Was this how Mop and Ness—in all their years of dreaming of children—thought a child would reach them? This panic and shock of mountain-found babe—so wind-cold, so empty-bellied? The rush to light the fire, to heat the milk, to warm the infant? The race to find the little pot they used to nurse the ailing lambs? The terror when the babe seemed too weak to take the spout? The astonishment when, with delicate pinkie finger, they’d scooped glistening sap and insect wing from the soft inside of its cheek? Surely not. But when at last they had house and milk and babe warm, when they’d unwrapped the soiled linens and reswaddled the child in soft wool, and when panic and terror had begun to subside, Mop saw suddenly before him the life he had envisioned so long ago. Though his wife, never a mother, looked now more a grandmother, her face—as weather beaten and furrowed as the slopes he had just climbed—had softened at the sight of the little life suckling in her arms, and, for a moment, in the pale light of the fire, she appeared to Mop as she had in the earliest days of their marriage, when she sat stitching small clothes for children that had never come.

“What should we do with…?” Mop, whispering, gestured to the sleeping child.

“Do?” Nessa looked startled. “As one does. Feed. Care. Raise. Love.”

“But it isn’t…” Mop hesitated. “Ours.”

“Not ours? I think this child would have been the wolves’ or the buzzards’ if you’d not come along.” Nessa’s voice broke, and Mop glanced up in surprise. She was not one to let emotion overcome her. “Just brutish,” she hissed, turning away and rubbing a knuckle across her eye. “Brutish to abandon a helpless babe like that. Especially when she comes from a place with rags as fine as these.” She gestured to the soiled fabric she had unwrapped from the child. “I’ve never seen such cloth. We may not have anything as lovely as those rags”—her chin nodded over their scant furnishings, their dirt floor—“but we’ll share all we have. Whatever we can give this babe is better than the fate she would have found on the mountain.”

Mop started. “She?”

“She.” Nessa handed the sleeping child to Mop. “A little girl.”

Mop looked down at the swaddled infant. Though he had carried the bundle clutched tight in his arms down rocks and cliffs and treacherous passes, he felt suddenly he might break this fragile creature. He held her lightly, hardly daring to breathe.

Tentatively, Mop touched the impossibly small fingers on the impossibly small hand. Immediately, the hand, soft as plum blossoms, curled around his. He stared wonderingly at the strangeness of his finger—his weatherworn and calloused skin—surrounded by this soft new life.

Mop opened his mouth. The sleeping girl in his arms filled him with a kind of terror, and he wanted desperately to express this terror to his wife—How could they be responsible for this life? Were they not too old? Too poor? Too far from the village? Did they not have too many sheep? Did they not struggle sometimes even to feed themselves? What could they offer this child? Would the life they gave her be hard? Unpleasant? Full of misery and despair? Would she ever see any kind of happiness?—but the plum-petal hand was still gripped tight around his finger, and this, too, offered a kind of answer to his terror.