Chapter Four

The big rains came at the end of that season and stayed three days. The yard turned to red soup. Water ran off the roof in a line you could have put a cup under, and the track was unusable, and her father made her do strength work in the doorway while the rain came down behind her like a wall.

On the fourth morning the sky was clean, and she went up to run the ridge because the track would still be mud.

The valleys were gone.

There was cloud where the valleys should be. Not mist — cloud, the real kind, the kind you saw from underneath on ordinary days. It lay over the whole lowland, white and still, going out to the edge of everything. The hills to the south stuck up out of it. The High Ridge stood above all of it in the early light, and the path along the spine was empty and the earth was soft from three days of rain.

She stood at the top of the path for a while. Then she ran.

The ground took her prints clean, one after another. Birds went up out of the wet grass ahead of her, two and three at a time. The sun came up out of the cloud itself, not from behind the hills where it usually came from, and the light off the white was so much that she ran the first stretch squinting, half-blind, laughing at nothing.

She ran the whole spine and turned around at the far cairn and ran it back, which she never did, because the session had hills in it and this was not the session.

Coming back along the top she saw her father at the old line.

He didn’t have the stopwatch.

He didn’t say anything about the session, or her knees, or the bend. He stood with his hands at his sides and watched her come up the spine, and when she passed him he didn’t call a split, and she ran on because she didn’t know what else to do with that.

When she came back down he was still there.

They walked home without talking. The cloud burned off before they reached the house, and the valleys were back, and everything was where it had been.