The drizzle was of a very wetting sort, and Marion unfolded the blanket that had covered Dick and put it round her shoulders.

Marion’s mind was brought back to the present by the sudden chattering of a blackbird just outside. She opened her eyes again. It was getting light. Peter lay unstirring, his face to the wall, just a mountain of bare shoulder half covered with the quilt. Peterkin, curled up in the straw, his hair over his face, slept on. There was no sound from the cradle.

Marion eased the position of her head on the straw. The grief was still heavy on her heart, but she now rationalized the fluttering anxieties into two. The first she shared with all the villagers: who could take Dick’s place as their chief shepherd? All knew that young Ned was the only candidate, but he had been shepherd boy for only a few years and was still very young. Jo, even younger, they dismissed. All he wanted to do was to play his silly whistle, they said. Could Ned learn, had he learnt how to guard and protect the flocks in winter, how to increase them as Dick had done? Dick had been their hero because of his success. During recent years under Dick’s care there had been no pestilence among the sheep, hardly a lamb lost to a fox, almost all those born were reared. He had found out the best pastures on the hill and had built the turf and gorse shelters in little ravines in which the sheep had survived on the food he had brought them even if the January snows had drifted over. For weeks at a time he was on the hills, Ned or Jo coming down to the village for food and to report on the births of the lambs. Wool was the source of their wealth. It was no wonder that they looked anxiously at immature Ned and worried that this source would dwindle.

The other anxiety had not been spoken of in the village, perhaps for fear that by voicing it, they would make the anxiety more real. It was concern about the supply of salt. As long as the oldest villager could remember, in late May or early June a party of men from Rutherford arrived with their horses or donkeys laden with salt, pottery and iron. The path through the forest, though overgrown with leaves, was usually at its driest and the days were long enough to do the journey from Rutherford in daylight. Last year Peterkin had been the first to see them. He had been on the Common and happened to look up across the stream, and there, between the willows, just coming out of the forest along the path that followed the far side of the stream, he saw the group of four laden horses and three tired men slowly walking towards the village. It had been near dusk and it was not until the following morning that the baskets were unpacked and the sacks of salt crystals set upon the Hall bench, and the brown jugs and dishes ranged out on Sir Hugh’s table awaiting distribution. The following morning Marion, standing at the water-place with her buckets, watched the Rutherford men going silently into the engulfing forest again, with the baskets, now packed tight with spools of spun wool, some of it of Marion’s spinning, swaying about each side of the horses’ backs.