

"Because I don't know it. He would not tell me. He said, it is the first half, it is for your mother, it is not for you. I asked my mother, when he was dead. She said, I never went up there, how should I know. I said, but he wanted the answer. She said, I'll answer him when I'm old." Bego's mouth twitched. "She died at ninety. In 2002. I asked her the week before. She said, I'm not old yet."

Maite laughed, and then stopped.

Then she picked up her phone from the step, and looked at it, and turned it over in her hands. She did not point it at anybody. She held it in her lap.

"Amama," she said. And then she said something else, in the other language.

It came out slowly, carefully, with a pause in the middle of it while she hunted for a word, and with a little lift at the end of it that made it a question. Arthur could not understand a word of it. But he saw what it did to Bego Arrieta's face. The old woman went very still, the way a bird goes still on a branch when something moves below it.

"Again," said Bego. "Badly. The verb at the end. Again."

Maite said it again. The verb at the end. Her face had gone dark red, but she did not stop.

"She asked," said Bego to Arthur, without taking her eyes off her granddaughter, "if she could record me telling it. My father's story. In Euskara. For the family. For when there is nobody left who heard it from him." She was quiet for a moment. "She asked in Euskara. Very badly. Like a child of six." Another pause. "She has not asked me anything in Euskara since she was six."

"You can say no," said Maite. "I won't be mad."

"I am not saying no," said her grandmother. "I am saying, if you ask me in Euskara, you will listen in Euskara. All of it. No English. No stopping to look it up. And at the end, if there is a word you did not understand, you will ask me in Euskara what it means." She held out her hand, palm up, on the little table. "Yes."

* * *

Arthur took his tea outside and sat on the porch steps of the house in the shade of the arbor, so as not to be in the way, and listened through the open half of the wagon's door.

He did not understand any of it. He did not need to. He heard the old woman's voice, low and steady, going on and on in the language she had learned at a table of thirty men, telling the story she had heard every winter of her childhood, about a boy from the sea who carved a wife on a tree. He heard it rise and laugh and drop. Twice he heard it break into a few bars of song and stop. And under it, now and then, he heard the girl's voice: very short, a word, a question, a sound of surprise. Once she laughed out loud, at exactly the right place, before Bego had finished the sentence, and Bego stopped, and said something sharp and pleased, and went on.

It took forty minutes. When Maite came out of the wagon, she sat down on the step beside Arthur and put her phone in her lap and looked at the grape arbor for a long time.

"There were four words I didn't know," she said. "Out of everything. Four." She seemed surprised. "One of them was a kind of hat."

"And the bertso? On the tree?"

"Nobody knows," said Maite. "Nobody living. He wrote the first half in 1927 and left the second half for her. And she never went up." She looked at the wagon. "It's been waiting a hundred and one years for somebody to answer."

* * *

Bego called him back in alone, before he left.

She was sitting at the little table with her hands folded on the photograph. She did not look at him. She looked at the shears on their nail by the door.

"You," she said. "Clown."

"Madam."

"You are a clown. A clown can make a man do something stupid. That is your whole trade." She lifted her chin. "Make my son take me up the mountain."

"Your son says there are ten thousand trees."

"My son has been saying ten thousand trees for forty years. There are not ten thousand trees above the forks of the creek where his grandfather made camp. There are perhaps two hundred. He knows the camp. His father knew it. His father bought the grazing permit for that mountain in 1972 with every dollar we had, and I said, Joxe, why that one, there are better ones, and he said, because it's your father's." She turned her head at last and looked at Arthur. "I am eighty-four. My hip is made of titanium and the other one is thinking about it. I cannot walk a day up a mountain. But a man can put an old woman on a horse."

"Or a mule," said Arthur.

"Or a mule." She looked back at the photograph. "I don't need to read it. I don't need to know what it says. I want to put my hand on it." Her voice did not change at all. "Before it falls down. Before I do."

* * *

At a quarter past four the next morning Arthur sat in the Sardine Can with his tea in the dented mug, and wrote his one ordinary page, and then slipped the earpiece into place.

"Reginald. I need a trust."

"You always need a trust."

"Something to pay for recording the old carvings on the aspens in the Idaho mountains before the trees fall down. Photographs, measurements, a proper record. And for the families of the men who carved them to be taken up to see them. Quietly."

"There is already a good deal of work being done on that," said Sterling. "The universities, the forest people. My archivist has been reading about it since you rang about the shears. She says there is a young woman on the forest in your part of Idaho who records the carvings on her own time with her own camera and a borrowed tape measure, and could use rather more than a borrowed tape measure." Paper moved. "A name?"

Arthur thought of a white truck grinding up a mountain on a Saturday, with flour and coffee and news.

"The Camp Tender Trust," he said.

There was a pause from Edinburgh.

"Very apt," said Sterling. "A man who carries supplies up the mountain and goes away again before anyone has time to thank him." Another pause. "I notice, Arthur, that you are presently wearing a bell."

"Only in the evenings."

"A man in your line of work," said Sterling, "wearing a bell. I merely note it."

Lost Sheep on Grove Street

By Friday afternoon the Basque Block had been turned into a single long room with the sky for a ceiling.

Strings of lights ran back and forth across Grove Street from the boardinghouse to the club. Red and white and green flags hung from every window and lamppost, the red and white and green of the Basque flag, with its white cross and its green saltire, and beside them the stars and stripes. Folding tables lined both curbs under white tents, and at every table there was food, and in front of every table there was a line.

It was not Jaialdi. Jaialdi, the great gathering that filled Boise with Basques from five continents, came around only every five years or so, and the last had been in 2025; Bego had been to every one since the first, in 1987, and meant to see the next out of spite. This was the summer festival, smaller and older. Arthur walked it at four o'clock, in a heat that came up off the pavement like an oven's breath.

There were chorizos on a grill as long as a canoe, split and laid in rows over the coals, dripping red fat that flared and smoked, and men in aprons turning them with tongs and laying them in rolls for a line that went around the corner. There were croquetas in paper boats. There were lamb skewers, and beans, and slices of a dark cake with cream inside it. There was a stall run by four grandmothers in aprons who were selling nothing at all, as far as he could tell, but sat in a row in the shade with paper fans, watching everyone, which seemed to be their contribution.

There was music from three directions at once. On a little stage at the near end of the street, a young man and a young woman were playing for the dancers: he on a small accordion that he squeezed so fast his hands blurred, she on a tambourine as big as a hubcap, which she struck with her whole fist, and together they made a quick, jangling, irresistible noise that Maite said was called trikitixa and made old men stand up from their chairs without meaning to. In front of the club, an old man in a white shirt and red sash was playing a three-holed wooden flute with one hand and beating a small drum hung from his arm with the other, the two at once, the flute high and sweet and the drum dry and steady, and every now and then he took the flute from his lips and let out a shout. And from the far end, near the fronton, came the sound of an axe.

* * *

The axe belonged to a young man in a white undershirt standing on top of a log.

The log lay on its side on a platform of planks, a thick one, eighteen inches across, and he was standing on it with his feet apart and chopping down between his own boots with an axe that came over his head and down in a long silver arc so fast that Arthur flinched every time. The chips flew. The crowd counted. On the next platform a second young man was doing the same with another log. They were racing. Their axes rose and fell like the arms of a machine, and the logs were opening under them, and at the moment the first log split clean through, the first young man was already in the air, jumping off, and the crowd roared.

"Aizkolari," said Maite, coming up beside Arthur with a chorizo in a roll in each hand and giving him one. "Wood choppers. They come every year. Some of them from the old country. After this they lift the stone."

"The stone?"

She pointed. Beside the chopping platform sat a block of gray granite, squared off, with rounded edges, about the size of a suitcase. A sign beside it said, in two languages, that it weighed two hundred and twenty pounds.

"They pick it up," said Maite. "And put it on their shoulder. And turn it around. As many times as they can in a minute. Then the farm ladies race carrying milk cans." She ate. "It's all farm work. From the old villages. Chopping, lifting, carrying, scything. Everybody used to do it anyway, so they turned it into a contest." She looked at him sideways. "Like the circus."

"The circus," said Arthur, "is also farm work, if you ask the terriers."

* * *

At seven the Hrynchuks came up from the river in a body.

Taras went straight to the grill, where he was recognized as the Ukrainian who had said hordago with nothing, and given two chorizos and a great deal of advice. Vira went to the four grandmothers in the shade, and within ten minutes had a fan, a chair and an argument. Bohdan's terriers were not permitted on the block, by order of Gorka Aldape, who had had a bad experience with a terrier in 2009.

Vange Doucet went to the trikitixa stage.

She stood at the edge of it with her own accordion on its straps, listening, her head on one side. She listened for a long time. The young man with the little accordion noticed her, and grinned, and played something fast, as if daring her. She listened to that too. Then, at the next tune, she came in under him, very quietly, finding the bass and the chords, and he looked around at her in astonishment, and then nodded, and played faster. The woman with the tambourine laughed and hit it harder. By the third tune the three of them were playing as if they had been doing it for years, the little Basque accordion and the big Cajun one, one squeezing the tune and one pumping the floor, and a crowd had gathered at the stage that had nothing to do with the dancing.

"Who is that?" said Nerea, coming past with her whistle.

"Louisiana," said Arthur.

"Huh," said Nerea, and went off to tell somebody.

* * *

At a quarter to nine, when the sun had gone down behind the buildings and the strings of lights had come on and the heat had broken at last into something soft and blue, the dancers came out into the middle of Grove Street to dance the jota.

There were thirty of them now, the youth troupe and the adult troupe together, in white trousers and white shirts and red sashes and red berets, the girls in red skirts and black vests, and they danced the jota in two long lines facing one another, with their arms up and their fingers snapping, leaping and turning on the beat, their feet flying, and between the lines the old man with the flute and drum walked up and down, playing, and the crowd clapped.

And at the far end of the block, behind the chorizo grill, in the smoke, a sheep bleated.

It was a very loud bleat. It was an operatic bleat. It went up the street over the music and the crowd turned, and there at the end of the block, standing on top of the grill's woodpile, stood a sheep. A sheep six feet two inches tall, in yellow polka-dot trousers and a red waistcoat with eleven buttonholes and no buttons, with a fleece of white cotton batting pinned around its shoulders, two small floppy felt ears on top of an orange wig, blue stars around its eyes, a red nose, and, hung around its neck on a broad leather collar, a big old iron bell.

It bleated again. And it rang the bell.

The whole of Grove Street laughed at once.

* * *

The herders came after it. Six of them, out of the line of the jota, in white with their long staffs, and Maite at the front. The sheep fled. It ran down the curb behind the food tables in its enormous violet shoes, ducking, the bell clanking at every step, and dived under the table of the four grandmothers in the shade, who lifted their feet for it without looking up from their fans.

The herders ran past. The crowd shouted. "Under the table! Under the grandmothers!" The herders stopped, looked up into the trees, looked down the side street, consulted with one another, shrugged elaborately. The sheep put its head out between Vira's ankles. The bell clanked. The herders whirled.

It went on for twenty minutes, and it went exactly as Bego had written it, and it was, by the reckoning of everybody who had seen fifty-odd years of lost sheep on Grove Street, the funniest the act had ever been.

The sheep hid behind the stone that weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, crouching, so that its whole body showed on both sides of it and only its face was hidden. It hid among the chorizos on the grill, briefly, and came out smoking. It hid in the middle of the jota, in the line of dancers, with its arms up and its fingers snapping a whole beat behind everybody else and its violet shoes coming down on the wrong foot every time, and when the line turned it turned the other way, and came face to face with Maite Arrieta, who looked up at it for a long moment, and then stuck out her tongue and pointed, and the herders charged, and the crowd roared.

It took refuge, near the end, at the axe men's platform, behind a stack of logs as tall as itself. A young aizkolari, a big blond boy from the old country with forearms like hams, took one look at the stack, and then at the crowd, and then grinned, and climbed onto a log right in front of it, and began, very slowly and deliberately, to chop. With every stroke, a chip flew over the stack. With every stroke, the hidden sheep flinched, and the bell rang, and the crowd counted. Seven. Eight. Nine. The log split. The aizkolari jumped clear. And the sheep, with nothing left between it and the herders but air, rose up from behind the stack with its arms raised in surrender, and Maite, at the front of the herders, put her staff down in front of it like a bar across a gate.

* * *

They carried it home on their shoulders. Six of them could not do it. Eight of them could not do it either. In the end it was eleven: six herders, three adult dancers, the blond aizkolari and the man from the chorizo grill, and they bore Bippo the sheep down the middle of Grove Street at shoulder height, stiff as a plank, bleating, with his violet shoes sticking up at one end and his orange wig at the other and the bell clanking on his chest at every step, and the trikitixa playing, and Vange's accordion pumping underneath it, and the old man's flute shrieking above it, and the whole crowd clapping in time.

They set him down in front of the club. In front of a folding chair. And in the chair, in her red beret, with a small megaphone in her lap that she had not needed once all night, sat Bego Arrieta.

She looked at the sheep. The sheep looked at her. The street went quiet to see what she would do.

She reached out and took hold of the bell on its collar. She rang it once, hard, in the sheep's face.

"Found," she said.

Two thousand people cheered.

* * *

At ten o'clock Amra put the photographs up. Arthur saw them later on Maite's phone: a pin on the family's map, on Grove Street, where there were already pins going back eighty years, the old boardinghouse, the dance at the club in 1961, a picture of a young Xabi in a jota line with too much hair. And now this year's, at the top. Eleven people carrying a clown. A sheep in a jota line, a beat behind. And one of Bego in her chair with the bell in her fist, looking up, saying the one word.

Under it, Amra had written: San Inazio, Grove Street. Amama's 57th sheep. Best one. (Don't tell Pello.)

Answers in Three Languages

The two bertsolaris from Bizkaia did not come.

They had flown from Bilbao to Madrid and from Madrid to Chicago, and in Chicago a summer thunderstorm had parked itself over the airport for six hours and then moved on, leaving behind it a great many canceled flights and two of the finest improvising poets of their generation sleeping on the floor of a terminal beside a pretzel stand. They telephoned Gorka Aldape at nine o'clock on Saturday morning. They were very sorry. They would arrive on Sunday afternoon. The verse session was on Saturday night.

Gorka came to the circus lot at ten to tell Lesia, for no reason anyone could later explain, except that the circus was the only thing in Boise that week that had not yet gone wrong. He sat on the ring curb in the heat with his mustache drooping and his program in his hands.

"Every year," he said. "Every year since 1949. There are bertsos on the Saturday. Somebody sings. Somebody answers. People come from Reno for it. From California. Old people who don't come for anything else." He looked at the program. "Bego will sing. Bego always sings. But who answers her?"

"Who answered her last year?" said Arthur.

Gorka looked at him with great sorrow.

"Last year," he said, "it was Iñaki Goitia, who was ninety-three, and who died in March. The year before that it was Iñaki Goitia and a man from Mountain Home who is now in a home in Mountain Home. Before that, it was always Joxe Arrieta." He folded the program in half. "There is nobody left. That is the truth. It is a thing for two people, and in Idaho there is only one."

* * *

The verse session was at eight o'clock, on the little stage at the near end of Grove Street, after the street dance and before the last music, and the folding chairs in front of it were full by half past seven. Arthur saw what Gorka had meant. The people in those chairs were old. Very old, many of them, in their eighties and nineties, the men in berets and pressed shirts and the women in cardigans in spite of the heat, with canes hooked over the backs of the chairs in front of them and grandchildren standing behind them to take them home. They had come, as Gorka said, from Reno and Elko and Bakersfield and Winnemucca and the little sheep towns of eastern Oregon. They sat very upright. They talked among themselves in the old language, quietly, and they watched the stage.

At the back of the crowd, standing, were the younger ones, with their beer and their phones, half listening, waiting for the band.

Gorka climbed onto the stage with a microphone and a sheet of paper. He explained, first in Euskara and then in English, what had happened in Chicago, and the old people groaned. He explained that Begoña Arrieta would sing alone tonight, and that he himself would give her the subjects, as the gai-jartzaile, the one who sets the themes, and that she would answer each one on the spot, and the old people clapped. He explained, in English, for the younger ones at the back, that a bertso was very difficult and that they should be quiet. The younger ones went on talking.

Then Bego climbed the three steps to the stage, slowly, with her cane, and Maite behind her with a hand at her elbow, and she stood in the middle of the stage under the string of lights in her red beret and her black cardigan, with the microphone at the height of her chin.

The street went quiet. Even the back.

* * *

Gorka gave her the first theme. Arthur did not know what it was. It was in Euskara, a single sentence, and the old people laughed when they heard it.

Bego stood with her eyes half closed, her hands folded on her cane. Arthur counted. Five seconds. Ten. Twelve. And then she opened her mouth and sang.

It was the same voice as on the bench, plain and firm and cracked down the middle, with no microphone tricks and no accompaniment, and it went to a slow old tune that seemed to have been worn smooth by a great many voices before hers. Eight lines. At the end of the fourth line, as the rhyme came down on its word, a sound went through the old people in the chairs, a soft collective "Ah," like a crowd watching a high diver go in clean. At the end of the eighth, the last rhyme came down like a door closing, and they applauded.

"She was asked about the heat," whispered Maite, who had come down from the stage to stand at the edge of it beside Arthur. "Whether it was hotter in Idaho or in hell. She said she'd been to both, and in hell at least the chorizo was free."

Gorka gave her another. Then another. Bego answered every one. The old people leaned forward in their chairs. One theme made them roar. One made them go quiet, and an old man near the front took off his beret and held it on his knee. One, Maite said, was about a man in the third row, by name, who had owed her husband ten dollars since 1979, and the man in the third row stood up and bowed and sat down, and a woman next to him hit him with her program.

And then Gorka gave her the last theme, and it was the hardest, because there was nobody to give it to.

In a bertso session, Maite whispered, the last round was always a duel. Two bertsolaris, each taking a side, answering each other, verse for verse, until the gai-jartzaile called it. Gorka had written on his sheet of paper the old traditional theme for a duel at a festival of herders: one of you is the herder, and one of you is the sheep. He read it out. And then he stopped. Because there was nobody to be the sheep.

Bego sang the herder's part anyway.

She sang it alone, eight lines, to the sheep that was not there. It was very fine. Arthur could hear that without understanding a word of it, in the shape of it, in the way the rhymes fell, in the soft collective "Ah" from the chairs. Then she stopped, and waited, as a bertsolari waits, for the answer.

The answer did not come.

The silence went on. It was not long. Perhaps five seconds. But it went all the way down Grove Street, past the chorizo grill and the four grandmothers in their chairs and the axe men's platform and the fronton door, and it came back up the street again. On the stage, under the string of lights, the old woman stood very straight with her hands on her cane and her face turned a little to one side, as if listening for something very far off, the way Arthur had seen people listen for a car in a driveway that is not coming. For the first time since he had met her on the bench, she looked eighty-four years old.

The old people began to clap, kindly, to fill the silence.

* * *

Taras Hrynchuk got up out of his folding chair in the fourth row.

He had been sitting there all evening beside Vira, in his good brown jacket, with his cap on his knee, very still, with a look on his face that Arthur had last seen the night before a big stand in a strange town. He stood up. He put on his cap. He walked up the aisle between the folding chairs, through the old people, and up the three steps onto the stage, and he stood beside Bego Arrieta, a little behind her, at a respectful distance, the way a man stands beside a woman at a dance before he has been told he may.

Gorka, open-mouthed, held out the microphone. Taras did not take it. He did not need it.

He sang.

He sang the sheep. Arthur knew it was the sheep, because he baaed, once, in the middle of it, a big rough old baa that set the whole street laughing. It was the kolomyika again, the quick stamping mountain tune, couplet after couplet, his boot coming down on the stage boards at every rhyme, and it was in Ukrainian, and not one person on Grove Street understood a word of it. It did not matter. They understood a sheep answering back. They understood an old man on a stage, in a strange country, rising to an old woman's challenge in his grandmother's language because nobody else would. When he finished on his high shout, the old people in the chairs were on their feet.

Bego had turned all the way around to look at him.

"In Ukrainian," she said, into the microphone, so that the whole street heard it. "Again. He thinks I am a translator."

Laughter. And then Gorka, desperate, inspired, turned around and held the microphone down toward the edge of the stage, to Maite.

"Translate," he said. "Please. For the people. Both of them."

* * *

Maite looked at the microphone as if it were a snake.

Then she looked at Arthur, standing beside her. He did not say anything. He did not need to. He had heard her in the fronton.

She took the microphone. She climbed up onto the edge of the stage. She stood beside her grandmother and the old Ukrainian, a tall dark girl in a green T-shirt with a sheep on it, with the whole of Grove Street looking at her, and she lifted the microphone to translate and found, apparently, that she could not do it in plain sentences.

So she did it the other way.

She began to clap. A slow, heavy beat. The young ones at the back of the crowd heard it and knew it, and began to clap with her, and then the people in the middle, and then the old people in the chairs, uncertainly, and then not uncertainly at all, until the whole street was clapping one steady beat under the strings of lights. And on top of it, Maite Arrieta began to rhyme.

She rhymed what her grandmother had sung. The herder, in English, to the beat, eight bars, every line landing. Then she rhymed what Taras had sung, from his rough translation to her, whispered in her ear on the stage, the sheep who would not be herded, who had come from the Carpathian mountains to the Rocky ones and found the same old woman with the same old stick. She rhymed Idaho with nobody knows. She rhymed bertso with hurts so. She rhymed Ukrainian with complaining, which made Vira in the fourth row put her hands over her face. She did not stop. She did not stumble. It was fast and funny and dead on the beat, and when the last rhyme came down, the young people at the back of Grove Street, who had talked through everything, let out a yell that rattled the windows of the boardinghouse.

Bego Arrieta sang again. Straight at the girl. Eight lines, quick and sharp. Taras answered her in Ukrainian, stamping. Maite rhymed them both, in English. Gorka, at the side of the stage, had given up any pretense of being in charge and was simply holding the sheet of paper over his heart.

It went on for three rounds. In three languages. On one beat.

When it ended, Gorka called it, finally, in Euskara and then in English, a draw.

* * *

Afterward, at the foot of the stage steps, in the crowd, Bego took her granddaughter's wrist in a grip like a vise.

"In English," she said.

"I know, Amama."

"You rhymed 'Idaho' with 'nobody knows.' That is cheating. It is not a true rhyme."

"I know."

Bego held on to her wrist.

"It was good," she said, very low, so that only Maite and Arthur heard it. And then, louder, letting go, in the voice she used for her scripts: "Next time in Euskara. Or don't bother."

She went off on Taras's arm toward the club, the two of them arguing loudly about whose verse had been worse, and the crowd parted for them as if for a bride and groom.

Amra recorded the whole thing, standing on a chair at the back, every round of it, and that night it went up on the family's pages, under the heading Amra gave it: Bertsos, San Inazio. Amama, the Ukrainian, and Maite. Three languages, one beat. Gorka is still holding the paper.

And at midnight, when the block was dark and the last chairs were being folded, Arthur slipped a square of brown grocery-bag paper under the door of the sheep wagon on the Bench, on his way back to the river.

CAMP SUPPLIES. One answer, in any language. Delivered. More to follow.

And a very small bell.

A Mule Named Senator

The festival ended, the flags came down, the bertsolaris from Bizkaia arrived on Sunday afternoon looking like men who had slept on a terminal floor and sang that evening to a packed club anyway, and on Tuesday the Hrynchuk Family One-Ring Circus folded its tent by the river and went out into Idaho.

August in Idaho was county fairs, booked back to back in towns where the fairgrounds sat at the edge of the alfalfa with the mountains blue behind them: a river town on the old Oregon Trail, where the emigrants had forded the Snake; a high cold valley where the terriers slept in Vira's bunk; a farm town whose main competition was the heaviest potato. The circus played between the 4-H lamb show and the demolition derby, and ranchers in their good hats watched Taras on the seven-foot unicycle with the narrowed eyes of men who had been thrown off horses.

And on the Monday dark days, Arthur drove back across the sagebrush to Boise in a borrowed pickup, and sat at the long table under the grape arbor, and argued with Xabi about a mountain.

* * *

He did not, in the end, make Xabi do anything stupid. He made him do something sensible, by offering to do something more stupid himself.

"I'll take her," he said, on the first Monday in August, over the coffee. "If you can't spare the days. I'll borrow the circus's spare truck and put her in the passenger seat and drive up to the camp and find a horse."

Xabi looked at him. "You'll what?"

"Or I could take the trailer. My trailer. It's very comfortable."

"Your trailer," said Xabi slowly, "is a 1958 aluminum can with a hole in the window. It would come apart on the first switchback. And you'd put my mother on a horse. Have you ever put an eighty-four-year-old woman with a titanium hip on a horse?"

"Not personally."

"Do you know what happens?"

"I imagine," said Arthur, "that she tells the horse what to do, and the horse does it."

There was a long silence at the table. Amra, at the far end with her laptop, did not look up, but she had stopped typing.

"She wouldn't ride a horse," said Xabi at last, to his coffee. "She'd need a mule. A good one. Steady. There's a packer in the little town on the river who rents them to the hunters in the fall." He rubbed his face with both hands. "We'd need two days. Three. We'd need Edwin to guide, he knows every grove on that permit. We'd need a camp for her. We'd need..." He stopped.

"Next year," said Bego, from the head of the table, without opening her eyes.

Xabi put down his cup.

"No," he said. "Not next year. Next Monday."

* * *

Kuba Kurek's message came that week, as his messages came every Sunday, wherever Arthur was: long and careful, all in lowercase, and packed with facts.

kuba here. i have six chords now. at highlanders school the teacher says my floor is good but i rush. dziadek says everybody rushes the first ten years. pola says hi and the bellwether walls have 3 new ones in back of the yards. babcia wants to know if the basque lady really sharpens shears on a bench in public because she says that is showing off. she also says ask if the basque lady cuts paper. i said i would ask. does she.

Arthur wrote back that the Basque lady cut sheep and, once, in 1976, her son's hair, but not paper, and that Babcia was quite right: it was showing off.

* * *

They went up on the second Monday in August, in two trucks, before dawn. Lesia had given Arthur three days, on condition that he did not come back with a sheep.

Xabi drove the first with Bego beside him in her red beret and a jacket she had borrowed from Amra and refused to zip, and Arthur in the back seat among the sleeping bags. Maite drove the second, with a trailer behind it and, in the trailer, a mule.

The mule's name was Senator. He was tall and gray and Roman-nosed, with long ears that moved independently, like the arms of a semaphore, and an expression of great age and infinite patience, and the packer in the river town who had rented him to them had said only, handing over the lead rope: "He's carried a lot of senators. Hunters, I mean. Fat ones. Your grandmother will be a vacation."

Edwin met them at the trailhead above the camp, at seven, with the two horses saddled and the border collie at his heel and Ganso lying in the shade of a pine like a dropped rug.

With him, stepping down from a green Forest Service pickup, was a young woman Arthur had not met. She was about thirty-five, short and sturdy, with a sunburned nose and a black braid down her back and a camera on a strap around her neck, and she had a clipboard under her arm and a long canvas bag over her shoulder that rattled.

"Renata Mosqueda," she said, shaking hands all around. "Heritage technician. Forest Service. I record the carvings." She looked at Bego, and something in her face softened. "Mrs. Arrieta. Edwin told me. I've been up these groves every summer for six years with a borrowed tape measure and my own camera on my own days off. And three weeks ago I got a letter." She lifted the camera. "New camera. New equipment. A grant for three summers. Two seasonal techs to help. And a line in it about families." She shook her head. "Some trust nobody's heard of. In Seattle, the letterhead says. The Camp Tender Trust." She laughed. "I thought it was a joke. Then the money came."

Arthur, holding Senator's lead rope, examined the mule's ears with great attention.

* * *

They put Bego on the mule at the trailhead. It took Xabi, Edwin, a mounting block made of two coolers, and a great deal of instruction from the person being mounted, who told them each in turn and in two languages that they were doing it wrong. But at last she was up, sitting very straight in the old saddle with her cane strapped behind her like a rifle and the reins gathered in one small brown fist, and Senator, who had felt the weight settle and recognized it as a vacation, sighed through his nose and turned one ear back toward her to listen.

"Good," said Bego. "He is a sensible animal." She looked down at her son. "Not like a horse. A horse thinks it knows. A mule thinks."

Then she clicked her tongue and Senator walked off up the trail ahead of everyone, and the rest of them had to hurry to catch up.

* * *

The trail went up a long draw beside a creek, through grass and sage and late wildflowers, the tall red spikes of paintbrush among them. The air was thin and cold and smelled of pine resin and, from somewhere ahead, of sheep. Twice they passed groves of aspen on the slopes, white and shivering, and twice Renata stopped her horse and lifted her camera and said, "Recorded that one. 2023," and rode on.

Maite walked. She had refused the second horse. She walked beside her grandmother's mule with her phone in her hand, and every so often she stopped and held it up to look at something on the screen and then up at the mountain, and then down again.

"What are you looking at?" said Arthur, coming up beside her.

She showed him. It was the family's tree, the big one that Amra kept, with every Arrieta and every Urkiaga and every Bengoetxea back to a village in Bizkaia in the eighteenth century, each in a box, with dates. Maite had scrolled up to the top of her father's side, where there was a box for Tomas Urkiaga, born 1903, Ispaster, died 1979, Boise. And beside his name, where other boxes had a photograph of a person, his had the photograph from the sheep wagon wall: a young man pointing at an aspen.

"It's a tree in a tree," said Maite. "I just noticed. A family tree with a real tree in it." She put the phone away. "If we find it, I want to put the real one there instead. The tree as it is now. With the date." She looked up the trail at her grandmother's straight back. "Before it isn't."

* * *

They camped that night at Edwin's camp in the green basin, which had moved since Arthur's first visit to higher grass, a mile further up, beside a spring under a grove of very old aspens. Edwin had made a pachamanca.

He had made it in the afternoon, while they were riding, and when they arrived at five he took them to see it: a low mound of earth beside the fire ring, steaming gently at the edges, with a smell coming out of it of lamb and smoke and wet grass and something sharp and green. He opened it with a shovel and his hands, carefully, layer by layer: earth, then wet burlap, then a layer of broad leaves from the creek, and then, on a floor of stones still too hot to touch, the food. A whole shoulder of lamb, dark and falling from the bone. Potatoes, blackened outside and white and steaming inside. Ears of corn. Beans in their pods. A tinfoil packet of something Edwin called humitas, ground corn steamed in husks, which he said his mother made better and he would not hear otherwise.

They ate it at dusk, on blankets on the ground, with their fingers, with the sheep settling for the night all over the basin around them in a vast soft murmur of bells and bleats, and the light going red on the far ridges, and the cold coming up out of the ground.

Bego ate a potato and a great deal of lamb, and said to Edwin in Spanish that it was very good and needed salt, and he said in Spanish that his mother said the same thing about everything, and she laughed. Arthur had not known she spoke Spanish. Of course she did, Maite said. Half the herders who came through the boardinghouse had come over through Spain. And her husband had herded with Mexican men in the sixties, and then hired Peruvians in the eighties, and the whole ranch had run on Spanish for forty years.

"I remember your father," Bego said to Edwin then, suddenly. "Teófilo. The boy who sang."

Edwin set down his plate.

"You remember him?"

"Of course I remember him. Every Christmas, my husband brought the herders down to the house for supper. Your father came six Christmases. He was very thin and very polite and he sang after supper. In your language. Songs about rivers and about girls." She considered. "He would not eat my croquetas. He said they were too rich. I never forgave him."

Edwin began to laugh, and then he stopped laughing and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist.

"He still sings them," he said. "My father. Carnival songs. From the valley. At carnival everybody sings, in Quechua, and you make up verses. About your neighbor. About the mayor. About the girl you like and the boy she likes better. Somebody sings one, somebody sings back." He reached into his jacket and took out the little wooden flute from the shelf in his wagon. "Like you. Like the bertso. Like the old Ukrainian." He smiled his gold-toothed smile. "Everybody in the mountains, the same."

He played. It was a high, breathy, wandering tune, sad and then suddenly quick, and the sheep nearest the fire lifted their heads to listen. When he finished he sang a verse, in a language none of the others had ever heard, and grinned at the end of it, and pointed with his chin at Bego.

"What did you say?"

"I said the señora rides a mule like a general and eats like a herder and does not like my father's singing." He shrugged. "In Quechua it rhymes."

Bego Arrieta looked at him across the fire for a long moment. Then she sang back. In Euskara. Eight lines, to a slow tune, without taking her eyes off him.

Nobody translated. Nobody needed to. Edwin bowed his head over his flute, smiling, and played the next tune as if it had been asked for.

* * *

Arthur put the bread in the ground that night, at Edwin's instruction, for the morning. Edwin had mixed the dough and let it rise in the pot by the stove and showed him the pit, and the coals, and how to set the pot and shovel the coals on the lid and the earth over that.

"Mark the place," said Edwin. "In the morning, you dig."

Arthur marked the place. He was very careful about it. He set a flat white stone on the earth exactly above the pot, so that he would know.

Then he went to bed in a borrowed tent, under more stars than he had seen since he was a boy, with the sheep breathing all around him like a sea, and the bells going now and then in the dark, one here, one there, as a ewe shifted in her sleep. And at some point in the night Ganso came and lay down across the door of his tent, heavily, on purpose, to make sure the lost one stayed where he had been put.

Speaking Through the Bark

In the morning the white stone was gone.

Arthur stood at the edge of the fire ring at six o'clock, in the blue cold, in his cardigan and two borrowed sweaters, with a short shovel in his hands and his breath smoking, and looked at the ground where the stone had been. There was ground. There was a great deal of it. It was all the same. Somewhere under it was a cast-iron pot with a loaf of bread inside, and above it, in the night, two thousand sheep had passed on their way to water, and every one of them, by the look of the dirt, had stepped exactly there.

"Where's the stone?" said Edwin, coming up behind him with the coffeepot.

"I was hoping you could tell me."

Edwin looked at the ground. He looked at the sheep. He looked, after a moment, at Ganso, who was lying ten yards off in the grass with something white and flat between his front paws, which he was licking with great tenderness because it smelled of bread.

"Ah," said Edwin.

* * *

They dug five holes. Arthur dug the first two himself, with tremendous confidence, in places where he was absolutely certain the pot was, and found earth and stones and a tin can from about 1950. Xabi, coming out of his tent with his hair standing up, dug the third, on the grounds that he had been digging bread out of the ground since he was nine and a city man could not be expected to understand it, and found a root. Maite dug the fourth, filming herself, narrating in a low, solemn, documentary voice: "Day one. The clown has buried our breakfast. Morale is low." Renata, who said she had excavated archaeological sites in four states and this was the most embarrassing of them, dug the fifth, very precisely, in a neat square, and found a gopher.

Bego sat on a cooler in Amra's jacket with a cup of coffee and watched them all and laughed until she had to wipe her eyes on the jacket's sleeve.

In the end it was Ganso who found it. He got up, unhurried, with the air of a dog who had waited long enough for the humans to embarrass themselves, and walked over to a perfectly ordinary patch of ground about four feet from where anybody had dug, and put his great nose down to the earth, and breathed in, and sat down on it.

Edwin dug there. The pot came up black and hot, with the coals still glowing under the lid, and when he lifted the lid the loaf had risen into a perfect brown dome and split across the top, and the smell went out over the whole camp, and two hundred sheep turned around to look.

They ate it on the cooler lids, hot, with butter, while the sun came over the ridge.

"Next time," said Edwin to Arthur, tearing off a piece for Ganso, "mark the place with the dog."

* * *

They went into the groves at eight.

Renata had a plan. She had a map, printed out, with every grove on the Arrieta permit outlined in red pencil, and beside each outline a date and a number: the groves she had already recorded, and how many carvings in each. There were nineteen groves on the permit. She had done eleven. "The other eight are the old ones," she said. "Up high. Up toward the forks. The trees up there are big and old and half of them are already down. I never got that far on a day off."

"Then we go to the forks," said Bego from the mule.

"Mrs. Arrieta, the forks are four hours."

"Then we had better start," said Bego, and turned Senator's head toward the trail.

* * *

It was in the third grove, two hours up, that Arthur began to understand the scale of it.

They were on a steep north slope, where the snow lay late into June, and the aspens were very big here, thicker than a man's body at the base. Many of them were dying. Their crowns were thin, with dead gray branches sticking up through the leaves like antlers. Some had fallen and lay across one another on the slope in long white piles, the bark peeling off them in curls, the wood inside gone soft and brown. Between them the young trees came up thick, green-barked and slender, shoulder high.

And every big trunk, standing or fallen, was carved.

Renata worked like a machine. She went from tree to tree with the new camera, photographing each carving straight on, then from the side to catch the depth of the scar; then a tape measure laid across the carving for scale and photographed again; then the tree's diameter, measured with a tape; then its position, from a little satellite unit on her belt; then a number painted in small white figures on a stake at the foot of the tree, nowhere on the tree itself; then notes on the clipboard in a quick small hand. Her two new seasonal technicians had not started yet, so Maite became her assistant within ten minutes, holding the tape and reading out the letters.

"Juan Ugalde. Ea. 1918," Maite read. "There's a horse. A horse with a rider. The rider has a beret."

"Bizkaia," said Bego from the mule, at the edge of the grove. "Ea is next to Ispaster. Ugalde. There was an Ugalde who stayed at the boardinghouse. Very tall. Big ears." She considered. "Could be his father."

"José Mari, Lekeitio, 1924. And under it there's a list of numbers."

"His count," said Edwin. "The sheep. Every evening you count. Some men wrote it on the trees so they would not forget." He looked closer. "He was missing nine."

"Antonio. No last name. 1931. There's a house. There's a woman with very long hair." Maite tilted her head. "She's not wearing very much."

"Typical," said Bego. "Antonio." She said it as if she had known him.

There were dozens. Every tree in the grove. Names, villages, dates. Hearts. A boat, very carefully done, with sails, by a man who was a long way from the sea. A bottle, with the word ARDOA cut beside it, which Bego said meant wine, and under it, in a different and angrier hand, another word, which she said meant late. "The camp tender," she said. "Was late with the wine." Crude drawings of men with big bellies and the word for boss. A beautiful one, very old, faded almost to nothing, of a mountain with a little church at the top of it, and the name of a village, and the single word MAITE.

Maite stopped holding the tape.

"It means beloved," said Bego, from the mule, quite gently. "It is what you are named. Some boy, a long way from home. That is his village. That is what he left there."

Maite stood looking at it for a long time. Then she put her hand flat on the trunk beside it, and Renata took the picture.

* * *

At noon, in the fifth grove, on the shoulder of a ridge, Xabi stopped dead.

He was standing in front of a big gray aspen, half dead, its top snapped off by some old wind, looking at a carving about the height of his chest. He did not say anything. He did not move. Arthur came up beside him, and looked.

J. ARRIETA. MARKINA. 1959.

And under it, small and neat, a sheep. Just a sheep, standing, very simply done, with a bell under its chin.

"Ama," said Xabi, in a voice Arthur had not heard from him before. "Ama, come here."

They got her down off the mule, and Xabi carried her, actually picked her up and carried her, over the fallen trunks and through the thick young aspens, and set her on her feet in front of the tree, and held her by the elbow.

She looked at it for a long time. Then she put out her hand and touched the J, and the A, and the sheep with its bell.

"He never told me," she said.

"Did you know he carved?"

"Every herder carved." Her fingers were on the sheep. "He never told me he carved here. On my father's mountain. In 1959." She worked it out. "He was twenty-one. He had been here two years. He did not know me." She took her hand away. "He came here, to my father's grove, before he ever saw me, and wrote his name beside my father's sheep." She laughed suddenly, a small, astonished sound. "Thirteen years later he buys the permit and says, because it's your father's. He never said, because it is also mine."

She stood and looked at it, with her son holding her elbow. Renata took the pictures without being asked, quietly, from a long way back. Maite took one too, and before they moved on she had put it in her grandfather's box on the family tree, beside his wedding picture.

* * *

It was Edwin who found the next one, twenty feet away.

He had gone a little apart from the others while they stood around Joxe's tree, as if to give them room, and was walking slowly through the young aspens looking at the trunks, the way he had told Arthur he looked every Sunday. And he stopped, and stood very still, and then sat down, all at once, on a fallen log, as if his legs had been taken out from under him.

On the tree in front of him, smaller, fresher, the black of the scars still edged with paler bark, was carved:

TEOFILO QUISPE. HUANCAYO. PERU. 1987.

And beside it, long-necked and careful, an alpaca.

Nobody said anything. Edwin sat on the log with his hat in his hands. Ganso came and leaned against his knees. After a while Edwin got up and went to the tree and put his palm flat beside his father's name, the same way he had put it beside his own, three ridges over, on the day Arthur met him.

"He said the big trees by the two forks," he said. "Every summer. I went to the wrong forks." He laughed, shakily. "Two creeks. Both with forks. Three summers."

He took the little satellite unit from his belt. It would not send a photograph, he said, only words. So he sent words. They watched him type with his big thumbs, slowly. And then they waited, all of them, in the grove on the ridge, with the aspens shivering overhead, and the sheep calling far below, for a man in Huancayo who was seventy years old to wake up and read it.

It took forty minutes. Edwin read the answer aloud, in Spanish, and then in English, for the others.

My son. Is the alpaca still there? I made the neck too long. Joxe laughed at me. Tell the señora I still don't eat the croquetas.

Bego Arrieta, sitting on the log where Edwin had sat, with her cane across her knees, laughed out loud.

"Tell him," she said, "I still don't forgive him."

* * *

They camped that night in a small meadow below the highest grove, with the forks of the creek a few hundred yards above them in the dusk. It was very cold. They built a big fire. Edwin made rice and lamb and fried the last of the potatoes. Bego was very tired, and sat in a camp chair wrapped in two sleeping bags with her red beret pulled down over her ears and said almost nothing, which frightened her son more than anything she might have said.

Before he slept, Arthur saw Maite sitting alone at the edge of the firelight with her phone, looking at the photographs of the day: a carved mountain with a church on it and her own name. Her grandfather's name beside a sheep with a bell. An alpaca with a neck too long. She was saying something under her breath. It took Arthur a moment to understand that it was not English, and that she was counting on her fingers.

The Lady in the Hat

The forks of the creek were two streams of snowmelt coming down out of the high country from two directions, one from the north and one from the east, clear and cold and loud over gray stones, and meeting in a pool the size of a kitchen under a bank of willows. Above the pool, on a long bench of the hillside facing south into the sun, stood the oldest aspen grove on the Arrieta permit.

They reached it at nine in the morning. Bego rode Senator to the edge of it and stopped.

"Here," she said. "This is the place. He said, the trees face the sun and the water talks two ways. That is the water talking two ways."

The grove was dying. Arthur could see that at once. The big trees were very big, the biggest he had seen, gray-trunked and enormous, and more than half of them were down: lying in great heaps across one another on the slope, white and silver and soft with rot, with the young aspens coming up between them thick as wheat. The ones still standing had thin crowns and dead tops and long black wounds down their trunks where the bark had split and something dark had got in. The ground was a tangle of fallen wood and fireweed and tall grass. It smelled of rotting wood and wet earth and, faintly, of sheep, though no sheep had been here in a week.

"Old," said Renata quietly, getting down off her horse. "A hundred years, some of these. That's ancient, for aspen. They should be down already." She looked up at the dead tops against the blue. "Another five years. Maybe ten. Then there's nothing here but the young ones."

* * *

They searched for two hours.

There were carvings on every standing tree and on many of the fallen ones, some still upright on the bark of logs lying on their sides, so that Maite had to lie down in the grass to read them. Renata recorded every one she could reach. Edwin and Xabi worked their way up the slope, tree by tree, calling back to each other in Spanish. Arthur held the tape. Bego sat on Senator at the bottom of the grove in the sun, with the reins in her lap, and did not ask anything, and did not say anything, and watched them go up and down the slope, and the mule watched with her, both ears forward.

At a quarter past eleven, high on the slope, Maite went very quiet.

She was standing in front of a big tree near the top of the grove, one of the last ones standing up there, gray and enormous and dying, with its crown nearly bare and a long black canker down one side of it from the dead top almost to the ground. She did not shout for anyone. She stood with her hands at her sides, looking up at the trunk at about the height of her eyes, and after a while she turned around and looked down the slope to where her grandmother sat on the mule in the sun.

"Amama," she said. Not loudly. The whole grove heard it.

* * *

It took Xabi and Edwin twenty minutes to bring her up. They did it between them, with Bego's arms over their shoulders and her feet sometimes on the ground and sometimes not, over the fallen trunks and through the young aspens, slowly, while she told them both which way to go. Renata followed with the camera, not using it. Arthur came last, with the cane.

They set her down in front of the tree.

The carving was at the height of a tall man's shoulder. The scars had blackened and spread and swollen with the years, the way all of them did, so that every line was three times as thick as the knife had made it, but it was perfectly clear. A woman. Long skirt. Very straight. And on her head a hat, so wide and so curly at the brim that it was nearly the size of the rest of her. Beside her a little house with a pointed roof and a door and two windows, and a curl of smoke going up from the chimney, which the photograph had not shown. And beneath them, in four lines of capital letters, words. And beneath the words, T. URKIAGA. ISPASTER. 1927.

Below that, a long way below, where the knife had stopped, the bark ran smooth and gray and empty to the ground.

Bego Arrieta stood in front of her father's tree with her son's arm around her waist and looked at it.

She did not say anything for a long time. Arthur, standing back with the cane, watched her face, and he thought he had never in his life seen a face look so much like a child's and so much like an old woman's at the same time.

Then she put up her hand, and touched the hat.

She traced it, slowly, the brim and the crown and the curl at the edge, with one small brown finger, the way Edwin had put his palm beside his father's alpaca. She touched the woman's skirt. She touched the house, and the door, and the smoke. And then she put her finger on the first word of the first line, and began, very slowly, to read aloud.

She read in Euskara, in the old Bizkaian of the coast, the language of the boardinghouse table, and she did not read it so much as sing it, quietly, because it was a bertso, and it had a tune, and she knew the tune at once from the shape of the lines the way a person knows a song from four notes. Four lines. The first half. The rhymes coming down in the right places. And then her finger came off the bark at the end of the fourth line, and the tune stopped in the middle, with its foot lifted, waiting.

Maite translated, in a whisper, for Arthur and Renata. She did not need to look anything up.

"Woman who has not come yet, I have built you a house in a tree. When you come, bring your hat. The sun up here is strong."

That was all. Then the empty bark.

"The answer is hers," said Bego. "He said so. He left the rest for her." She looked down at the smooth gray bark below the carving, where the second half of the verse should have been, and had never been. "She never came up."

* * *

Renata recorded it.

She did it slowly and carefully and with great respect, and nobody minded: the carving straight on and from both sides, every letter, the tape across it for scale, the tree's girth, the black canker, the dead top, the position from the unit on her belt, the white number on a stake at the tree's foot. Then she asked Bego, in a quiet voice, whether she would stand beside it for one photograph, and Bego said no, and then said yes, and Xabi let go of her waist, and she stood beside her father's tree by herself, very straight, with her hand on the bark under the hat, and did not smile, and Renata took the picture. Then Maite stepped in beside her, and Renata took another. Then Xabi. Then Edwin, at Bego's insistence, at the edge, with his hat in his hand.

Then Bego said, "The clown," and Arthur came and stood in the back, very tall, with the cane, and Renata took the last one.

That night, by the fire, Maite put the new photograph on the family's tree, in Tomas Urkiaga's box, beside the old one from 1931: the same aspen, ninety-seven years older, dying, with four people and a clown in front of it. And she put the place on the family's map with a pin, between the boardinghouse on Grove Street and the village of Ispaster, with both photographs and the date, and under it the four lines of the verse in Euskara, and her own English beneath them, and a note: First half. Answer still owed.

* * *

Xabi told his mother that night.

They were sitting around the fire in the meadow below the grove, in the cold, with the sky full of stars right down to the black edge of the ridges and the creek talking two ways in the dark above them. Edwin was playing his flute very softly. Bego was in her camp chair in the two sleeping bags with a cup of tea, looking into the fire, and she had not said anything since the grove except, once, to Senator, who had been brought a whole apple.

Xabi said it in English, plainly, not looking at her. That he had meant to tell her in October. That he was selling the band after this season, and the permit, and the trucks, and the wagon at the camp. That the wool did not pay for the shearing. That the lambs went up and down. That the fires and the wolves and the fuel and the bank. That Amra had shown him the numbers for three years. That he was sorry. That he was tired. That he was the one who stopped it.

Bego did not look at him.

She looked into the fire, and when he had finished, she set down her tea, and she sang at him.

It was angry. Arthur could hear that without a word of it. It was fast and hard and the tune was a hammer, and at the end of every second line the rhyme came down like a fist on a table, and Edwin stopped playing, and Maite, who understood it, put both her hands over her mouth. Eight lines. And then she stopped, and waited, as she always waited, for the answer.

Her son did not sing. He had never sung. He looked at her across the fire with his big sunburned face and his hands hanging between his knees.

"Ama," he said. "I'm tired."

That was all. Not a verse. Not a rhyme. Three words in English, in the cold, under the dying grove.

Bego looked at him for a long time.

"I know," she said at last. Quietly. In English. "You have been tired since your father died. I have been watching you be tired for thirteen years." She picked up her tea again, and looked into it. "My father came here for sheep. The sheep did not come here for him." She was quiet. "If you have to sell, sell. Better to sell than to hate it."

Xabi looked at her as if she had hit him.

"That's it?"

"What do you want me to say? That you are killing your grandfather? Your grandfather was a herder for fourteen years and then he ran a boardinghouse and he never touched a sheep again in his life and he was perfectly happy. He said the best thing about sheep was getting away from them." She drank. "It was your father who loved them. Not me. I married the permit."

Maite made a small sound.

Xabi sat for a long time without moving.

"If the wool paid," he said at last, slowly, to the fire. "If it paid anything. Anything at all. I'd keep a little band. Half. Maybe less. Enough for Edwin. Enough for the mountain." He shook his head. "But it doesn't."

Nobody said anything. The creek talked two ways. Up in the dark, in the old grove, a dead aspen let go of a branch and it fell through the others with a long slow crackle and a thump, and Ganso lifted his head and looked toward the sound, and laid it down again.

Arthur, sitting at the edge of the firelight with his knees up to his chin, took a square of brown paper from the pastille tin in his cardigan pocket. He wrote on it by the light of the fire, on his knee, in his small neat hand.

CAMP SUPPLIES. One reason. On order.

And a very small bell.

In the morning, when they packed the camp, Xabi found it folded into the brim of his hat.

Wool and Numbers

The Western Idaho Fair came at the end of August, on the fairgrounds by the river on the west side of Boise, and it was every county fair multiplied by heat and noise and fry oil: a Ferris wheel turning slowly against a white sky, funnel cakes, and a barn of rabbits so fluffy that Vira went in and did not come out for an hour. The Hrynchuk circus played twice a day in a big tent between the livestock barns and the grandstand, and the farm children came in with their show lambs still on halters, and twice a lamb got loose in the middle of the terriers' act, and the terriers, for the first time in living memory, ran the right way.

And in the sheep barn, on the Saturday afternoon, Bego Arrieta sheared a ewe with her father's shears.

* * *

It was a demonstration. The fair had a shearing contest every year, with young men in moccasins and electric clippers taking the fleece off a sheep in under a minute while the crowd counted, and in between the heats, an old woman in a red beret sat down on a low stool in the middle of the pen with a ewe from the Arrieta band held for her by her son, and took out the long iron blades from their leather sheath.

It took her eleven minutes. She did not hurry. The blades opened and closed in her small brown fist with a sound like a pair of birds arguing, snick, snick, snick, and the fleece came away in one piece, rolling back off the ewe's body like a heavy cream-colored blanket, greasy and thick and gray on the outside and white as milk on the inside where it had lain against the skin. The ewe stood very still. The crowd stood very still. When it was done, Bego folded the fleece in on itself, skin side out, and rolled it, and tied it with a twist of its own wool, the old way, and handed it to her son, and the crowd, who had cheered the young men with the clippers, gave her a long slow round of applause that went on until she waved it away.

"My father taught me," she said, into a microphone a fair official held for her. "In the yard of the boardinghouse. On a sheep he borrowed. My mother said it was not for girls. My father said it was not for anybody, any more, so it might as well be for girls." She put the shears back in their sheath. "Now the clown."

Bippo had been waiting at the gate of the pen in his yellow trousers and his fleece of cotton batting and his bell. He came in on all fours, bleating. He was caught by Xabi, protesting, and seated on the stool, and held, struggling, while Bego, very slowly, very seriously, raised the long iron shears to his orange wig.

Snick.

A lock of orange yarn fell to the straw. The crowd shrieked. Snick. Another. Bippo's eyes went wide under the blue stars. He clutched at his head. Snick. He looked at the crowd in despair, and at the old woman with the shears, and at the little drift of orange on the straw, and then, with tremendous dignity, he took the wig off his head, under which there was another, identical orange wig, and held the first one out to her, to finish.

It was the best laugh of the fair. A man from the newspaper took a photograph of it that ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, above the fold, under the headline: SHEARED.

* * *

Amra Arrieta explained the numbers to Arthur that evening, at a picnic table behind the sheep barn, with her laptop and the fleece Bego had sheared lying on the bench beside her like a sleeping dog.

"This fleece," she said, patting it, "weighs about eleven pounds. It's good wool. Fine. Clean. Long. This year a wool buyer would pay me, if I'm lucky, a dollar and a half a pound. If I'm not lucky, less. Some years, much less. Some years nobody comes at all." She turned the laptop toward him. "It costs me about four dollars to have a ewe sheared. The shearing crew, the travel, the bags, the trucking to the warehouse. So I lose money on the wool. Every fleece. Every year. Two thousand of them." She closed the laptop. "There was a time the wool paid for the whole outfit. Bego's father's time. Now we shear because a sheep has to be sheared or it suffers in the heat. The wool is garbage. Beautiful garbage."

"Is there nobody who wants it?"

"Everybody wants it. Nobody wants to pay for it." Amra laughed. "People pay three hundred dollars for a wool blanket in a store in Sun Valley. The man who grew the wool gets about eleven dollars. The rest is somebody else."

She looked across at the sheep barn, where her husband was loading the Arrieta ewes back into the trailer in the long gold evening light, slowly, one at a time, and talking to them.

"He'll sell," she said. "He's right to. I've told him for three years he's right to." She put her hand on the fleece. "I wish he wasn't."

* * *

The letters came in the first week of September, three of them in two days, and Lesia Hrynchuk, who had nothing to do with any of them, heard about all three by lunchtime.

The first came to the Arrieta Sheep Company from a small woolen mill in the northeast corner of Oregon that nobody on the Bench had ever heard of: an old family mill on a creek, it said, recently bought and reopened by new owners with new looms and old ideas. The mill wished to make blankets. Not many. Very good ones. Each blanket made only from the wool of one named band of sheep, from one mountain, in one year, and each carrying a woven label with the name of the band, the name of the herder and the name of the mountain. The mill had heard, it did not say from whom, of the Arrieta band. It wished to buy the whole Arrieta clip for the next three years, at a price per pound that made Amra Arrieta put down her coffee, take off her reading glasses, put them back on, read it again, and sit down on the kitchen floor.

At the bottom of the letter, in small print, there was a line explaining that the mill's first three years were supported in part by a charitable trust interested in the heritage of herding in the American West.

The second came to Renata Mosqueda at the Forest Service office, and said that the same trust would pay to bring any family of any herder whose carving she recorded to see it, if the family wished, and to pay for the photographs to be printed and framed for them, at full size.

The third came to Maite Arrieta, in a heavy cream envelope with a small drawing of a sheep wagon in one corner. It offered her a year of Saturday lessons, by video, with a teacher of bertsolaritza in a town in Bizkaia, the teacher's fee and every expense paid, in recognition, it said, of a performance in three languages on Grove Street on the twenty-ninth of July, which had been described to the trust by a person who wished to remain unnamed. And at the bottom of the letter, after the signature, there was a verse.

It was eight lines long, in Euskara. It was about a girl who answers. It was, Bego said, after reading it twice at the kitchen table through her reading glasses with her mouth getting tighter and tighter, the worst bertso she had seen in eighty years.

She took a red pen from Amra's ear and corrected it. Every line. The meter was wrong in four places. The rhymes landed on the wrong syllables. One word was not Bizkaian and another was not Basque at all. When she had finished, the letter looked as if it had been bleeding.

Then she sat back and looked at it.

"Bad meter," she said. "Good heart." She tapped the page. "Who writes like this? Somebody old. From far away. Who learned Euskara last month, from a book, in the evenings, so they could write one verse to a girl they never met." She looked up, across the table, at the tall man in the cardigan who was helping himself to the croquetas. "Hm?"

Arthur ate a croqueta. His face gave away nothing whatever.

"In Lesia's opinion," he said, "it's the Prime Minister."

* * *

The sheep came down from the mountain in the third week of September, out of the high groves and the green basins, trailing down the long draws toward the river road in a slow river of their own, two thousand ewes and their grown lambs, with Edwin walking behind on foot with his staff, and the border collie running the edges, and Ganso padding along in the middle of them all like a great white boat. Arthur walked one day of it with Edwin, on a Monday, from the camp to the river. Dust rose gold behind the band and hung in the low sun. The bells went all day, the deep clank of the old wethers and the high clink of the young ones, and the sound of two thousand small hooves on the trail was a long soft roar like rain on a roof. Ganso spent the whole day pushing Arthur back into the flock whenever he strayed to the edge of it, until by evening Arthur stopped straying.

"He has decided," said Edwin. "You are his."

At the river that evening, by the trucks, Edwin's satellite unit buzzed. He read the screen and stood still for a long time.

"My father," he said. "The papers came. The visa. For Ketchum." He looked up at Arthur with an expression of complete bewilderment. "A festival. For the sheep. In October. They invited him. A program for the families of herders. They pay the plane. They pay the hotel. Six weeks of papers and he got it." He shook his head. "Nobody gets it. He got it." He looked down at the screen. "He says he is bringing his good hat. He says tell the señora he is still not eating the croquetas."

Arthur wrote on a square of brown paper that night, in the Sardine Can, and gave it to Edwin in the morning folded into the next week's grocery list.

CAMP SUPPLIES. One extra coffee cup. For Ketchum.

And a very small bell.

* * *

In the evenings, all through September, there was a light in the sheep wagon on the Bench, and two voices.

Maite came every night after school, after her Thursday battles in the library, after her Saturday lesson by video with a patient, gray-haired, delighted teacher in Bizkaia who said she had a natural ear and a terrible accent and that the second would fix itself if the first was given a chance. She sat on the step of the wagon with her feet in the grass, and her grandmother sat at the little table under the photograph, and they worked.

Seven syllables. Six. Seven. Six. Counted on the fingers, tapped against the thumb, the way a girl had counted them at a table of thirty men in 1953. The rhyme at the end of every second line. The tunes, one after another, old tunes worn smooth. Maite sang a line. Bego listened. Maite sang it again.

And something happened in that wagon in September that nobody saw but Arthur, sitting on the porch steps under the grape arbor on his Monday visits with a cup of tea, listening.

Bego stopped correcting her in the middle of the word.

She let her finish. The whole line. The whole verse, sometimes, all eight lines, wrong vowels and wrong verb endings and a rhyme that did not quite land. She let it go to the end, and then she sang back, answering. And only after that, after the answer, quietly, she said: that vowel. Again.

"She never did that before," said Maite to Arthur, at the gate, one night at the end of the month. "Not once. Not my whole life." She looked back at the glowing wagon. "I asked her why. She said she listened to me on Grove Street. She said in English I never stop, and she was the one making me stop." She was quiet. "She said she's eighty-four and she's learning too."

On the last night of September, Bego asked Maite to record one more thing. Not for the family's pages. A bertso, eight lines, sung once, into the phone, sealed in the family's letters for later, with a note in Bego's dictated words: For Maite's children. Not before. If she has none, for whoever answers.

Nobody but Bego knew what it said.

The Other Half of the Verse

Ketchum sits at the top of a long valley in the middle of Idaho, under mountains that are already white on top by October, and in the second week of that month, for about thirty years now, the town has given its Main Street back to the sheep.

The Hrynchuk circus came up the valley on the Thursday, the last booking of the summer before the long drive home to Manitoba, and set its tent on a field at the edge of town with the cottonwoods along the river gone pure yellow and the aspens on the slopes above gone gold, whole mountainsides of them, so bright in the low sun that Arthur kept stopping on the lot to look. The air was cold and thin and smelled of woodsmoke and fallen leaves and, everywhere, of sheep. There was a sheepdog trial on a hayfield south of town, where border collies from all over the West brought small groups of very offended sheep through gates by whistle. There was a fair in a park, with Scottish pipers and Peruvian dancers in wide bright skirts and the Boise troupe in red and white, and a woman spinning wool on a wheel.

And on the Friday, at a small airport in the next town down the valley, a man of seventy stepped off a plane in a good gray felt hat with a band of woven red and green, and stood on the tarmac in the cold sunshine, and looked up at the mountains for a long time before he looked for his son.

* * *

Edwin had come straight from the band. He had left the sheep with Xabi at the trailing corrals for six hours and driven down the valley in the white pickup in the same canvas jacket and rubber boots, and he stood at the low fence of the little terminal with his knit cap in his hands, and Arthur and Maite and Bego stood a little behind him and pretended to look at a vending machine.

Teófilo Quispe came through the door. He was small and very straight, with a brown deeply lined face and a thin gray mustache and the same wide mouth as his son, and he walked through the glass door and saw Edwin and stopped.

They did not say anything. They put their arms around each other at the fence and stood there.

After a while Teófilo stepped back, and held his son at arm's length by both shoulders, and looked at him, and said something in Quechua that made Edwin laugh and wipe his face. Then he looked past his son, at the small old woman in the red beret by the vending machine.

"Señora Arrieta," he said, in Spanish.

"Teófilo," said Bego. "You are old."

"You are not."

"Liar," said Bego, and held out her hand, and he took it in both of his and bowed over it, very formally, the way a young herder at a Christmas table in 1987 had bowed to his boss's wife. Then she reached into her canvas bag and took out a paper napkin and unfolded it, and inside it were two croquetas.

Teófilo looked at them. Then at her. Then, after a long pause, with the air of a man settling a debt of forty years, he took one, and ate it.

"Too rich," he said.

"I know," said Bego. "Eat the other one."

* * *

That night Amra put up a page for him. It was a single page in the family's private pages, with a photograph from the airport, and at the top she wrote, Welcome, Teófilo. Thirty-seven years later. And by morning there were messages on it from all over.

From Danae in Huancayo, a video, in Spanish, with a gap-toothed grin: Abuelo, don't let the señora feed you, you'll get fat and Mamá will blame me. From Renata Mosqueda, the photograph of his tree, the carved name and the long-necked alpaca, full size, with the note: Printed and framed. It's in the truck. From the Hrynchuk circus, collectively, a photograph of the terriers in red and green knit caps, which Vira had made overnight. From Taras, separately, in his own hand on a paper napkin photographed and sent by Lesia: Welcome, mountain man. The mountains are everywhere. So are we. And from a boy in Chicago who had never met anybody involved, but whom Arthur had told about it in a Sunday reply, a short message with no capital letters: kuba here. my dziadek says welcome from one old herder to another. he says he was a canvasman not a herder but it is the same thing, you sleep with animals and nobody understands you.

* * *

The storytelling evening was on the Saturday, in a hall in town with a wooden floor and long tables and paper lanterns, and it was full. Ranchers. Herders, a dozen of them, Peruvian and Mexican and one old Basque from a valley in Nevada, in clean shirts, sitting together near the back. Townspeople. Visitors in fleece jackets. The Boise dancers, who would be in the parade in the morning. Taras and Vira and Lesia and Cyril and Halyna and Vange with her accordion on her knee. Renata in a sweater with her black braid down her back. And at a table near the little stage, Bego Arrieta in her red beret, with her son on one side and Teófilo Quispe on the other and a cup of tea she had not touched.

There were stories. A rancher's daughter told about her great-grandfather losing six hundred sheep in a blizzard and finding them in spring, alive, under a cliff. A Peruvian herder told, in Spanish with his teenage nephew translating, about the night a bear opened his wagon door like a man coming home late. Renata showed photographs on a screen, the carvings, the dying groves, the names, and said the trust had paid for three summers and she meant to get every tree she could before they fell. When the photograph of the aspen with the woman in the hat came up on the screen, enormous, ninety-seven years after the first picture of it, the hall went quiet.

And then Gorka Aldape, who had driven up from Boise especially and was holding a sheet of paper, stood up and said that there would be a bertso. And that it would be in two halves. And that the first half had been waiting since 1927.

* * *

Bego stood up at her table. She did not go to the stage. She sang where she was.

She sang her father's four lines, in Euskara, to the tune she had known at once in the grove. Woman who has not come yet, I have built you a house in a tree. When you come, bring your hat. The sun up here is strong. Her voice cracked on the third line and held on the fourth. Then she stopped, with the tune's foot lifted, in the middle, and sat down.

Everybody in the hall looked at the stage.

Maite Arrieta walked up onto it.

She was wearing a black sweater and her grandmother's other red beret, and her hands were empty, and she was so pale that Arthur, standing at the back of the hall by the door in his cardigan, could see it from forty feet away. She stood at the front of the little stage and looked out at the hall, at the tables, at the paper lanterns, at the old woman at the table by the stage, and she put her right hand down by her side, and Arthur saw her fingers begin, very slightly, to tap against her thumb.

She closed her eyes.

And she sang the second half.

In Euskara. In the old tune, picked up exactly where her grandmother had left it hanging. Four lines, seven and six and seven and six, with the rhymes coming down on the right syllables. It was not perfect. There was a vowel in the second line that was more Boise than Bizkaia, and a hesitation before the last word that went on a breath too long. Nobody minded in the least. The old Basque from Nevada, at the back, let out his breath in a long "Ahhh," at the first rhyme, and at the last one he stood up.

Afterward, at the table, Maite told Arthur what she had sung. She had spent September on it. She had spent, she said, a hundred and one years on it, if you counted properly.

I came. I came late. The hat was too big for the boat. I left it at the boardinghouse and brought you a granddaughter instead.

* * *

For a moment the hall did not applaud. It held still, the way a room holds still when it has heard something that was not meant for it and has been allowed to hear it anyway.

Then Bego Arrieta stood up again at her table and answered her granddaughter. Eight lines. Quick and sharp and laughing. Maite answered back from the stage, eight more, faster, with a grin starting at the corner of her mouth halfway through that she could not stop. Bego answered. Maite answered. The old Basque from Nevada was clapping on the beat. Gorka had his paper over his heart.

On the fourth round, Taras Hrynchuk stood up from the circus table, put on his cap, and sang a kolomyika at both of them, in Ukrainian, stamping, which Maite then put into English rhyme in eight bars without dropping the beat, and then answered in Euskara. On the fifth, Teófilo Quispe rose slowly from his chair beside Bego, and took off his good gray hat, and sang a carnival verse in Quechua, high and quick, about a señora with a red hat who feeds old men poison croquetas, and Edwin, at the back with the herders, took out his flute and played under it, and the herders at the back table shouted.

It went on for half an hour. Four languages. One beat. The paper lanterns swinging slightly in the warm air over the tables.

When it ended, Gorka Aldape called it, as he had on Grove Street, a draw.

"It is not a draw," said Bego, sitting down. She reached over and took her granddaughter's hand as Maite came down off the stage, and held it hard. "It is an answer."

Fifteen Hundred Sheep on Main Street

On Sunday at noon the sheep came down Main Street.

The town had been waiting since ten. People stood six deep on both sidewalks under the gold cottonwoods, in parkas and fleece and cowboy hats, all the way from one end of town to the other, and the street between them lay empty and swept and shining in the cold sun, with the mountains standing white at the end of it. A woman on a balcony above a bakery was ringing a cowbell for no reason anybody could discover.

First came the music. The Scottish pipers, in kilts, droning. The Peruvian dancers, women in wide layered skirts of red and pink and green that swung out like bells when they turned, and men in embroidered vests, and a band behind them with flutes and a harp and a little ten-stringed guitar, playing the huaylas of the Mantaro Valley, the harvest dance, quick and stamping. Teófilo Quispe walked at the front of them in his good gray hat, very upright, beside a woman from Lima who had been asked to carry the banner and had given it to him instead. The Boise dancers came after, in red and white, the jota leaping and turning down the middle of the street, and at the head of the youth line, in her red beret, Maite Arrieta, who looked, Arthur thought, like someone who had slept for the first time in a month.

Behind them, an old sheep wagon on rubber tires, pulled slowly by a pickup with a dented tailgate. Its canvas was new and white and its wheels were painted green, and the Dutch door at the front stood open, and on a cushion on the step, wrapped in a blanket, with her cane across her knees and her red beret pulled down against the cold, sat Bego Arrieta, being towed down the main street of Ketchum in her father's office like a queen in a coach.

And then the street went quiet, and down at the far end, from the north, there came a sound like rain.

* * *

Bippo the Clown walked in front of the sheep.

That had not been in anybody's plan. The plan had been for the herders to bring the band down Main Street the way the bands had come down it for a hundred years, on foot, with the dogs. But at the trailing corrals at eleven, when the first ewes were let out onto the road, they had stood bunched at the gate and would not go. Fifteen hundred ewes, looking at a town full of people, and deciding, sensibly, against it. Edwin whistled. The border collie ran. The sheep milled and did not go.

And Bippo, who had been standing at the corral fence in full costume with Tomas Urkiaga's bell around his neck, because Bego had told him that morning that the sheep wore the bell in Ketchum or he did not come at all, had climbed over the fence and walked to the front of the band, and stood there, and taken one step down the road.

The bell rang.

The old lead ewes at the front lifted their heads. The bell rang again. They took one step. He took another. They took another. And all at once, the way water goes when the gate is lifted, the band moved, and followed the bell.

So the clown led them. Down the road from the corrals and around the corner and onto Main Street, six feet two in yellow polka-dot trousers and a red waistcoat with eleven buttonholes and no buttons and an orange wig, ringing a bell a hundred and four years old, walking slow and steady in his violet shoes down the middle of the shining street, and behind him, filling it from curb to curb like a river of cream, the Arrieta band. Fifteen hundred ewes, Xabi had said, the ones that would come down the street, the rest in the trucks. Their hooves made the sound of rain on a tin roof. Their bells clanked and chimed. The smell of them came up the street, lanolin and dust and grass, warm and enormous in the cold air. The crowd on the sidewalks fell almost silent, the way crowds do when something very old goes by.

Edwin walked behind the band with his staff over his shoulder, and his father had dropped back from the dancers to walk beside him, the two of them in step. Xabi walked on the near side. The border collie ran the far edge.

And Ganso walked at the front, just behind the clown, with his great white head at the clown's elbow, and every time Bippo drifted a step toward the crowd to bow, Ganso leaned on him, firmly, and moved him back to the middle of the street, where the lost one belonged.

* * *

At the corner by the bakery, where the parade turned, the sheep wagon had pulled over to let the band go past, and Bego Arrieta sat on its step in her blanket and watched them come.

Bippo stopped in front of her. The band stopped behind him, because the bell had stopped.

The old woman looked up at the clown. She looked past him at the sheep, the whole street full of them, standing patiently in the cold sun, waiting for the bell. She looked at her son, at the edge of the flock, with his big sunburned face. She looked at the two herders from Peru, father and son, at the back.

Xabi had told her that morning at breakfast. He had told everybody. Half the band, kept. A thousand ewes. One herder, a fourth summer and a fifth, if he would come. The wool to the mill in Oregon with the name of the mountain woven on the label. The other thousand ewes sold to a young couple from the Wood River Valley starting out. He had said it in English, over the coffee, plainly, and his mother had said nothing at all, and then she had got up from the table, slowly, with her cane, and come around to his chair and put her small brown hand flat on top of his head, the way you might put your hand on a dog to keep it from getting up, and left it there for a long moment, and gone back to her seat.

Now she reached up from the wagon step and took hold of the bell on its collar, as she had on Grove Street. She rang it once.

"Found," she said.

And then she let go of it, and waved her hand at all of them, the sheep and the herders and the clown, to go on. By evening Amra had put the parade on the family's map, at a new pin on Main Street, just above the one for Grove Street.

* * *

The circus left for Manitoba on Tuesday. Arthur did not see Bego Arrieta again before it went. She had gone back down to Boise on Monday in the pickup with the sheep wagon behind her, and he had been loading trucks. But on the Tuesday morning, when he went to the Sardine Can at a quarter past four to make his tea, there was something on the step.

A leather sheath. And in it, oiled and sharpened, the long iron shears of Tomas Urkiaga, with a square of brown grocery-bag paper tied to them with a twist of wool.

It was in Maite's hand, but the words were dictated.

CAMP SUPPLIES. One pair of shears. For a man with some training. Bring them back when you have something to cut.

And under it, in a slanting black hand, very small: a bell.

Arthur sat on the step in the dark with his tea and the shears across his knees for a long time.

* * *

Then he went inside, opened the leather-bound book of memories where its ribbon lay, and lettered, in his fine calligraphy:

Book Six Complete: Grove Street and the Groves. A woman who had sung on with nobody left to answer, and was answered in three languages and then in her own. A son who said three words instead of eight lines, and was heard. A girl who threw her verses at a wall until the wall had to share. A herder who found his father's alpaca on the wrong side of the right creek. A man who carved a wife in a tree in 1927 and waited a hundred and one years for her reply. I only wore the bell. They followed it home.

Under it he drew a doodle: a sheep in an orange wig, wearing a bell, being leaned on by a very large white dog.

Then he took the pastille tin out of his cardigan pocket. He took out the buff pasteboard ticket he had carried since December, the one that said ADMIT ONE and nothing more. He looked at it for a while. Then he wrote on it, after the two words that had waited ten months, in small neat capitals: WHOEVER ANSWERS.

He put it in an envelope addressed to the sheep wagon on the Bench, and set it on the shelf to go out with the mail.

After that, as on every morning, came the ordinary page. Frost on the window. Tea. A pair of shears on the bunk. The sheep gone south.

He tucked the earpiece in and spoke to Scotland.

"Reginald."

"Arthur. I gather you led a parade."

"I followed one. From the front." He looked at the shears. "Who wrote the verse? In Maite's letter. The bad one."

There was a pause from Edinburgh. Paper moved.

"My archivist," said Sterling, "took evening classes in Basque for six weeks at a community hall in Leith, taught by a retired fisherman from Bermeo who was very patient with her. She wished, she says, to write one verse to a girl she had heard about, in the girl's grandmother's language, so the girl would know that somebody far away had gone to the trouble." A pause. "She has since received it back by post. Corrected. In red. She has had it framed."

Arthur laughed out loud, alone in the trailer, so that the frost on the window seemed to shiver.

"Tell her," he said, "that it was the best bad verse in eighty years. I have it on authority."

"I will." Another pause, longer. "Arthur. I hesitate to mention it."

"Then I'll wait."

"There is a town on the Gulf coast of Florida where, more than a hundred years ago, men from the Greek islands came to dive for sponges in copper helmets, and some of their grandsons still do. The boats still go out. There is a grandmother there, I am told, who mends the old diving suits by hand, and knows the name of every reef, and has opinions about the price of olive oil that she shares with the whole harbor. And there is a small festival on the water in the spring that has lost its comedic act to a hip replacement." Paper moved. "I merely note it."

Arthur's hand went to his cardigan pocket. The spare nose was there, where it always was. A clown never travels with only one.

He put it on and gave it one long soft squeeze in the dark.

"Sponges," he said. "Reginald, I can hold my breath."