A few days went by before word arrived that flu had broken out in the sum. Father and Mother turned mute with fear. Their prayers, those conversations with oneself that were addressed to the mountains, the waters, and the clouds, became longer and more fervent by the day, and whereas at other times they might have taken place out of habit, as a kind of duty, they now arose from a heartfelt need. Re-awoken, my guilty conscience did not pass but gnawed at me and made my wound spread further with each passing day.

I begged the mountains, the steppe, and the sky to protect Brother and Sister from vicious and rabid dogs, from illness, and from black or white tongues. That such dangers existed I learned from the grownups as I listened to their prayers. But there were some additional pleas that I had not heard from anybody but that I came up with myself. For example, I asked of Eser-Haja, the mountain saddle, that Brother and Sister not only return happy and healthy, but also with candies. And I pleaded with the ravine below our camp and with the river that snaked through it and was now frozen stiff and seemed to be resting, to protect me from school and to let me live with Grandma and our shared flock. Because I saw that the sides of the ravine were steeper than any other I had ever seen, and because I knew that its river gathered the waters of all other rivers, I did not doubt their omnipotence.

My wishes were insatiable, my pleas unbridled. Arsylang crouched next to me and listened patiently—full of understanding, I thought—when, my arms stretched out and my head held high, I adopted the pose of an epic hero and with my high voice loudly recited my pleas.

I begged Harlyg Haarakan for a flock of a thousand. They would all be stumpy-eared Blackface, the whole one thousand of them.

“One thousand sheep—do you know how many that is?” I turned to Arsylang. “That’s all the fingers of one hundred people taken together!” Arsylang tilted his head and looked at me attentively. “One hundred is a big number, too,” I went on to tell my companion. “Where will we get so many people, hey?”

Arsylang realized he had been asked but could not grasp, let alone answer, the question. There was confusion in his eyes. “Never mind,” I consoled him and continued: “It’s winter now, so we won’t be able to gather so many people. But in the summer we will. In the morning and in the evening, there will be lots of people at the dairy plant to drop off the milk. And if they don’t add up to a hundred, we’ll get a man to ride from ail to ail and ask that everybody quickly come to the dairy plant. People will want to know if there’s a meeting.”