What the Hag Carries

(contains mention of dying)

He was on his back in the snow when I found him, one leg twisted under him at a bad angle. Alive, but not for long. His lips were moving. I assumed it was prayer, but when I got closer it turned out, he was naming his sheep — working through them one by one. Bess, Graidh, Old Meall, and the three unnamed ones he kept meaning to name.

I crouched beside him.

He opened his eyes and looked at me. He was old enough that fear wasn't the first thing.

"You're her," he said.

"I'm her."

He had the look of a man who had always half-believed and was now adjusting to the other half. "You're smaller than I thought."

I've heard this before. I am what I am in proportion to what's needed. On the ridge in a storm, I am as tall as the wind wants me. In a snow gully with a dying man, I am the size of a woman who has sat beside a thousand dying men.

"Your leg is broken," I said.

"I know."

"You've been here since before dark."

"I know that too."

He'd stopped shivering, which was a bad sign. His collie was pressed against his side, head on his chest, watching me. Dogs have always known what I am. They don't like it but they stay.

I looked up the hillside. The snow was mine — I had pulled it down from the north two nights ago. I knew every fold of this hill. I had made it. Thirty thousand years ago, I walked this ground with my hammer and broke the rock into the shapes it still holds, and the rubble I scattered became the scree fields and the lochs. The lochs are my footprints. People don't know that.

He was watching me look at the hill.

"Are you deciding?" he asked.

"Deciding what?"

"Whether to take me."

This irritates me. I don't take people. I don't make those choices. I am winter. Winter doesn't decide who falls on a hillside at the wrong time. It is cold, the hillside is steep, the man is old, and these things together make a fact. I shape the land. That's all.

He heard me out. "That's cold comfort."

"Yes," I said. "It is."

He almost laughed. His breathing was shallow but steady. The cold had done its work.

"My daughter will be looking for me," he said.

"Your daughter is in Inverness."

He was quiet for a moment. "You know that."

"I know most things about this valley. I've been walking it longer than your family name has existed."

This should have frightened him more than it did. But he was a hill farmer, and hill farmers think about time differently. They watch the same fields flood and drain, flood and drain. They know the soil under them was once somebody else's soil, before that it was ice, and before that it was seabed. They know it even when they don't say it.

"My grandfather said he saw you once," he said. "On Ben Mòr. He said you had blue skin and white hair and you were carrying a staff, and you scared the life out of him."

"I remember your grandfather."

He turned his head to look at me. It hurt him to do it.

"He found a sheltered spot," I said. "He wedged under a boulder on the north face, out of the wind. He sat there for four hours before it cleared. He was sensible."

"He never said that part."

"No. He told it as a story about how he stood his ground. But he was a frightened young man sitting in a hole. People change the stories."

He was quiet. The collie lifted its head and looked at him, then lay back down.

"Do you remember everyone?" he asked.

"Everyone who has died on these hills, yes. And most of the ones who haven't." I looked across the valley. There was a village down there, lit yellow against the dark, someone's chimney throwing sparks. "I remember the woman who drowned in the burn at the foot of this hill in seventeen-forty. I remember the soldiers who came through in seventeen-forty-six, camped in the upper field, and burned the croft. I remember a child who got lost in the heather here in August of nineteen-twelve and was found the next morning asleep under a rowan. Nobody remembers any of that now."

"The earth remembers what we forget," he said.

"Yes," I said. "And I remember what the earth forgets."

"What does the earth forget?"

"The small things. The texture of a morning. The sound of a name spoken once. The earth keeps the bones, the ash, and the shape of where a wall once stood. But it loses the rest." I picked up a stone from the snow beside me. Schist. I had made this stone. I knew its whole history. "I keep the rest."

"That sounds lonely."

It does sound lonely. I'm not sure it is. I feel something. After this long, it's hard to say what. A weight, maybe. The weight of ten thousand last conversations.

"Tell me something you want kept," I said.

He looked at the sky. It had cleared, the stars out.

"My wife," he said. "Twenty-two years. She died in the spring." A pause. "She used to say that spring on this hill smelled like the inside of a stone."

I knew what she meant. That cold mineral damp when the frost comes out of the ground. There's no other smell like it.

"I have it," I said.

He looked at me.

"I have it," I said again. "I'll carry it."

He didn't say anything for a while. The collie shifted. Down in the valley, a car moved along the road, its lights sweeping the trees.

"There's a box under my bed," he said. "Letters. My wife's letters. My daughter doesn't know about them." He stopped. "Tell her."

"I can't tell her anything. I don't work that way."

"Then what good are you?"

I didn't answer. What good is memory if it never reaches anyone?

"None," I said. "In the short run, none."

"And in the long run?"

The scree was once molten, the loch was once my footprint, and neither will be what it is now in ten thousand years.

"The long run is very long," I said. "And I'm still here."

He closed his eyes. His breathing changed — not stopping, just going slower. The collie put its chin on his chest and didn't move.

I stayed.

He died just before the search party came up the hill, four people with torches and one with a dog who went frantic at the smell of the snow where I had been sitting.

I moved off up the ridge.

The snow lay quietly along the top. The stars were sharp. Somewhere below, in Inverness, his daughter was driving north. She would find the box under the bed. She might open it, might not. That was her business.

I know her face. I've known it since she was small, running these fields. I'll know her face when she's old. I'll know this hill when their names are as forgotten as the woman who drowned in the burn in seventeen-forty.

I walked north. The storm had spent itself. I would make another one. I would come back around — the long loop through winter, over the tops, down the glens. I have been making this same walk since before these mountains had their names.

My hammer is still here. It's a good hill. I made it well.