The next morning I noticed that Grandma was bedridden. She continued to tell her little stories about everyday life in years gone by, and the gentle smile in her old, wrinkled face accompanied the telling.

Dusky, she recounted, had been an orphan lamb whose mother was eaten by a wolf just after his birth. Grandma had noticed that the ewe was missing and went looking for her. When she finally found her, the ewe’s body lay in the snow while the trembling lamb stood at her side. It had almost frozen to death and was hungry because it hadn’t had its first milk. Grandma noticed the swollen, unscathed udder, touched it, and found it lukewarm; the wolf had probably taken off when she arrived. So Grandma crouched down and held the lamb to the udder. The poor thing had been looking for the mother’s udder, and now it quickly found the tit and began to suck. After it had drunk from the other tit as well, its desperate thirst seemed quenched. Grandma tucked the orphaned lamb in the breast pocket of her coat and started home. First she could sense its cold and later its warmth, and when she got home and pulled the lamb from her coat, she found it sleeping peacefully. She swaddled it like a baby and took it to her own bed for the night. The next morning the lamb was given a new mother. It stayed alive and thrived. Drinking the first milk from its mother’s udder had been good for it because that milk was thick and shimmered golden. Anybody unable to drink his fill of the first milk fails to thrive, and this is true for all living beings. There is a reason the first milk is called fire milk. “Eat of the meat and drink of the broth,” Grandma concluded. “The orphan lamb became a wether and the lonely woman a mother with a yurt full of children—how could it have turned out better?”

The following night I woke up suddenly. A fire was burning in the stove, and the dshula was lit in the dör even though the oil lamp was burning as well. Grandma sat propped against a tall pillow made of rolled-up clothes. Father and Mother sat at either side of her. Grandma spoke and Father and Mother listened quietly while looking at each other. Grandma was talking about two dung baskets that were to be put bottom-up, about her clothes, and about a body that would feel neither pain nor cold.

“You know that, Schynyk, don’t you?” she said and paused, but Father did not respond. So she continued: “Burn all the clothes; that’s the cleanest way.” Although I heard the words and saw Grandma say them, I could not grasp what they meant. The bit about the dung baskets and the body struck me as even more mysterious since I had not heard what had been said when I was still asleep.