Katharina paused to wipe her damp brow. At the end of their herd, Florian was marching with wide strides, his arms swaying. The brim of his hat was cocked so that she could barely make out his face, but he raised an arm with his prodding stick in acknowledgment, and she saw the sweat stains on the armpits of his shirt and the dark rings forming on the soft brown leather vest he wore over it. She could imagine that his bouncy steps came mostly from the light feeling of someone who’d recently rid his back of an enormous wheel of cheese.
Farther up the slope, Martin Noggler and Thomas Noggler steered their thirteen cows. Theirs was the only herd not coming in complete. They’d gone up with fourteen in May. It had been an unfortunate incident: a heifer, a slip down a steep slope, a broken femur. Florian had been there and shot the poor animal in the head while Katharina had stroked the bellowing beast’s flank.
Behind the Nogglers were the Ritsches: Kaspar at the front of his family’s herd, the sons and their wives scattered in between, lugging the supplies from the Vorsäß on their backs, like Katharina. Behind the Ritsches, she could just make out the first of the jaunty sheep and scampering goats, their bells tinnier and gentler, like an altar boy’s sanctus bells. Hans Glockner was back there with his animals, still above the ridge and hidden from view.
To the west, dark-grey clouds were building up and the sun was just reaching its zenith, making the landscape sharper in its hues of meadow and wood, rock and river. Everything seemed sharper and closer than it really was. Rain was coming. Snow would fall on the Vorsäß. They’d left just in time. They’d need about another hour before the livestock reached Arlund and they could all rest themselves, the end of another season. She kept walking.
Yes, the Steinhauser herd was intact, but the family? A different story. Katharina sighed heavily, her heart aching over Annamarie, and the grief threatened to overpower her once more. Everyone had tried to comfort her over the last weeks, and nobody could, not even Florian.
As the storm clouds overtook the sun above them, the path grew wider, and she saw the roof of Hans’s new farmhouse. Deciding to take a quick peek, she cupped her hands around her mouth and called to Florian.
“I’ll be back in just a moment.” She pointed towards Hans Glockner’s new place.
She slipped out of the pack and left it at the foot of the path, then followed it through a clump of juniper bushes to the front door. Behind the house, somewhere, a creek bubbled, and when the breeze picked up, the pines sighed about the coming weather.
The house was made of wood, and Hans had used stone and mortar for the foundation. It was smaller than any Hof in the area, but they had plenty of land for the sheep, and that was all Hans had ever really wanted. She peeked into the first single-paned window and saw a simple but cosy kitchen. There was a little pile of sawdust near the far foot of the table, the rest of the floor brushed with the hurried marks of a broom. A few pieces of wood he must have been sawing for the floor’s trimmings lay stacked next to one another. The tools were neatly lined up on the unfinished counters. At the next window, she looked into the Stube and the jewel of the house: a dark-green-tiled oven, gleaming like something new ought to. Behind that, stairs led to the half-story above. She stepped back to view the two gables on either end of the second floor. At least two more rooms fit above, making the house big enough for two adults, and perhaps even an adult child, like Alois.
Everyone knew that Jutta and Hans had an affection for one another, but something between them kept getting in the way. It wasn’t age. Both were at the end of their fifties, she guessed, and if nothing else, they ought to get on with it. It was pride, probably. Hans was as old-fashioned as could be, and until he was on his own two feet again, he’d not entertain the thought of taking a wife. Maybe the small house would finally be enough for him to do the inevitable.
The small size of Hans’s farmhouse was not the only sign of a previously unimaginable trend. Up on the alp, around the big table at night, Katharina heard of several families planning to sell off their farms and move into smaller quarters in nearby towns. The youngsters, the adults opined, were off chasing dreams and ideas that no longer fit in the narrow Reschen Valley. This talk had meant to comfort the Steinhausers, to let them know they were not the only ones whose children abandoned them. But such discussions soon fuelled heated debates, for the scandal of her daughter running off had set off theories amongst the men on the alp about how eager youngsters were to find jobs with the Italians. Factories had sprung up like mushrooms in the rain, they said. This generation wanted automobiles and motorcycles, they said. Some of them, their parents said—in tones mixed with admiration and admonishment—organised themselves enough to afford excursions to Meran. To the cinemas and pubs they went, spending what little money they had whilst their fathers were out breaking their backs in the fields. Working for the Walscher, that was what the older generations called the Italian bosses. Signor and Capo, that was what the Tyrolean boys more appropriately called their Italian employers.
The night before, Thomas Noggler, who’d taken a short-term job outside the valley with a factory, defended
