Three hundred and fifty yards down the southern mountain face. There, the wider shale cart-track zig-zagged toward the heavy timber snow-shed at the edge of the pine forest, villager Mer was walking at the head of his limping mule with a hemp lead-rope wrapped around his mittens. Behind the mule’s panniers—loaded with the four sacks of hulled winter barley and salted turnips that stood between three lower-valley cottages and starvation before the spring thaw—walked Mer’s wife carrying their six-year-old daughter bundled in a sheepskin coat. Meanwhile, their twelve-year-old son pushed at the rear pannier pole to keep the injured animal from sliding toward the gorge lip.
Seyun knew that mule and that family by touch as well as sight. Six hours earlier at dusk, when an early tremor from the northern sky-slit had shaken a shelf of loose shale down across the upper cart-track, Seyun had thrown his own shoulder under the collapsing rock-lip and taken a jagged slab of slate across his left calf so Mer’s twelve-year-old boy and the barley-laden mule could scramble clear. The twelve catgut stitches pulling across Seyun’s left calf right now were the physical souvenir of that dusk rescue.
The mule’s bruised left hock couldn’t handle the steep. Because of that, narrow stone steps of the direct hospice footpath, Mer and his family had taken the longer, gentler one-in-twelve grade of the old quarry switchbacks. In ordinary winter weather, they would have reached the heavy log roof of the timberline under-road drain in another…
