by Will North
Suddenly, his left boot slipped on a wet boulder and for a split second he was airborne. He landed hard on the rocks. The fall knocked the wind out of him. His ribs hurt. He lay still and took a deep breath. The pain didn’t worsen with breathing. Good, he thought. Bruised but not broken. He rolled over ... and found himself staring straight down into the yawning nothingness of the sheer thousand-foot drop to Llyn Cau he’d passed earlier. He scrabbled away from the edge and sat very still, waiting for the adrenaline to stop pumping in his ears. Suddenly, his bruised ribs seemed trivial. A few steps farther and he would have joined Gwynne in whatever it is that comes after life on this earthly plane. Moments later, he retrieved his walking stick and crawled back to the last cairn, stood, and retraced his steps to the ladder stile.
He was angry. In all his years of hiking, he’d never become disoriented, never been lost. He hurt and he was tired. He had a duty to perform, and he was failing at it. What’s more, the weather had turned nasty; the mist had changed to a hard, cold rain and the wind was rising. Once again he closed his eyes to connect with his inner compass.
“Down,” he heard a voice say.
His eyes flew open and he looked around.
“Hello?”
Nothing. Maybe it had been a crow’s caw, distorted by the fog. Maybe not.
“I need to get off this mountain,” Alec said aloud. He hunched on the pack with Gwynne’s ashes, picked up his walking stick, and struck off in a new direction, determined to descend to wherever it led him.
five
HE NEVER DID COME ACROSS another cairn. Instead, Alec followed a faint, gradually descending track through the billowing cloud. He was like a boat cutting through dark water, the bow of him parting the deep, the deep re-forming itself again behind him. How different this climb was from the day he and Gwynne had been to the summit—a day of cobalt blue skies, warm wind, and isolated, slowly drifting puffball cumulus clouds. And yet, maybe the gloom is only appropriate, he thought. Funereal.
***
THE LAST TIME Gwynne called was only two months after her final chemotherapy treatment.
“Hiya, toots, it’s me. Any chance you might be able to make a visit? I’ve been in the hospital again,” she said with a heartiness he knew from long experience was artificial. That’s the thing about long-term relationships: you learn to hear what’s meant, not just what’s said.
Alec’s heart lurched. “What’s happened?”
“Oh, you know me; I like to do things the hard way. Seems like there’s been complications. I think I could use a hand.”
“I’ll be there tomorrow night,” Alec said. “Count on it.”
Alec heard her voice break. “I was hoping that’s what you’d say.”
He dropped everything, flew east, and spent the next two months at his ex-wife’s bedside. Although the doctors initially had been confident of her recovery, the cancer had spread to the fluid in Gwynne’s brain. She only lived a block from the hospital; it was a short walk, and he and Gwynne walked there together, daily, for more chemotherapy.
Alec slept on a single bed in the guest room in her Boston condominium. He tried to cook for her, as he had years before, but the smell made her nauseous.
“It’s the chemo,” she explained. “It makes the smell of cooking disgusting.”
Still, her spirit never flagged.
“Let’s have takeout,” she’d say brightly, and off he’d go to a Mexican place she loved. When he returned, she’d have a bite and then lose interest.
“A salad! I need a salad,” she suggested another day. “That way you don’t have to cook anything.” But she ate almost none of it.
Next it was “Let’s have sushi! No smell!” And of course he got it, but he ended up eating it all himself.
After a couple of weeks of this, on their way down the block to the hospital for another treatment, Gwynne stopped and said she felt dizzy. Then she collapsed to the pavement. Alec and a passerby lifted her and half-carried her to the emergency room. A nurse took her blood pressure, then took it again because she couldn’t believe the result: it was only 70 over 20.
“Hell,” Gwynne wisecracked, “I’ve known cantaloupes with higher blood pressure!” Then the orderly wheeled her upstairs to a private room. Surgeons installed a shunt directly into her skull and pumped neon green chemicals through it every other day. Alec sat with her from morning till night, went out for a quick supper, then returned and stayed with her until after midnight. They told each other favorite stories from their life together. No one told him to leave, which he took as a bad sign. And in fact it soon became clear that the new chemo was having no effect. Her chief oncologist, a young woman with a faintly German accent, was both caring and refreshingly candid: they could keep her on chemo, but it was unlikely to help. Gwynne’s condition was terminal. Gwynne listened to this latest diagnosis calmly and Alec realized she’d already come to the same conclusion.
“Okay, Doc,” she said, “here’s my take on this: I think you should spring me from this joint and spend your time with somebody who’s gonna make it. If I’m gonna die, I want to do it in my own bed. Besides, I’ve got work to do to get my house ready to be sold. You know what Oscar Wilde’s dying words were?”
The doctor shook her head.
“Either this wallpaper goes, or I do.”
Gwynne started laughing. Then Alec did, too. It was a story they loved. The doctor nodded quietly and left; Alec found her in the corridor, crying.
“I try to maintain a degree of emotional distance from my terminal patients,” she said, “but I can’t with Gwynne. She’s beyond anything I’ve ever experienced before.”
Alec arranged for a hospice nurse to visit every couple of days. Gwynne’s decline was rapid. He was amazed that having eaten or drunk nothing for weeks, Gwynne still had bodily functions, but he cleaned her gently when she did and she accepted his help with grace. It was, he realized, perhaps the most intimate thing they had ever done together. He read funny books to her. He massaged moisturizer into the mottled, papery skin of her arms and legs. As her dehydration deepened, Gwynne’s world filled with delusions and fear. Only semiconscious but longing for the inevitable, she would suddenly sit bolt upright in her bed, look at him, and plead, “What else do I have to do?” The hospice nurse increased the morphine dosage and Gwynne slipped peacefully into a coma. Alec bought an infant monitoring device so he could listen to her when he was in the kitchen. She breathed like someone with sleep apnea: sharp intakes of breath, slow exhale, and then agonizingly long periods of silence. He spent hours at her beside, listening, telling her it was okay to let go. Finally, the hospice nurse took him aside and suggested that even though she was unconscious, Gwynne was willing herself to live so as not to disappoint him. It was common with the dying, she said; she saw it all the time. That evening, he sat in the kitchen listening to the ragged stutter of her breathing. The gaps between breaths lengthened. He went to her room, climbed up onto the bed, and held her in his arms, telling her, as he knew she already knew, that he had never stopped loving her. Moments later, her breathing stopped. He closed her eyelids, kissed her forehead, and pulled the sheet over her body. Then he called the funeral home.
***
AFTER PERHAPS AN hour of picking his way downhill, Alec finally dropped below the level of the cloud wreathing the mountain’s summit. In the distance, sunlight shimmered on the lower pastures and cloud shadows raced across the hills. Able to see landscape features once again, he checked the map and discovered that he had walked far to the west of where he wanted to be. He followed a shoulder of the mountain downhill and reached a high saddle that ran south to north. There he picked up an old farm track and followed it around to the north, threading his way through high moorland thick with sedges and spongy wet ground. Here and there, he came upon the ruins of old farmsteads. Alec marveled at the artistry with which their thick stone walls had been built, intact and sturdy still, long after their roofs had collapsed. He marveled, too, at th
e optimism—or the desperation—of anyone who would go to such trouble to scrabble sustenance from such a harsh landscape.
He continued north, gradually curving around the flanks of the great mountain until he reached the edge of the boggy plateau. Off to his left, the sun was sinking toward the Irish Sea, and directly ahead he recognized the gentle features of the valley in which Tan y Gadair sat. He was still descending when he came upon a pasture filled with sheep and saw a young man struggling to control one of them.
Alec slipped through the gate and shouted, “Need a hand?”
The young man looked up sharply; he’d been so intent on helping the birthing ewe he hadn’t seen Alec coming down off the mountain.
“Know anything about lambing?”
“Not a thing,” Alec said as he reached the fellow. The ewe was on its knees, its neck arched backward, obviously straining. The young man was leaning against her side, pressing her gently against a stone wall to keep her still. He looked to be in his midtwenties and was of medium height, broad-shouldered and powerfully built. He had tightly curled short hair, nearly black, and his eyes were green with sparkles of amber, as if they’d been sprinkled with gold dust. On the ground was a plastic carryall loaded with tools and bottles.
He smiled. “Reckon you’re about to learn. She dropped her water bag more than an hour ago and she’s fully dilated. Nothing’s happened, though. My guess is, she’s breached.
“Usually, by this time,” he continued, “the front hooves will have appeared and, after the ewe pushes for a bit, the head will appear and then the rest of the lamb will slip out. That’s not happened. D’you suppose you could hold the ewe steady while I reach in and try to turn the lamb around in the uterus? Straddle her and hold her with your knees.”
“Um, okay,” Alec said, taking his position.
The young man disinfected and lubricated his right forearm, kneeled by the ewe, and looked at Alec.
“Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
Alec watched as the fellow tucked his thumb and pinkie finger inward, streamlining his hand, and then gently inserted his hand, and then his arm, into the ewe’s birth canal. His eyes were focused far off across the fields and Alec realized the shepherd was “seeing” with his hands. The ewe had stopped thrashing—whether from gratitude or exhaustion, Alec couldn’t tell.
“There’s the answer,” the young man said, removing his hand and sitting up.
“What is?”
“Twins. Ewes are bred for multiple births nowadays. Good for the farmer but a bit hard on the sheep, I think. Especially young ewes like this one. These lambs are both facing to the rear, which is good. But they’re jammed up behind her pelvic bone. Not good. I’ll need to pull one out, and then we’ll see if she delivers the second on her own.”
He reached into his carryall and pulled out a short rope with loops at each end. He slipped the tip of one loop over the last knuckle of his forefinger and held the rest of the loop in his palm. Then he inserted his hand into the ewe’s birth canal again.
“I’m slipping this loop over the back of the first lamb’s head. Its legs are facing forward so we shouldn’t have much trouble. Now here’s where you come in,” he said to Alec. “I need you to lift the ewe’s hindquarters upward a couple of feet.”
Alec did so, and groaned.
“You okay?”
“No problem,” Alec lied, his bruised ribs complaining. “Why am I doing this?”
“It’ll make the other lamb slide back down into the uterus. Right then, here we go,” he said. After a few moments of fishing, his hands held the lamb’s forelegs and the rope secured its head. Steadily, but very gently, he pulled. The ewe did not struggle. After what Alec guessed was about three minutes, two tiny hooves appeared, followed by a wet head. The young man stopped, pulled a cloth from the carryall, and wiped mucus away from the newborn’s nose. Then he gradually pulled the gasping lamb into the world. The creature was inexpressibly small and vulnerable-looking, its eyes squeezed tight against the light. Instinctively, it struggled to stand.
“Okay, let the ewe down,” he said to Alec. With exquisite gentleness, he treated the newborn’s navel with what looked to Alec like iodine, and then placed the lamb beside the ewe’s head.
Finally, he sat back on his haunches and smiled. Steam rose from the warm lamb in the cooling air. The ewe made soft bleating sounds and licked the blood off its newborn.
“We’ll wait a few minutes, now,” he said, “and see if she can deliver the next one on her own. Depends upon what position it’s in and how tired she is.”
Alec sat next to him, leaning against the wall, and looked at all the wobbly wet lambs around him. “How long have you been doing this?”
“Long as I can remember; since I was ten, I reckon, on my da’s farm.”
“I meant today.”
“Oh.” He laughed. “Since about three thirty this morning.”
“My God, you must be exhausted.”
“Comes with the job this time of year. We’re about half through. First peak of lambing was a bit more than a week ago; this is the second one. Most ewes lamb early in the morning; some, like this one, late afternoon. No way of telling.”
“You’re Owen, aren’t you?”
“That I am; how’d you know? You’re from away.”
“I’m staying at the farm; Fiona mentioned you were helping David. I’m Alec.”
“Glad you happened along, Alec. Haven’t seen much of David today. You’ve been out walking then?”
“Yeah, up on Cadair.”
Owen looked up at the mountain, invisible in its cloak of cloud. “Not much of a day for it.”
“So I discovered.”
“A bit thick, was it?”
“Thick as milk and just as wet. I got lost.”
“Ah,” Owen said, nodding, “that would be Brenin Llwyd, out to bewitch you.”
“Who?”
“Brenin Llwyd, ‘the Lord of the Mists,’ also called ‘the Grey King’ for obvious reasons. People hereabouts believe he rises from the mountain to claim the unwary.”
Alec lifted an eyebrow.
“Yes, well, that’s what they say, anyways. Me, I don’t know. Not very superstitious, I suppose. But as you’ve seen, even when it’s nice here, that mountain can breed its own weather, wrap itself in cloud. Nasty it can get up there, all of a sudden like.”
Alec thought about his disorientation in the clouds, and about his mounting fear. He thought about the voice—in his head, he was sure—telling him to descend. He thought, too, about the Grey King and how, with age, he had begun to accept that much of the experience of being seems to exist just beyond the reach of the rational. Maybe that’s what had been so unsettling; he’d been beyond the realm of the rational, beyond his safe zone.
Owen rose. “She’s too exhausted to deliver; we’ll have to help her with the other one, too.”
Alec snapped into the present.
“What do we do this time?” Alec asked.
“Same as before, only easier this time. Want to give it a try yourself?”
Alec looked at him and thought about the ashes in his pack and the new life all around him.
“Yes,” he said finally. “Yes, I think I do.”
Owen nodded toward the disinfectant and Alec cleaned his hands and arms. He kneeled by the ewe, then hesitated.
“Go on then,” Owen said.
He made a pyramid his fingers, just as Owen had, and slipped his hand into the ewe, amazed at the smoothness and breadth of the passage. He felt around it carefully, finally finding the second lamb’s head.
“Got it.”
“Good. Now follow down the neck to the forelegs and be sure they’re facing to the rear like the head.”
“Okay, yeah, that’s where they are.”
“Right, then. Put your thumb alongside the lamb’s right cheekbone, your little finger by the left and the middle three fingers along the top of the neck, behind the ears. Then b
egin pulling, gently.”
“Don’t I need the rope?”
“Only if the legs don’t come first.”
Alec released the head momentarily and checked the legs.
“One’s in front, the other seems to be tucking under.”
“Use the rope. Slip it over the head like I did, straighten the tucked leg, then pull both legs and the rope.”
“Won’t the noose strangle the lamb?”
“There’s a stop-knot in it; it can’t close down tight. It’s more like a snare.”
“I can’t tell if the lamb’s alive,” Alec said.
“Soon find out.”
One last tug and out the lamb came: smaller than the first, Alec thought. Owen passed Alec the cloth and he wiped the lamb’s nose. But the lamb wasn’t breathing. Owen rose, leaned over the stone wall, and yanked a frond from a clump of bracken fern on the other side, stripping off the leaves. Then, gently, he pushed the tip of the frond into the newborn’s nose. The lamb twitched, then sneezed mightily, and its tiny chest heaved in great gulps of air. In moments, it was struggling to its feet, like its sibling.
Alec doused the second lamb’s navel with iodine and placed it beside the ewe.
“Make a good shepherd, you would,” the young man said, smiling.
Alec stood up, wincing from the pain in his ribs. “Too old for it, I suspect.”
Owen laughed and eased the lambs down to the ewe’s udder, placing a teat near each little mouth and encouraging them to suckle.
“Besides disease,” he said, “the way we lose them is exposure. They need to get as much colostrum from the ewe’s milk as they can in the first few hours. It’s thick as cream and loaded with antibodies. The high fat content gives them the energy they need to stay warm and dry out. Without the colostrum they’ll die within twenty-four hours. Sometimes, if the ewe won’t nurse, we milk her and pump it into the lamb through a tube.”