“I doubt it,” says Cain, stepping aside to let Abel go down the path first. “He must have forgotten that he was supposed to come down today.”
“We’ll see,” says Abel.
Cain follows Abel’s back along the path, which is really nothing more than an animal track that at first wends its way through the great spruce trees whose branches, almost as thick as a pelt, block out the light and wave ponderously up and down as they push past them. Then the forest opens into a thicket, and on the other side of it the path disappears entirely for a while over rocky ground, but they know where to find it again, and pick it up after a few hundred yards where it travels like a corridor through an area of rushes that grow around the small tarn. From there they can see the mountains towering in the east, the snowcapped summits that reflect the sun’s rays with such precision that they seem to pull the far-off mountains closer.
Some ducks rise with flapping wings at their approach. Cain looks at the water lilies floating on the surface, lazy as if they’ve just awoken. The way their stalks run straight down into the depths and vanish in the blackness like thoughts trying to recall a dream.
On the other side of the tarn there is the rapid, rolling rattle of a woodpecker.
“Can you see it?” Abel asks without turning.
“No.”
“It’s up there.”
He points toward the trees on the slope above the water. Cain searches for movement but everything is still, and he has to quicken his pace to close in on his brother, who’s suddenly no more than a ripple in the rushes far ahead.
Half an hour later they reach the forest brow on the other side, and see the mountain farm hut on the slope before them.
Cain sits down on a stone wall and rests his head in his hands.
“I’ve got to take a breather,” he says.
“Do you remember the way we used to make pipes in the spring?” Abel asks.
“Of course I do,” says Cain, following his brother with his eyes as, knife in hand, Abel bends down to cut the branch off a small tree. Then he looks up at the hut again. Not a movement to be seen up there, not of man or beast.
“What do you think’s happened?” he says.
Abel, who’s knocking the butt of the knife on the bark of the branch, shrugs his shoulders.
“He’s just forgotten, like you said.”
“Then we should at least see some sheep,” says Cain.
“Well, in any case we’re not going to get home before dark,” says Abel. “What do you think, should we spend the night up here?”
He strips the bark off the branch and puts the small stem in, raises it to his lips and blows. The sound reminds Cain of the highest notes the wind can make when it blows its hardest in the mountains. He rises and begins to walk uphill. Abel puts the knife in its sheath, pockets the pipe, and follows.
Outside the hut there is still no sign of Jared or the animals.
“Jared?” Abel calls. “Are you here?”
Absolute silence.
Cain opens the door and goes in. He sees immediately that the place is empty.
“So, what now?” he says, turning to Abel in the doorway.
“We must search for him while it’s light,” says Abel. “If we can’t find him, we’ll have to sleep here the night and continue early tomorrow morning.”
They climb a prominence from where they have a panorama of the entire mountainside. When they can’t see anything of Jared or the sheep from there either, they decide to go back down to the forest’s edge and follow it to the river, which marks the pasture’s northern limit. If they don’t find him there, they plan to search the ground up by the waterfall as long as the light permits.
Cain walks a short way up the mountainside and is approaching the waterfall when he catches sight of the sheep. They are huddled in a circle far up the slope, hidden from the hut by a buttress. Even though they’ve seen him and are following every movement he makes with their eyes, they do not move.
From down in the forest comes Abel’s voice.
“Down here, Cain!”
He turns and looks down, but can’t see him. Darkness has already begun to gather between the trunks of the thickly grown spruce forest. There is something impatient about its presence, Cain feels, as if only a strong will keeps it from making an advance into the open before night’s main force arrives. But the sun will hold sway for a while yet. Its rich evening light falls obliquely on the landscape and makes everything about him glow. The moss glows, the grass glows, the leaves glow, the bare rock of the peaks glows. And ridge after ridge of the undulating roof formed by the spruce trees down the valley shines as if it were made of gold.
He goes down the slope and into the trees where Abel is bending over a dead lamb. It is covered in blood, the whole of one side has been torn open.
“It looks like the work of a bear,” he says as Cain comes up. “And not long ago, either. Maybe a couple of hours.”
Cain cups his hands to his mouth and shouts as loudly as he can.
“JARED!”
But his only answer is the rush of the waterfall.
“There’s another one over there,” says Abel, pointing past Cain. Then, as he turns back, he raises his hand to run it through his hair.
“Don’t do that!” says Cain.
Abel’s hand stops halfway, and he looks inquiringly at Cain.
“You’ve got blood on it.”
He looks down at his hand, which is covered in blood up to the wrist, and smiles.
“I’d completely forgotten.”
He bends down and wipes the blood on a moss-covered stone. Somewhere close by there’s a rustling of leaves. The sound makes the pair of them stiffen. But then the rustling changes to the drier sound of wing beats, and Cain looks up just in time to see a pair of magpies disappearing over the treetops.
“He must be close by,” says Abel, and straightens up. “What about following the stream down to the river?”
Cain nods and they begin to walk through the forest. Sometimes they call, but their voices are without hope, and they no longer stop to wait for a reply but walk as fast as the rough terrain will allow. Under the cover of the spruce trees the ground is bare, the only thing that grows by the edges of the stream is moss. Green and black, these are the colors. Here and there windfalls lie across the path of the stream, some with their bark washed off and the seemingly ossified wood slimy with algae, remorselessly subjected to the laws that govern this low, dank world; others lie farther off the ground and are relatively intact, though desiccated, their cracked, gray branches pointing in all directions, festooned with skeins of strange species of moss, still fixed in the earth that was pulled up with the roots when the wind forced them to the ground.
As the roar of the waterfall grows in strength around them, the forest gradually thins. A steep, sparsely covered face of rock, perhaps a hundred feet high, appears through the trees in front of them, forcing them to descend a bit. As they round the foot of this slope, still following the stream, Cain looks up and sees a dead pine above him. With its red branches it almost looks as if it’s enveloped in flames.
On the other side, running with the mountainside, lies a meadow, it rolls away gently and is perhaps just over a hundred yards long. At their end it descends steeply to the forest below, and the stream, always naturally seeking the lowest point in the landscape by the quickest possible route, finally satisfies its suppressed longing a little farther on: it falls rushing from rock to rock down through the cleft.
Cain has never been here before, and feels entranced by the beauty and calm of the place. Without thinking of Jared he lets his gaze wander across the flower-filled meadow and toward the trees, just bursting into leaf, which stand along the opposite bank, when Abel lays a hand on his shoulder.