The Goat Pens had had no goat in them for thirty days.
Tamsin had counted the days on the wall beside the gate, with a stick of charcoal and a notch for each evening, the way she had counted the goats on the Caul road in the first spring, when there had been thirteen of them with tally-collars buckled round their necks and every one of them trying to eat the harness. Thirty notches. She had made the last one that morning and had sat down on the step of the pen afterwards and looked at it for a while, because it was the first day in her life that she had not been able to say which goat she had lost first.
The last herd had gone over the Caul crest with the Crossing, into the lake valley on the far side, and nobody had come back over the crest to say what had become of them. That was the truth, and it was the only truth Tamsin had ever been able to hold on to. Later, when the snow melted off the high road, the valley people had come down the lake track with a handful of goats and a story about finding them in a meadow, and they had taken them south to Lantern Ford to sell. Tibbe said so. Tibbe had heard it from a carter. The carters had eaten the old ones on the road.
