The crutch was a forked ash branch, cut green and dried by the fire.
Pip had done the knife work. Rowan had shaped the fork where her arm would rest. June chose the padding herself: a strip off her own old coat, folded double.
"If I'm to lean on a thing all winter," she said, "it'll lean on my own coat."
The first walk was from the bed to the door of the keeper's cabin. She went at it the warden's way, the way she did any count she meant to keep. Crutch. Good leg. Bad leg swung through, touching nothing.
Pip counted aloud, because counting aloud was the school now.
"Ten," he said, at the door.
She stood in the doorway with the cold coming in around her, breathing hard, furious at the size of the number and proud of it in the same breath.
"Write it straight," she said. "Ten steps. On the crutch. First day of it."
It went in the book under the day's counts. The counting had moved to her feet. Her breaths had long since stopped needing it.
The weeks that followed had a shape, the way work does when it is done in turns.
The splint was checked at the fire, morning and night. The leg was unwrapped, looked at, wrapped again. Rowan gave it nothing. The bone was doing its own work, and he had the sense to let it. What he kept was the fire, the water, and the count of her steps, which grew the way a count in that book was allowed to grow: a little, and in writing.
June wrote her report in sittings at the cabin table.
She wrote it the way she had walked her rounds. A page. A rest. A page. The stumps of the thirteenth and fourteenth stations, counted, named, and filed, and cut under a paper that called them unworked. The dead spruce, hung in a living tree's arms over a work ground, and left there by the crew that dragged through. The stay that came up the road three days after the cutting, at the speed of paper.
Her own hurt went in last, and driest.
The warden was hurt in the making of the count. One leg, below the knee. She mends at the pace bones mend.
When the fair copy was done, Silas took it down the road on his next trip, wrapped in oilcloth against the weather. Paper travelled at the speed of a man with a bad knee, and it travelled. He came back up with the winter stores on his back and the word that counted: the copy had gone into the mail bag at the village, sealed, with the carrier's own mark on the strap.
"Rosa watched it go in," Silas said. "She stood over the bag like a hen over one egg. Nobody's paper gets lost out of that village this autumn."
In the same week, June walked forty steps.
Door to yard. Yard to the woodpile, on the far side, where the wood was stacked for the post. She stood there a while with her hand on the top log, counting nothing, looking at the line of the ring going away north in the cold.
"When I can stand the litter without the leg singing," she said, "we go down. Not before. The road doesn't care about my pride, and neither does the bone."
The last north dawn of the post was a grey one, with the cold deep in the ground.
Pip read the twelfth tree at rest, the way the counts were sworn to be taken. Palm to bark. Nothing given.
"Twelve," he said. "And the hole at seven. Same as the last count. Same as the one before."
"Held," Rowan said.
"Held," Pip said, and wrote it.
They hauled the tree's double water. They cleared the last of the brush off its feet. What was left at the gap was left counted, and tidy, and the book said who would be back, and when: the two of them in turn, at the next moon and the one after, till the thaw road. A post could stand a few empty days when its page was full. Winter itself was a slow keeper, and the cold starved the threads the way it starved everything else — thin, and steady, and no nearer than it had been.
The carry down took three days, in rests.
It was an easier carry than the first one had been. The leg rode straight on the litter, quiet the whole way. Silas walked with the kit and took the light end on the flat stretches, and gave it up at the rises without being asked twice. June kept the count of the rests from the litter, out of a warden's habit, and used it the way she used everything: to keep the carriers honest.
"You're both walking shorter than your spring count," she told them, at the third rest. "Mind you don't write my litter in that book with your legs."
They came down to Rowan's cabin at dusk on the third day, and the fire was lit, and the near line's book lay current on the table in a fair ruled hand. Nora had kept the south end the way she had kept it all autumn: day for day, nothing missing. She looked at June on the litter the way she looked at a page that had come back with its sums right.
"You counted her in," she said to Pip.
"Every rest," Pip said. "She counted us back."
The splint came off in the sixth week of the bone.
Rowan unwrapped it at the cabin fire, slow, and June stood at the door frame and bore her weight on the leg for one breath. Then two. The leg held. It would hold her badly for a while, and then better, and it would never be argued with again about what it could do. She had walked with a limp since the trap, years back. Now the leg had its own new way to learn, and it would learn it at the pace of walking.
The crutch stayed. The splint went on the woodpile, to be burned with the winter's leavings.
That same week, Nora walked her dawn round alone.
She had walked the near line alone all autumn, in pieces. This was the whole of it, for the first time, end to end, with the book under her arm and nobody's hand in reach. Rowan stood in the cabin door and watched her go down the clearing path, small and straight-backed, until the trees took her.
She came back with her cheeks red and her count kept.
"The spot by the cabin," she said. "I knelt. I put my face down to it the way you taught me, and I smelled it properly."
"And?"
"Wet earth," she said. "Leaf mould. The woodpile's damp. That's the whole of it, Rowan. There's nothing under it anymore. Nothing sour. Nothing wrong."
Rowan went out to the spot himself then, and knelt, and put his palm flat to the ground the way he had put it there a hundred times. Wet cold. Ordinary earth, going into winter at its ordinary pace. Nothing under it. He had taught the whole valley to want two counts of a thing. The spot got its two.
"Two counts," he said, coming back in. "Write both."
She wrote it at the table in her fair hand, under the week's counts, the way a thing is written when it is finished:
The spot by the cabin: earth, wet through, ordinary. Smelled at the first hard frost. Nothing under it.
Above it on the page stood her own count, entered that morning, by herself, at rest, the way Pip had first counted it in the spring and Rowan after. N. Voss — twenty-four in ten breaths. And above that, the column of the autumn, week on week, in her hand and Pip's between them: twenty-four, twenty-four, twenty-four. A season of flat counts. That was what stable looked like, in the book. It did not look like anything else.
June walked the clearing path two dawns later.
Splint off. Crutch under her arm. Rowan behind her at the distance she had set, close enough to hear the counting, too far to catch anything.
She counted the way she had counted the cut in the autumn, aloud at every tenth, striking the ground with the crutch the way she used to strike it with her stick. The path was the path Rowan had walked alone every season of his keeping: cabin door to the clearing's edge, through the birches, over the root crossing.
"Two hundred," she said at last, at the edge, and stopped, and stood. "And twelve."
She sat a while on the flat stone where the lessons were given, with the clearing quiet in front of her and the great spruce dark above it, and rested the leg without shame. The walk back she would not let him count.
"The book took the out-count," she said. "The back's mine."
The parcel came up from the village on the last market cart before the roads went to mud: dried apples, lamp oil, Rosa's winter stores for the cabin — and the mail she had been keeping for him, kept flat and dry under the oilcloth.
Corvin's cover sheet first, in the hand Rowan knew.
She wrote you herself, this time. I only paid its road. — C.
Under it, a folded sheet in an uneven hand, the letters large and careful, the lines climbing a little uphill the way a child's lines do.
Dear Rowan, Corvin reads me your letters when they come. He says the trees in the north have numbers now, like houses on a street. Here is my question. It is mine, not his. When you count a tree, does the tree know it is counted? Your friend, Mira.
Rowan read it twice by the lamp. Then a third time, slower, the way a man reads a count he means to enter true.
He took a clean sheet that night, while June slept in the chair with her leg up on a folded blanket and the book lay shut on the table. He wrote the first lines of the answer in his slow hand.
Dear Mira. Yes. Not the number — a tree has no use for numbers. The listening. A tree knows the difference between a hand that takes and a hand that stays, the same as you would.
The rest would come. The sheet would go down with the next parcel, and south with the first mail that ran, whenever the roads allowed. The answer had waited three years to be asked. It could travel at the speed of paper.