Chapter 4 · Chapter 4

Thunder does not come down off that mountain. It stays along the ridge and turns, the way a millstone turns, and each time it turned the goats set their feet apart and the small ones were carried in under the tent ropes.

By the fourth morning I had the mountain's measure. It did not want us near.

We had been at our own wells since the night the cloud came down and sat on that ridge like a lid — our tents, our goats, our water, and the black rock standing off past the salt flats, half a day's walking and none of it ours to walk. The first tents, pitched at the eastern edge, were struck and dragged back a bowshot; then back another.

Now the camp lay in a wide half-ring, and the water was counted twice a day, after the goats and again in the last of the light, and the counting was written by me, in the second column, in my own hand, because my father Abir says a count that lives in a man's head dies with the man.

Everything we had of that mountain came secondhand — a drover with a lame camel, a boy sent east with three ewes who came back without them and without an account. My father gave the edge of the half-ring to anyone who came in from that side and would not give them the middle. He said a camp that goes to look at another camp comes back carrying another camp's troubles.

No one in the half-ring said what the man on that mountain had gone up to bring down. My father had put a stop to the saying of it on the second day, and after that there was only the count, and every eye going east when the eye thought no one was watching.

The thunder turned over us again and the air went flat.

That time it came down. It struck somewhere behind the ridge and the sound of it came a breath late, and a tent rope parted like a whip and the pole went over, and every goat in the half-ring tried at once. My father was up before the dust reached us.

He put his hand on the store-tent pole and stood with it until it stopped rocking, and the men came one by one and stood with him, and no one said anything, because there is nothing to say to thunder.

I wrote the hour. I did not write what I thought of it.

"The poles held," my father said at last.

"The poles held," I said, and wrote it.

He came back along the row and stood where I sat with the book open on my knee, and he turned the leaf with one finger and looked at the underside of it, as though the ink might have gone through.

"You wrote the count in twice," he said.

"I wrote the morning count and the evening count. They are not the same count."

"You wrote the morning before the goats went out."

"I did. The morning is the whole of what we have."

He let the leaf fall. "Then the page has a before and an after in it now. Keep it so."

At the far end of the half-ring, past the last of the fires, the men sat with their knees up and had not stood when the thunder came down. Everyone in that half-ring was waiting for a number. It is the only thing any of us has ever known how to wait for.

The thunder went along the ridge again, further off. I wrote the hour, and then I closed the book and held it shut with both hands, because the wind was up and the page was new, and a new page will take any mark at all.