The Old Silent

It sounded like one of the Braine woman's inscrutable comments on Hadrian's troops.

She clicked her tongue, and Stranger started a patrol of the wall. Wind had caused the snow to drift, and the dog was nosing slowly along, sniffing. 'Here, poke with the crook.'

'I take it we're looking for sheep. Good grief, if any were trapped in there they'd be dead.'

'No they wouldn't,' she said matter-of-factly. 'I expect you don't know their breath makes airholes-'

'Oh, be quiet.' But he did as he was bid and tried to hold on to his temper. He'd never get anything out of her if he drove her deeper into silence. The crook met with no resistance; what, he wondered, were they to do with these entombed sheep, should they find any? Stranger had reached the end of the wall and turned, panting.

'That's all right, then,' she said. 'There's another wall yonder.'

'So you do know where we are.'

'More or less.' Slogging along, she held the cosher above her head like a bayonet. There was another wall up there.

Stranger ran alongside of it, raced back, sat down, and at the clicking of her tongue darted through what was apparently a hole in the wall.

They approached it. 'Well, we can't get through there, obviously.'

'It's a cripple hole,' she said, disregarding his statement. Carefully she lay Melrose's stick near the hole, got down and crept through on her hands and knees.

The last he saw of her was a mittened hand coming back to claim the cosher and whisk it through the hole. Then there was silence.

He looked at the size of the cripple hole, remembered how big the black-faced sheep was, and imagined he could get through it, if he manuevered on his back or his stomach. He called: 'I'm much too big for this cripple hole thing.'

No response. His voice was borne away by the wind; he heard its distant echo, or thought he did. No sound came from the other side of the wall, not even the bark of the dog. He cupped his hands and let out with a 'hallo, hallo.' He whistled as if the dog would come at his bidding. Who was he fooling? That dog wouldn't pay attention to Attila the Hun.

He knelt and peered through the cripple hole. No tracks led away from it, of girl or dog. Blast it all, where was she? Except for wind soughing through the stand of evergreens over there to the east, the silence was engulfing, and the clouds appeared lower, the sky chalkier, the curlews circling in ever-narrower patterns, as if they meant to settle soon, like vultures. Oh, for heaven's sakes, it was merely an illusion created by the godforsaken moor.

'I'm heading back!' he shouted irritably as he planted his crook more firmly in the snow. Why should he continue on this senseless venture? He'd got precious little information for his trouble, all of those monosyllabic answers. That bit about the dog Stranger constituted, for Abby Cable, a parliamentary address. Must have been two, three sentences. 'Well, good-bye!'

There was no response although he thought she was probably just the other side of the wall, doodling in the snow, drawing rough pictures with his walking stick.

Still. One never knew whom one might meet. He thought of the black-cloaked figure striding across the moor. Furthermore (he rationalized, as he tossed the crook through the hole and lay down on his back, arms outstretched to gain purchase on the stone), they were probably not too far from the Citrine estate.

God. He flattened out, heaved his way through the cripple hole, to which the sheep smell and sheep's wool clung. Then he rose and shook off the snow.

They were directly on the other side of the wall, Stranger working one end, Abby the other. Melrose walked beside the snowdrift to the place where she was poking with the cosher.

'Use your crook,' she said.

'You heard me calling. Why didn't you answer?' Irritably, he poked the crook into the drift.

'You said you were going.' She shrugged and looked at him, eyes narrowed as if against something heavenly bright or hellishly unsightly. 'You're still here, aren't you?'

He resisted the temptation to raise the crook. To hear her talk, one would think she were clairvoyant. What she expected to happen, would.

'I'd sooner talk to the dog. Did you get him as a pup?'

'No.'

He sighed, watching Stranger snuffling at the drift of snow. 'Well, how'dyou get him?'

'He came by,' was her no-frills answer.

The dog was pawing away, sending up fans of snow.

'I should think a border collie smart enough to round up a hundred sheep down in a gully would be missed.'

Abby appeared to be giving this some thought. In her flat-as-a-pancake voice she said, 'Maybe nobody cared.' Then as the dog kept shoveling away, she added, 'He's found one.'

The highlight of the morning for Melrose was to be pulling and yanking a sheep from what must have been its snow tunnel. The ewe didn't seem the worse for wear as Stranger herded it out of the snow.

'Now, what do we do?'

'We don't do nothing. It does for itself.' She turned and tramped up the moor, headed, probably, for the wall in the distance.

Since he was getting nowhere putting questions to her he hoped would elicit answers that might deepen into some conversational foray about her life, about Mrs. Healey, about anything, he decided to be direct, even if the subject was grisly. He supposed the little wall Abby Cable had built between herself and the world was as resistant to grisliness as it was to snowbound animals.

'That's a terrible thing that happened at the Old Silent Inn, isn't it? It must have upset you quite a bit.' If it did there was no sign of it. Her small face held to its contour of stony silence just as those distant outcroppings of millstone grit held to the horizon. 'Since she's a friend of yours and your aunt's.' He tossed that in because he wondered, indeed, if the two women had been friendly.

'I don't think so.'

'Don't think what so?'

'She's a friend of Aunt Ann's.' She made that little clicking noise with her tongue, and Stranger, who had gone so far he showed only as a dot in snow, turned and ran back.

'Oh? I thought Mrs. Healey came to visit your aunt.'

'She came to visit me.'

The sheer force of her anger hit him like the wind, one of those winds that 'wuthers,' that rakes the snow and slants the trees. 'Billy and Toby and me, we were best friends.'

Then she turned and tried to run but could do no more than lope along, shrouded in her heavy garments.

'A dead lamb,' she said, when he'd caught up with her. She stood looking at the small thing, its legs tucked up. For some time she stared down and, then, in her usual businesslike manner, covered it up with snow.

'Look, don't you think we've had enough of death and blight for one morning?'

But she'd already followed the dog down the wall into a wind that had stiffened enough to bend the stand of pines off to the east. What an execrable place; what execrable weather. If Cathy Earnshaw had wanted to be flung out of heaven to get back here, it must be a cold heaven indeed. Melrose looked upward and thought with longing of the public house not far from here, surely. Shading his eye with his hand, he turned from the high moor and looked downward. Was that some pub on the road where cars, tiny in the distance, were parked like beetles? If they weren't always stopping for entombed sheep and pathetic dead lambs they could make it down there in another twenty minutes. Warmth! Light! Hospitality! Yes, the picture he conjured up was the very shape and color of good fellowship: the rubicund, accommodating publican; the hearty regulars round the bar; the dark brew, polished pine, glinting brass, rosy glow of mullioned windows…

Where was she, for God's sakes? The wind sent up coils of snow with a snakelike hiss. He saw her and the dog Stranger way off at the end of the wall and was a little surprised at the relief he felt. He called. No answer.

In the habit by now of following her instructions, he walked toward the two, aimlessly poking the damned crook