Love's Way by Joan Smith

you are perched on the very edge of solvency. There is some damage to the walls every year due to frost, but ours suffered so much and so late in the season, well past spring, that I began to wonder whether a human hand were not tearing the stones loose, letting our herd wander into precarious perches and, worse, into precarious clover, which can cause death if it is not looked after. We had lost several by this means.
    At the back of my mind there lurked the suspicion, perfectly unfounded, that Wingdale was the evil agent, devising a new tactic to get Ambledown away from us. He could hardly go on burning down barns forever, when folks were beginning to voice their suspicions. In any case, I placed implicit trust in our chief shepherd, Geoff Ulrich, who had been with my father for ten years before I was born. Certainly Wingdale had not got to him, whatever he had done about anyone else.
    It was Ulrich who first suggested to me that the stone walls were being tampered with. He had seen no one tinkering with them, but from long years on the fells he knew the signs of the marauding work of raw nature and suspected that some other source was responsible for our damage. I am an inveterate roamer of the fells. It is one of life’s chief delights for me to set out in the early morning (for later it will be too warm) and walk for an hour before breakfast, admiring the lichen, which comes in all shades, the heather, even the bracken—so pale and delicate in May, darkening to emerald as August approaches, and finally turning from gold to bronze. One can almost forgive it for poisoning our sheep, for without it the fells would be half nude. As one descends from the heights, the bird-cherry and whitebeam await you in the dales, but only for a brief spring season. Even holly and rowan are encountered occasionally. It was not beauty but necessity that propelled my next visit up the slopes. I had had word from Ulrich of another wall crumbling and must go to have a look at it.
     

Chapter Nine
     
    I set out for the heaf early, before eight, when the air was still fresh and cool. Heaf, incidentally, is the local name for the piece of fellside claimed by a farm for grazing. The sheep had already come down from the tops of the mountains where they sleep, and had begun grazing their way back up. By evening they would be back atop to sleep. Ulrich was particularly busy that morning, chasing off after a ewe and her lamb. I noticed something amiss, but for a full minute, what was lacking did not strike me. Then I noticed what it was. Why was Ulrich going after the ewe himself? Where was Scout, our Border collie? He usually came bounding up to meet me if he were not employed in any more vital business, his pink tongue curling a welcome. I looked around for a sight of his tawny back, his gleaming coat. Scout had a stunt of crawling on his belly like a fox, when he was going after a runaway, to sneak up on it. I looked all around in a loop of three hundred and sixty degrees, discovering that he was nowhere about.
    By this time Ulrich had observed me and came loping down the fellside in that peculiar gait of the hillmen that propels them at top speed without pitching them forward on their noses. The toes are pointed out, the knees bent a little, the body forward. “I’ve come to have a look at the walls, Ulrich,” I told him.
    “Catastrophe, Miss,” he said simply. Ulrich did not deal in euphemism.
    “How bad is it?” I asked in alarm, though I could see from where I stood that it was bad enough to be expensive. I mentally toted up the yards, and pounds.
    “Nay, I’m not talking walls, but the collie.”
    “Where is Scout? I hope he is not sick.”
    “Yonder,” he said, pointing off in the direction from which he had come. His voice would have told me the news, if the flocking buzzards had not. They did not hover so over a living body. I took a step towards the spot.
    “Nay, you don’t want to see it, Miss. It ain’t a pleasant