By evening the people coming through the lane were carrying their tools home.
They left mud on the yard stones, took water and argued about where the fire had stopped. Everyone agreed that the low ditch had mattered. Nobody agreed whose idea it had been to clear it. Beyond the bathhouse roof the sky was still brown, but Ysabet could see separate clouds above the smoke now, pale and quite unconcerned.
Mara’s wet carpet had survived with three black holes. The washing trough had not. A whole rack of cut reeds had burned beside the south road, and the cooper’s brother had lost the winter fodder stacked behind his shed. The goats had been found standing in someone else’s vegetables.
“They’ll have eaten well,” Mara said.
The man whose small trough they had borrowed came to fetch it. He lifted one end, saw the crack beneath it and stood silent for a while.
“I’ll mend it,” Ysabet said.
“With what?”
She looked at the large broken trough.
He followed her gaze. “That wood’s rotten.”
“Some of it.”
“It was rotten before the goat.”
“Yes.”
He sat on the edge of the bench. At last he said he could make one serviceable trough from the two if he had his choice of boards and someone else’s labor. Mara offered him the carpenter’s bench inside the bathhouse. Ysabet said she would hold things where he told her.
He went home carrying the smaller trough, less quickly than he had arrived.
Pip remained beside the hare.
Two of the newcomer mice had gone out by the drain. The third was somewhere beneath the shelving, leaving the original mouse alone in its half-covered box. Ysabet put the temporary basket lid away. The shrew still occupied the bark hollow and objected whenever a shoe came near. Ysabet put the bark in the quiet corner by the drain, where its occupant could leave without crossing the yard.
She washed her hands. Soot came out of her nails in black lines. With her left thumb she cleaned between the bent fingers of her right hand, slowly, because the skin there had begun to chafe.
Chaska was sitting beside Lilt. The sandray’s fin rested against her knee. Chaska had taken off her boots and was looking at her feet with mild dislike.
“Mara said soup,” she said.
“She usually means it.”
“That’s what worries me.”
Neither of them smiled quite enough to make a joke of it.
Ysabet hung the clean linen on the bench rail. She took the sack that had carried the hare and folded the empty end back. Pip’s eye followed the movement. It got its jaw under the hare again, but lifted only the head.
“I’m going to put it in the ground,” she said.
Pip’s foot slid on the sack.
The place behind the wall had once held the bathhouse’s ash pit. Grass grew there now, thin and coarse. It was clear of the well, and the ground could be dug. Ysabet asked Mara before fetching a spade.
“Far enough from the fig,” Mara said. “The roots are shallow.”
“All right.”
“Not right by the lane, either.”
“I know.”
Mara drew her shawl tighter. “It’s not that I mind.”
Ysabet waited.
“I don’t want someone digging it up when they mend the drain.”
“I’ll mark the place.”
Chaska put her boots back on without fastening them. She followed Ysabet into the laundry shelter and stopped near the board.
“The potter’s boys keep thorn hares,” she said.
Ysabet glanced at her.
“A little one. They brought it in last week. Same sort of spines.” Chaska rubbed the heel of her hand across one eyebrow. “If we put it here while Pip was away, perhaps it would—”
Her voice stopped.
Pip shifted against the dead animal. The sack rasped over the board.
“No,” Chaska said, before Ysabet had answered. “That’s horrible. Never mind.”
“You’re tired.”
“I do have bad ideas when I’m awake.”
“Most people do.”
Chaska knelt, put the edge of the sack flat and smoothed it with two fingers. “It keeps trying. I wanted it to stop.”
“I know.”
“Does it know?”
Ysabet looked at the sideways jaw laid against the hare’s neck. “I don’t think it knows what to do with it.”
“Neither do I.”
She sat back on her heels. For a while they listened to Lilt drinking in the yard. The sandray made a soft dragging sound each time she drew water past the front of her mouth.
“Was it the sack?” Chaska asked.
Ysabet turned to her.
“I couldn’t carry it loose. It fought. I tried to leave its head out, but at first I couldn’t.”
“You brought it away from the smoke.”
“I know what I brought it away from. I’m asking what I brought it into.”
Ysabet had no answer large enough for the whole question. She could answer the part she knew.
“I saw it breathe when you put it down. That sound was coming from inside. You didn’t burn its chest with a feed sack.”
Chaska pressed her lips together.
“I wish you’d found it sooner,” Ysabet said. “I wish there had been something else I could do. But you carried it out.”
Chaska nodded once. She wiped her nose on her wrist and seemed annoyed to discover soot there.
“Let me get the spade.”
She dug the first part of the hole. The ground was softer beneath the roots than Ysabet had expected. Old ash darkened the blade. After a while Chaska stood aside and Ysabet took over, using her right palm to steady the top of the handle while her left did most of the guiding. A root caught the blade. She worked around it rather than hacking through it; Mara would be able to tell.
When the hole was deep enough, they went back for the hare.
Pip tried to keep its chest against the body as Ysabet slid the board away from the wall. She stopped and moved it a little at a time. At the doorway it scrambled off the sack and followed on six narrow legs.
Chaska held the other end of the board. They carried it level through the back opening, past the damp carpet and the last surviving pan of water.
Behind the wall Pip waited at the edge of the hole. It lowered its head, looked in, and put a foot over the lip. A small clod broke away. The creature drew back.
Ysabet unwrapped the hare. The burned spines no longer showed beneath the clean cloth. Its eye had dulled. She laid it on the earth with her left hand beneath the body and her right supporting the head, then withdrew both slowly.
Pip leaned farther over.
It clicked once.
Ysabet waited before taking up the spade. Pip could still see the hare when the first loose earth fell. It moved to the other side of the hole as if there might be a better view there. After the second spadeful it put one forefoot down onto the slope.
Ysabet lowered the tool.
She did not reach for it. Pip stood with its front foot in the hole and the other five braced above. Then it lifted the foot, shook soil from the fine toes and came out.
Chaska held the board upright while Ysabet finished.
They placed a flat stone at the head of the small mound. It was an ordinary bit of paving too chipped to be useful at a threshold. Pip touched it with its jaw and left it there.
The soup had thickened by the time they returned. Mara served it anyway. Ysabet carried her bowl to the step, where she could see the open lane and the back of the shelter. Chaska ate beside Lilt, one hand resting on the sandray’s broad head.
Pip stayed behind the wall until the light was nearly gone.
When it came back, it did not go to the clay. It went to the half-covered box where the original mouse lay beneath a fold of lining. The mouse raised its nose, whiskers working, and Pip lowered its warm chest against the wooden side.
Ysabet put her empty bowl down. She took the good lamp into the shelter and left the door hooked open.