Page 7 of She, Wolf, Him.

"Up the brook path, past the old fold, and out over the shale." I watch the bucket sink. "They've stopped the shale, since. It runs too near the firs for comfort."

"Since the shepherd."

"Since the shepherd."

"And where they found yesterday's man. Mark it for me from here."

"Down past the Berthou strips, where the pasture wall's gone to ruin. You'll see the trampled place from the church door, if you know to look for it."

"From the church door." One corner of his mouth tips. "Everything in this parish measured from the church door."

"Where else would we measure from."

He asks them flat and quick, question after question, and he listens to the answers like they go somewhere. No one asks me a question and waits for the answer. They tell me to come, to wash, to keep my tongue and my face still, to say thank you, then go home. I stay wary. I'm not a fool. A man who has use for you is gentle with you only that long. None of that dulls the simple pleasure of being spoken to like I've a mind.

"Was he out alone."

"They've all been out alone."

"Has it ever come at two together."

"Not that the drovers tell."

"And before the summer. Before the shepherd. Nothing in this parish, ever?"

"Nothing in this parish. My grandmother's stories had one, but her stories had everything."

"The bog paths," he says. "The ones a stranger wouldn't find."

"There's the moss way under the north side, where the ground swallows a hoof. And the lower groves, where the chestnut men go in the failing light. Thick cover. A thing could lie up there the day long and no one the wiser. I wouldn't walk either after dark."

"The men keep a watch now. Where do they stand it."

"The pens, mostly, and the lanes after dark. Five to a night."

"You're not afraid of the high country," he says.

"I'm afraid of it," I say. "I'm afraid of everything sensible. I don't care to be watched while I'm at it, is all."

He turns it all over without a word, and I can see him laying my ground down over whatever map he carries in his head, and the being used is half of the pleasure of it, God forgive me.

While he listens he sets his forearm across the well-stone, sleeve shoved back, and I see the scars. Four old rakes, white and raised, up the inside of his arm where claws once tried to open him and didn't finish. He catches me seeing and doesn't cover them.

"It lived," I say.

"So did I." There it is again, that dry private amusement. "We disagreed about which of us should."

"You've done the work a long time," he says. "The dead."

"Since I was fourteen."

"Who taught you it."

"My mother." It comes out before the guard goes up. "She had the laying-out of half this parish before me. She taught it me the way you teach a girl the churn."

"Fourteen's young for the dead," he says.

"It was that or marrying. The dead don't want anything. I've always been able to give them that."